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I’ve been running a solar microgrid on my coffee farm for the last 7years. We started with a few golf cart batteries and 4 panels, these days we’re powering 4 h

by K0balt 1y ago

I’ve been running a solar microgrid on my coffee farm for the last 7years. We started with a few golf cart batteries and 4 panels, these days we’re powering 4 houses, 7 cabins, water extraction, treatment, and RO processing, campus-wide fiber network and switches, path lighting, security systems, and a small server rack. We’re running 6 inverters on our primary system in a three phase configuration, 35kw of panels and 160kwh of lithium iron batteries. About to add an additional 20kw of panels and a test bank of LiTo cells. Our panels are a distributed set of rooftop mounted panels on various buildings, which also serves to shade the rooftops reducing cooling loads. We still have to run a generator to supplement charging on dark overcast days, but it’s typically about 100 hours a year. Hooping to get that running on biomass eventually. It’s strange to me that people in rural areas pay for electricity. It makes no economic sense, at least here in the Caribbean.

account-5 1y ago
Would imagine it's the initial cost of seeing all that up, and then the cost of maintenance. For me personally, where do you even start?
- K0balt 1y ago
  It grew organically so there was never a huge cost Really, except when we decided to build a building for The power plant because it was getting out of hand. It’s been a few thousand dollars a year in growth as we add batteries and panels. Also a bit of labor for installation of course, but we handle that in house.
  - boringg 1y ago
    How much are you valuing your own time? Theres money cost, then theres time cost and the final one is in more remote communities with cold weather… insurance costs on failure… Also to be clear - good on you for building out rural off grid electrical. Its a fun project and satisfying no doubt (outaide of costa)
    - Moto7451 1y ago
      I don’t know the OP’s situation but I’ve seen that many coffee growers have to do this because in high altitude tropical areas there is simply no one who will do the work anyway. They also have a very different regulatory structure in practice to what we have in the continental US and Europe. I’ve spoken to people from Rural Georgia (which is about an hour from Atlanta depending on the direction you’re driving) in Microcenter that are usually there to wire up their farm or factory with sufficient network capacity to keep production rolling. They have mentioned that they have had to do their own trenching for last mile for various services. Sometimes that means they literally drive down to Herc rentals, pick up a trenching machine, and do it themselves since the wait for someone else to do it is months away and that’s a long time if your business needs internet, water, power, etc.
    - K0balt 1y ago
      It’s been an adventure, but it would be disingenuous to imply that a don’t enjoy the challenge. It is very satisfying to have your work be so useful to many people. As for failure, we have them sometimes, but our casualty downtime for the last 6 years is <15 minutes. We have a highly redundant system that can run on as few as 2 of the 6 inverters, 8 separate battery banks, 16 separate panel banks with 9 separate charge controllers, 2 generators, and a completely separate redundant inverter for emergency power, as well as a separate power reserve system for control and monitoring power.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - Aurornis 1y ago
    > It grew organically so there was never a huge cost Really, Ahh, the accounting style of hobby projects. I’m very familiar with this because I do it, too. Nothing ever feels expensive if you just never add it all up and value your time at $0 because it’s fun.
    - K0balt 1y ago
      The total cost of the system so far is about $87k, and operating cost is around 4000 a year (includes equipment amortisation, slow expansion, direct operating costs). In all, for several homes, and a farm it’s very affordable. Getting power hooked up to a single house from the utilities is about $9000, so our buildout is roughly 2x what we might have spent just to get hooked up to the grid. We do buy carefully, and all the engineering is done by me. We have employees on the farm so much of the labor of installing underground cable etc was “free” (lol). Still, we are miles ahead of our costs if we were hooked up to the grid (which also would have cost us an additional $20k just for poles to get close, and we still would have had to bury the cables on campus along with the water and data, if we didn’t want ugly poles all over, so that part is a wash) I spend about 4 hours a week on utilities based projects, mostly engineering monitoring and control systems so that I spend less time working on the utilities. (So, futzing around with electronics because I have an excuse to) it feels like meaningful work that I care about, so that’s nice.
      - BubbleRings 1y ago
        Thank you so much for these posts! It makes me very optimistic about the future. For the longest time we all watched from the sidelines, hoping that the desire to turn off coal-fired power plants, and research often funded by tax dollars, would get the ball moving on solar. Now that the market has its magic invisible hand on that ball, it seems clear to me we have a path out of this mess. Rant your stupid “drill baby drill” crap all you want magats, we are going to solar, wind, and fusion our way to a better world, and there is nothing you can do to stop us.
        aftbit 1y ago
        Fission first! Let's build more nuclear power plants too. We know how to do it, and it's only so expensive because we got scared and stopped. Economies of scale for clean, safe, reliable baseload power.
jedahan 1y ago
Would love a write up or links to resources for water extraction and treatment if you’d oblige.
