Microblog Memes

Home owned windmills are almost a total waste. Its surprising how little electricity they generate especially given how much the cost to buy and install. Some real numbers. A 400w can cost almost $18k to buy and install. A 410w solar solar panel is about $250 + $3k of supporting electronics and parts. And that same $3k can support 10+ more panels. I looked into it myself really wanted it to be worth it for home, but it just isn't. Now utility grade wind? Absolutely worth it. You need absolutely giant windmills with massive towers, but once you have those, you can make a LOT of electricity very cost effectively.

Solar panels worth it? Yes. Absolutely.

Batteries, not quite there yet for most folks. Batteries are really expensive, and don't hold very much electricity $10k-$15k can get you a few hours of light or moderate home use capacity. For folks with really expensive electricity rates or very unreliable power this can be worth it financially, but for most every else. Cheaper chemistry batteries are finally starting to be produced (Sodium Ion), but we're right at the beginning of these and there not really any consumer products for home made from these yet.

"put the excess energy into batteries" is an idea, and is already pretty much what is done, but the large scale implementation still requires a lot of time, effort, and expense.

How, exactly, does that solve anything? It's not like we can add some kind of magic automatic residential cutoff system (that would just make it worse) and residential distribution is already the problem! Residential solar is awesome (tho home batteries are largely elon propaganda...) but they only contribute to the above issue, not solve it. There are ways of addressing it, but they're complicated and unglamorous.

In no home outside of fringe uses are any lights 12vdc, with the exception of maybe led strip lights for undercabs. They're all designed for 120vac. That lightbulb in the diagram is an e37/medium base for 120vac.

You can have your own batteries as well. If those then get overloaded, disconnect.

This is some real "basic biology" level thinking here. Even if it were as simple as "Pull the lever Krunk!" then you've just turned all that solar infrastructure into junk for the majority of the time that we need power.

People use the vast majority of electricity in a day in the afternoon and at night - times that are noticeably after the peak solar production time. So you have all that energy going into the system with nowhere to go because battery technology and infrastructure isn't there, and then no energy to fulfill the peak demand. This is an issue nuclear runs into as well because a nuclear plant is either on or off and isn't capable of scaling its power to the current demand.

There are times where power companies have to pay industrial manufacturing facilities to run their most energy consuming machines just to bleed extra energy out of the grid to keep it from overloading and turning into a multi-million dollar disaster that could take years to get people back on the grid.

It would definitely need to be ground in a literal sense.

And even the earth has its limits. Soil is only so conductive, pump enough energy into it and you'll turn it to glass (which won't conduct anymore).

To effectively waste electric power like that would take quite a bit of effort. It would be easier to make a giant heater that heats up air. But that would of course also be absurd. Just turn off the wind turbines etc. to reduce power generation.

No it's not, it's energized just right. Otherwise you run into either over or under frequencies. Both pretty catastrophic.

There's obviously a lot of issues with that idea, but I'd like to throw my wholehearted support behind it anyways, just to see the expressions my FCC/Radio buddies would make when they realize someone's running a MW-scale tesla coil as some kind of electrical blowoff valve. I can't easily tell you the exact size of the area you'd utterly obliterate all radio communications in, but it'd be hilariously large.