Good! Take that sellers of energy. Nobody owns the sun. Where’s your profit now?
Inb4 Sam Altman talks about Dyson Sphere-ing the sun to power his Orphan Crushing machine.
Have I gone mad with power?
No, it’s a perfectly reasonable plan to dream of stealing the Sun.
Sun in intermittent. Let our salespeople introduce you to our ASSymetric Hybrid OveralL Energy plan: for a modest monthly premium, you will be allowed to draw a quota of electricity from the grid that you can replenish by sending back your own excess of production. Of course sending back too much won’t increase your quota. If you exceeds your quota by drawing too much, a reasonabe penalty will be applied to your rate, as an incentive to moderate your production and make the world greener.
On a side note, you’ll be happy to learn our revenues have kept growing this year, and you can rely on us for years to come in our very fruitful partnership.
With love!
I’m doing my part! I have a small set on my house and it pays for almost my entire bill in the summer.
As soon as I bought my house I installed maximum solar panels and battery on it. Through all of summer I kept both my air conditioners on day and night at 23 degrees and never once imported from the grid, only used solar and battery power.
The credits I get from the power company for my excess exported power is pretty paltry, so I do what I can to use up my own solar. I bought a large food dehydrator and have started dehydrating my own hiking foods like soup, protein bars, biltong, ect and making little MRE-style hiking food packs. I have a spidergro grow light which I might use to set up a little greenhouse and grow some more delicate culinary plants some time soon too. Plus I can run a big stack of home lab servers and stuff at home without needing to consider the power cost. It’s pretty great.
biltong, ect
First off, are you South African? It’s not very humid where I live, and unless you’re living with bad humidity, I’ve discovered that peak biltong making equipment is a string and some meat hooks.
Second, etc. is short for et cetera - ECT is electroconvulsive therapy ;-)
Hey if I wanna use my solar power to run my homemade ECT machine, that’s between me and my patients!
And yeah it’s fairly humid and there are a lot of bugs and flies, so in the dehydrator at a sweaty 35 degrees is the way to go. Not Sth african though.
Fair enough, it’s your sun, so you can do what you want with it! 🌞
Same. I’m working on electrifying everything. I have geothermal HVAC, a heat pump water heater, and an EV running off the solar panels. Only the gas stove remains.
Gas stove was one of my first - when it’s time, definitely consider induction. My pots and pans really do heat up faster than gas! (And way faster than electric resistive).
It’s a good kind of strange that my stovetop itself never heats up.
Yeah same. 400W on the greenhouse. Pretty sick backup power. Would probably run the freezer with the batteries I have, as it is just runs fans, stereo, irrigation, chicken heater and water barrel heaters in the winter. But would be good enough for charging and a few other things on a pinch. Tempted to DIY for the house cause this system was so easy. Need to get an electric car to use for battery storage first though. Thinking of getting an old Nissan leaf to make into an off-road/hunting toy.
I got mine turned on October 13th, obviously not the best time for solar in the northeastern US, but for 2026 I’m 104kwh ahead, and produced nearly a megawatt in March, so I’m pretty excited to see how it goes for the summer.
Solar electric and heating is the ultimate because you can definetly cool down the panels and keep your well insulated house nice and warm.
In general solar electric is great because you can use it for anything, heating, cooling, battery charging, chemical processing, etc.
Well yeah, solar is free energy.
It wasn’t a foregone conclusion until recently. Thanks to the engineers who made it incrementally more viable over the years.
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Solar is great, but will never be the only source. The same way burning carbon has never been the only source.
We need to be able to cleanly generate electrons any time, any place and solar can’t do that. Neither can wind, neither can oceans, neither can hydro. We have nuclear now, we still need fusion and geothermal ASAP.
It must be wild being the kind of person who reads about a piece of positive news like any renewable being widely adopted and then believes that it means that everyone is going all-in, 100% on it. Also hydro powers nearly all of Québec and in Ontario there are plenty of different sources of power but we still call it a “hydro bill”, not an “electricity bill”.
You’re like the people who hear about reducing cars in city downtowns and bring up rural farmers needing their trucks as if anyone is talking about that.
Whoa, leave the farmers alone! We’ll never reach 100% farmer dependence. The sun doesn’t shine at night, so plants don’t grow, because they’re sleeping. If you’re hungry at nighttime, you’ll have to harvest from a sleeping plant, and they’ll get angry at you. This is why relying 100% on farmers will result in us eating all the farmers, just like the coal miners who eat only coal, but they also drink petrol. Going all-in on any single source is a recipe for disaster, which is why we need more tractors and need to teach cows how to drive the tractors so that we can eat them, too.
This is such a chaotic response. 11/10, no notes haha
Bro has never heard of batteries, apparently.
Solars power generation almost halves during winter in any semi-northern/southern region (compared to peak in summer). If wind isn’t plentiful in those areas then you do run into a generation issue.
Solar is great, but I do suspect that there will need to be something else beyond just solar and batteries to make renewable work.
Why do this threads always degrade to 100% renewable solutions only? We can generate most of our power via wind and sun, the rest we can buffer, we don’t need to eliminate burning just reduce it to sporadic buffering of the grid.
Because burning kills the climate. We need to eliminate it.
The planet can handle low levels of C02, just not the levels we are doing.
But insisting on a zero emissions solution is exactly what I would do if I were an oil and gas CEO.
Of course the planet’s systems can handle some degree of CO₂ emissions. But there are fields much harder to decarbonize than energy supply. Waste removal for example.
But insisting on a zero emissions solution is exactly what I would do if I were an oil and gas CEO.
How so?
Not if it’s closed loop or C negative with renewable sources. There’s nothing inherently bad about combustion, it’s just the scale and externalities.
And more importantly that “most of our power” that can be generated by wind and sun is far higher than what we do now. This is not a valid argument against building out renewables as fast as possible.
It may be an argument about where our endpoint is but by that time technology and circumstances will both have changed so it’s still an invalid argument
Fuck that, fossil’s too expensive
Not if demand drops 90%.
Well, fingers crossed then
If you could make a solar that works at night, this guy will say that it can’t be moved. If it can be moved, he’ll say it doesn’t fit in the pocket.
I read a study last fall claiming that with current technology, renewables plus batteries is the cheapest way to generate power, up over 95%! Beyond that you’d have to way overbuild to catch rare weather events so keeping a few gas peaker power plants around are cheaper.
And that was before this years announcements on sodium batteries and aluminum batteries
All the battery tech is coming out of China. USA really shit the bed on ignoring battery R&D.
Like so many things, a lot of battery R&S was done in the US but someone decided it wasn’t profitable or something so we should just drop it
Nuclear isn’t an energy source that can ramp up or down with demand. In fact, it can take hours to adjust the output.
While nuclear still has a place, that particular place is flat energy input and black start sites.We don’t need nuclear. We have geothermal, hydro, solar, tidal and wind energy. Combine that with a decentralized approach, a well designed grid infrastructure and storage capacity, voilà. No need for neither fossile nor nuclear.
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