- K0balt 1y ago
  I don’t have much in the way of links, but I can give you an overview. We have a fair bit of vertical scale in the terrain here. We extract our water from a shallow well in a natural crevasse between ridges. It is made of concrete blocks stacked in a circle, filled with gravel and pinned with heavy rebar. The above ground part is finished in a regular fashion, with the blocks filled with concrete and a concrete cap. The well is built of a circle of 12 blocks, and is about 16 feet deep- where we encountered hard bedrock. An underground stream flows over this bedrock, which we extract from. This raw water is pumped to a 300 gallon manifold tank about 160 feet above the extraction point using a 1HP centrifugal pump. From there, it flows down to the processing facility, where it is sediment and carbon filtered before flowing into either the 2600 gallon cistern, or back up the hill a bit to a 450 gallon upper campus distribution tank. Water passing through the processing facility is filtered and chlorinated, with the exception of the upper campus water, which is only filtered. The upper campus water flows to cabins in the upper campus, and also serves as the input water for the RO system. The RO source water is pressurised by another centrifugal pump to 70psi, and is fed through a pair of 150GPD membranes after being filtered to 1 micron and passed through another carbon block. We run a 4:1 “waste” ratio to give us good life on the membranes (typically a year). The mineral rich “brine” flows into the 2600 gallon cistern and is used in the regular water. We warehouse the drinking water in a 500-gallon tank at the processing facility. There is a dual distribution system for water on campus. From the cistern at the processing facility RO water and regular water flows through underground tubing to a network of 5 utility huts where it is distributed to various homes and outbuildings. Each building then passes the main water through another carbon block to catch chemicals and chlorine, and drinking water gets mineralization and carbon again at the point of use. The underground distribution network also carries 3 phase power, HVDC for solar, separate fiber optic networks for security, control, intranet, and ISP, as well as cat6 cables for RS485 control subsystems. The tank levels, pump controls, power distribution and usage monitoring, emergency and automatic casualty control shutoffs, etc are all operated over rs485 and modbusTCP to a server. It’s a lot of off the shelf stuff and some custom stuff that i have built. Someday I need to do a write up on that lol. Anyway, that’s the view from space.
Aurornis 1y ago
> It’s strange to me that people in rural areas pay for electricity. It makes no economic sense, at least here in the Caribbean. This comment was very confusing until I read the second sentence. Electricity prices in the Caribbean are very high, and I can only imagine that rural areas are even worse. Where I’m at in the United States a typical electric rate is around $0.10/kWh. Paying that nominal amount and avoiding the need to service additional equipment and deal with backup generators is an easy decision.
- nullpoint420 1y ago
  I’m jealous. Where I live in California the off peak rate is $0.32/kWh and peak rates are $0.58/kWh.
  - Loughla 1y ago
    Rural area power co-op member here - flat rate 24/7 for residential is .13/kWh. Businesses/farms can get down to .10/kWh if they qualify. They proposed to update it to .15 so they could trim trees around the lines a little better, but it got denied by the co-op members as unnecessary.
    - baby_souffle 1y ago
      > They proposed to update it to .15 so they could trim trees around the lines a little better, but it got denied by the co-op members as unnecessary. Pge felt the same way and it did t turn out so well for them. I hope your coop is never found to be at fault for the next record breaking fire…
      - Loughla 1y ago
        So the increase was to buy spray equipment to attach to a helicopter. And a helicopter. One of the co-op ex-board members' son recently moved back to the area and had his license. . . It was a shameless cash grab by that family and was rightfully voted down by a wild majority of the co-op members. Every member of the board was replaced within 2 years of them proposing the increase as well. They currently keep all the lines clear via bucket trucks, and when they spray, they use ATV's and trucks. It takes most of June to spray all the lines, but they get it done easily. The actual physical infrastructure has been replaced almost entirely in the last 10 years through federal and/or state grants in combination with income from power charges. Also, these are just fundamentally different entities. PGE is a private entity that operates for a profit. Our power company is a co-op owned and run by its members. If they have any profit at the end of the year (once infrastructure improvements and safety net investments are paid for), the money gets paid directly back to the co-op members. It's a WILDLY different incentive structure.
pryelluw 1y ago
Where in the Caribbean?
thebiss 1y ago
What is your recovery plan in the event of a hurricane? I'm not fond of high electric rates, but in addition to generation those rates amortize and distribute the cost of storm recovery. A home or business with grid-tied solar pays interconnect fees for the option to get paid back a little for excess generation, and the option to decide to switch back to 100% grid power if a storm damages the on-site panels.
