You should store your solar energy as heat. You move the heat from outside or underground into your house with a heat pump where the heat storage lasts a week or more. You need very little solar to heat your house this way.
So for a mild climate your installer seems to have done you a disservice and probably overcharged you. You can heat an average house with solar for under $14K if properly installed.
I emailed you. You can work with us as it is a booming market in Europe and Ukraine (and probably in China too), you could expand our market into the USA. We build charging stations, big batteries (see my other posts in this thread and in my HN profile), Enernet smart grids and entire solar only neighborhoods (houses, solar, batteries, fast internet, water and sewage infrastructure) remotely, all based on 100% solar. From $40K per tiny house.
I build off-grid electrical campers (Mercedes eSprinter) with extended 600kWh batteries (11 times more battery capacity than the default model) and charge them from solar panels at home. I disagree with your negative mindset, people who ride in my eCamper quickly learn you can go 100% solar and use you camper at home to store all neighborhood solar and even charge other EVs from our eCamper battery. We make our own parallel battery cell dis/charger to extent the LFP battery life to 20000 charges (one a day for 50 years).
15kWh 48V LFP battery around $1800 with low quality battery management system in metal box on wheels. Car batteries need more expensive inverters if you want to fast charge them (150kW-950kW) and super fast discharge them while driving fast (>100 kW). Thus my 600kW extender comes to almost $62000 for vans and small trucks. Cheaper if installed as house battery. The Mercedes eSprinter 56kW van costs around $80000 new but we sell 3 year old vans like this for $4000 without battery. So refurbished and converted to eCamper with 1800 mile range you pay $6700. You can drive 3000 km (almost 1860 miles) with this battery in the eSprinter and eCamper. A normal size car would go twice as far with this battery but it's big and heavy enough that you need to tow it in a trailer.
The crucial point though is the charging/discharging inverter (converter) that I purpose built (printed circuits boards) and a change to the car firmware. Without it the car will reject the battery, your acceleration would be less and it also would not last the same amount of discharge cycles. My battery electronics works fine for cars, trucks, boats, house and neighborhood batteries (up to 6mW per shipping container).
Thank you. I hardly get to explain the techology I 'invent' (power chips, power router, parallel battery charger, car firmware, charging (station) software, simulation software) because the investors customers only want to hear that its cheaper or sells better (then Tesla). Or that besides going from 4000 to 20000 dis/charge cycles you also prevent any li-ion fires and have fire alarm sensors on every battery cell. The main thing I would like to shout from the rooftops is: Not a single battery on the planet charges their battery cells in parallel as we do, they all shorten their cell lifetime by charging/discharging them to fast in series, what will damage all battery cell types but especially the li-ion.
It is the same with the article we are commenting on here: if people just listen to the statistics, the simulations and the actual market developments they would see that 100% solar+battery is the cheapest energy.
The simple message is Solar is by far the cheapest energy: below 1 dollar cent per kWh and that will fall a lot more in the next decade until we get to 'a squanderable abundance of free and clean energy' as Bob Metcalf puts it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axfsqdpHVFU
Batteries still double the cost of that solar but these prices are falling rapidly too. It is already cheaper to have solar nearby than transmit it over a distance of a few miles.
$0,01 per kWh from solar, that is the price worldwide on the condition that they sell you the panels at a reasonable price and don't overcharge you on all the other parts like micro-inverters, field or rooftop installation, permitting and labour. That adds up to around 5 cent for rooftop solar in Australia for example (including everything). 1 cent is for solar panels lasting 50 years (with 20% degradation over decades), we refer to such prices as Levelised Cost Of Energy (LCOE) over lifetime. It halved in the last 10 years for solar and it will halve again (20% cost reduction on each doubling of manufactured capacity). Similar for batteries, they also go down around 20% each year.
1 kWh Wind, or Hydro, Thermal and other renewables do not go down as much in cost price because they have mechanical or chemical components that do not last as long as solar cells and need maintenance and repair.
We keep the cost low by group buying in bulk at wholesale prices (a shipping container with 770 panels for 20-30 houses) with our coop instead of premium installer prices by the electrotechnical or building companies.
If you let our Fiberhood coöperative in the US install your solar, batteries, tiny house or eCamper you do not pay these high tariffs, we have enough panels pre-tariff. So you still can hit 1 cent per kWh but only if you get the decent installers and sellers.
Our energy storage solutions have widened. First you timeshift all electricity use of the car, house or neighborhood into daylight hours when the sun shines. This means a bunch of electronics and software changes. Next we build termal storage solutions, you can store heat much cheaper than electricity. You move heat around with a heat pump. Or you heat your water tank with a datacenter computer in your water tank (for free). In summer you store solar electricity in ice. Or you store it in iron, aluminum, glass or silicon by melting ore and purifying, You embodied the solar electricity into the purified ore.
In northern and southern latitudes you need 10 to 50 times more solar panels to heat houses during cold winters. This means you have large overcapacity in summer that you can sell as embodied iron, etc. Batteries are only needed to store for the hours there is no sunlight during 24 hours, no need to store longer. The cheapest place is to store it in the electrical cars in your neighborhood. That is why we install our own brand ev car chargers in the neighborhood of the panels. In contrast, Tesla chargers overcharge you a factor of 34 to 76 and that's partially because its fossil energy and transmitted over hundreds of miles.
Also Trump doubling solar panel prices with tarifs and shutting down subsidies is wrong, it makes it much more expensive. Add an oil third world war however does help, we sold double solar, batteries and evs in the last month.
I am surprised the author did not mention or uses Software Defined Networking (SDN), Openflow or P4 (programming language for programmable switches) or the mininet simulator. He must have skipped reading the scientific literature even though he is a computer science sophomore?
I programmed and build one of the very first ISP hardware and software systems in 1987-1997 when we connected the first submarine link between the US and Europe in Amsterdam.
Google switched 50% of the internet that they owned in 2012 to SDN and Openflow [1]. I'm sure they progressed to P4 and more recent SDN controllers since then. They build the Google Fiber ISP[5] with SDN. Cloudflare also uses SDN when last I checked. A majority of the internet has moved to SDN (there are many versions.
The author built his simulation on legacy systems mostly from the Telecom world, an alternate reality distinct from the real internet and acces providers we call ISPs. Telecom systems are about surveillance and monetizing the free internet.
You can query the US ISPs on the Nanog mailing list, there are similar social media for the European, Asian and other ISPs on other continents. Beware that those are biased to Telecom as well as Tier 1 network operators and less to ISP access providers.
I do not think we should continue with the current implementation of the internet. I think we should start deploying the true internet (decentralized, peer to peer) standard and expand it to the Enernet standards of the near future: every building a router (switch) and fiber optic and electricity cables to their peers; their closest neighbors. If every building has peer connections than you are connected all the way to the internet exchanges without need for Tech Bros, Government, Telecom, ISP or Tier 1 network oligopolies. True internet [3], true Enernet [4].
well.. openflow is pretty much dead, too inflexible, too slow. The whole control/user plane split is an attempt of the classical router vendors to keep their proprietary boxes. It adds complexity as it requires to synchronize the state of some controller with some data plane box.
P4 was a great idea, but there's not much hardware that supports it.
fd.io / vpp is an impressive stack for software-only routing. Like all SW-only solutions, it suffers from high power consumption and packet rate variability. At today's packet rates, you always have to ask 'how many CPU instructions / cycles are required to perform this or that function per packet'.
Thank you for the context. I did start out with mininet, then moved to containernet->containerlab. Mininet could not model subscriber session lifecycle in how I wanted it. P4/Openflow is on the radar, thanks for the pointer.
We only need solar energy at 1 dollarcent or eurocent (it will get much cheaper still!!) and a little batteries for the convenience of using electricity when the sun does not shine.
In the north and south you need more solar panels in the winter than in the summer by a factor of 50. But that pays it back in summer when you have a squanderable abundance of free and clean energy. We can store that surplus energy in purifying drinking water, melting iron ore or aluminum [5], melting reusable plastics or purifying silicon ingots.
Storing surplus heat or cold in the ground is another luxury, because it is more expensive than 1 dollarcent or eurocent solar running a heatpump.
Wind and hydro are also more costly than solar so they are another luxury with worse environmental costs than pure solar cells.
We need to build Enernet, a peer to peer electricity net and internet between all buildings with power routers. for around 100 dollar per building. You buy and sell your house surplus solar electricity to the neighborhood where it can be stored in car batteries. See my Fiberhood white paper [2].
I don't understand the wood argument. Isn't it widely accepted we need to do burns to manage forests? Wood is a short-term cycle of carbon. It releases when it burns but frees up space to capture it right after. When people live on rural plots and trees fall, should they burn for heat (and lessen needing other energy sources) or let it decompose and cause the same thing? It's not the same as extracting deeply embedded carbon sources that won't make it to the atmosphere if untouched (fossil fuels)
Wood and plant burning requires a longer nuanced answer than the Hacker News format allows. Humanity must not cut forests or grow plants unnecessarily. If you must use wood to build a house -(there are better and cheaper materials in terms of energy and climate change enhancing emissions, see for examples Amory Lovins book Reinventing Fire or his lectures on Youtube) - then first grow those trees in a place that has no natural forest. And then do not burn the wood after you demolish the house. Do not use wood from forest, humans should let the forest manage itself.
Same with clearing the underbush of Meditaranian and hotter climate forest to prevent forest fires. If humanity had not managed those forest (grazing animals, building roads, harvesting) in the first place than there would have been no buildup of excess material that sustain wildfires past its natural rate.
The trick to forest management is allow or create small, frequent burns that clean up dry, overgrown understories. Nature does this without our help and some species even depend on it. If we interfere with this, eventually there's a big fire instead that levels the place.
Morphle here. Thanks for mentioning our work [1]. We still seek funders and students we can teach.
We build on the shoulders of the generation that built Smalltalk but just retired. There is a huge amount of documentation, science papers and talks on how to implement it all.
We are starting to implement the final step: An autonomous European secure operating system running a hierarchy of Virtual Machines (message passing parallel bytecode Smalltalk, Lisp, Erlang) and Qemu VMs with a modern GUI in less than 30.000 lines of source code that can be fully understood by a single person.
We improved our hardware to a manicore European Morphle Engine processor architecture that can run microcode, bytecodes, X86, Arm, Risc-V and other Qemu supported processors faster than the native chips.
We have some funding from Ukrainian drone innovators that need cheap computer chips manufactured in Europe, not controlled by the US or China.
We hope the European Autonomy movement away from US Big Tech clouds, operating systems, surveillance and chips with political kill switches and backdoors built in will fund our operating system and app software.
The Potsdam university (near Berlin, Germany) and Hasno Platner Instute [1] has been actively teaching and researching Squeak Smalltalk for decades. Same in Buenos Aires and several other places. Science papers every month for 5 decades, under many names besides Smalltalk. Weekly online conferences, presentations.
This lecture Alan aimed at this particular audience, the computer science (programming) students at University of Illinois, where they programmed the second browser, the second broken wheel 20 years after Alan and Dan had showed them how do do it better.
Dan Ingalls implemented most of Alan Kay's invention of the personal computer, in the following demo's he shows how to fix the webbrowser's broken wheel a bit.
The Lively Kernel would be another way to fix html but retain the web. Two demos says it all:
> The Lively Kernel would be another way to fix html but retain the web.
The Web is not HTML (and it's not JavaScript). It's URLs. It's a machine-readable graph of clickable references on cross-linked Works Cited pages. It's certainly not Smalltalk-over-the-Internet, and it's not trying to be (at least it wasn't when TBL created it).
The biggest problem facing the Web in the 90s and still today is that everyone who saw it then hallucinated TBL describing an SRI-/PARC-style application platform because that's what they wanted it to be—including people like Alan Kay—who then perversely go on to criticize it for being so unaligned with that vision.
It is both surprising and unsurprising (given this reaction) that the industry managed to make it all the way through the 90s without Wikipedia showing up until after the crash.
I will not invest any time in improving badly designed software. You can't fix a broken wheel. Your HN newsreader app tries to improve the broken wheel. The least you could have done is make the comment edit field WYSIWYG, make it modeless, see what the text will look like while you type, not after you click update or when you click edit in the tread reader.
Your code is just a very limited webbrowser. The webbrowsers, html are a very broken wheel. Alan Kay, the inventor of personal computing, explains why https://youtu.be/FvmTSpJU-Xc?t=961
This lecture Alan aimed at this audience, the computer science (programming) students at University of Illinois, where they programmed this broken wheel 20 years after Alan had showed them how do do it better.
Paul Graham should not have based HN (Hacker News) on the web and html but on WYSIWYG, then you would not have had to fix it with your app.
The Lively Kernel would be another way to fix html but retain the web. Two demos says it all:
Dan Ingalls implemented most of Alan Kay's invention of the personal computer, in these demo's he shows how to fix the webbrowser's broken wheel a bit. Their Squeak, Etoys and Croquet fixed it completely:
So for a mild climate your installer seems to have done you a disservice and probably overcharged you. You can heat an average house with solar for under $14K if properly installed.
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