- gopalv 1y ago
  > those rates amortize and distribute the cost of storm recovery Not exactly when it is a farm out there away from a town. My experience is from a different era (90s) and a different kind of farm, but I spent a bunch of summers in one, which had power outages whenever the monsoons picked up. The trouble was that there was a single line feeding the farm from about 6km away, so if that went down a single farmowner complained - the rate payers who were in a denser urban area always got priority, because there were 600+ people who shared a transformer. The generator ran a lot when winds knocked power out, but the generator only ran when there was a big power need like running the well pumps or one of the winnowing mills. Even the winnower had pedals, because work doesn't stop. Every bathroom had a light with a 30 minute battery in it, which came on when the power went out - I guess if they had LEDs those same batteries would be 6 hour lights. They would have killed for solar + storage, because shipping fuel in for the generator was one of those annoying things you had to keep doing over and over again.
  - p_j_w 1y ago
    >The trouble was that there was a single line feeding the farm from about 6km away, so if that went down a single farmowner complained - the rate payers who were in a denser urban area always got priority, because there were 600+ people who shared a transformer. The urban rate payers also subsidize the rural ones, so it makes sense that they'd be front of the line.
  - devilbunny 1y ago
    I would have thought an isolated farm would have had propane on site - likely more than one tank. I don’t worry about outages much in my current home because the main line to ~1000 houses goes right past me, and I’m fed straight from it. If I’m out, it’s a very high priority line. Worst ever was about two days. It helps that our worst storms are usually in spring, so weather is mild.
roflyear 1y ago
What's your farm? How can someone reach out to buy small amounts of coffee from you, say 2-3 70kg bags?
- sgt 1y ago
  Where will the drop be?
  - roflyear 1y ago
    You mean roaster? ceto.coffee
rz2k 1y ago
How has your experience been with the lithium-titanium-oxide batteries? Everything I read makes it sound like the optimal solution for safety and long life, but it doesn't seem like they have displaced other battery chemistries very much.
- K0balt 1y ago
  I’m excited to try them too… I’ll get back to you in 5 years lol.
MostlyStable 1y ago
For the US, the entire user base helps subsidize rural customers. I have recently had the thought that I'm curious how this subsidy compares to the price of creating local micro-grids for rural communities. Especially in places like California where it is long distance power lines running to rural communities that have started several major fires. I don't have the skill to do it myself, but I'd love to see an analysis of whether it would make more sense at this point to do solar/wind + batteries and backup generators for at least the smallest and most remote communities.
- ZeroGravitas 1y ago
  Australia has just completed 5 years of feasibility studies on this: https://www.dcceew.gov.au/energy/programs/regional-remote-communities-reliability-fund https://www.dcceew.gov.au/energy/programs/regional-remote-co... and moved to the pilot phase: https://arena.gov.au/funding/rmp/ https://arena.gov.au/funding/rmp/ A review of some of the feasability studies carried out in phase one: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629624001312 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462962...
- pjc50 1y ago
  The Scottish island of Eigg has its own micro grid built by the residents which works like this.
jhfdbkofdchk 1y ago
reminds me of that Hunter S. Thompson quote from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, "Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious [solar power setup], the tendency is to push it as far as you can.”"
- K0balt 1y ago
  Lol. Definitely! It’s a ratchet: Need more power: Buy more panels, they are cheap! Need more power: Buy more panels, they are cheap! Need more power: Buy more panels, they are cheap! Need more power: Can’t buy more panels, need more batteries to stabilize the system. Thankfully , batteries are getting better and cheaper! Lots of power, so much we need to find new ways to benefit from it! Need more power: Buy more panels, they are cheap! …… The economics of panels are basically 20 percent APR here over 20 years. Over 40 years it drops to around 10 percent for out of service life panels.
networkisfine 1y ago
Very interesting. I'm looking to do something very similar on a farm. Would you mind sharing some more design details? Questions that come to mind: What products are you using? Are you doing any AC-coupling between inverters? If not, are you just running your PV wires between buildings? Are you stepping up your AC voltages to 480v or so to cover greater distances with less loss? Thanks!
- K0balt 1y ago
  Running the inverters in parallel synchronized in a three phase configuration, 2 per phase, 224/130. Since the power plant is centrally located, our longest run is about 270m. It’s at the edge of what we can do with the cable we have buried, so if we need to extend or add significantly more capacity we will probably go up to 440v for that segment, with a substation at the PED4 utility hut. Better efficiency in step up/step down is one of the reasons we chose 3 phase power. The panels are mostly centralized with each string being a home-run to the power plant but we are building out an additional 10KW on a rooftop about 200 yards away, so that will be 600VDC buried cable. We are testing small ( panel-back attached )grid-tie inverters for supplemental power at point of use, but we will see how much we can add before it results in stability issues. It would be great to be able to put a panel or two wherever it’s handy and just tie each panel separately into the ac distribution.
arwineap 1y ago
Naive question, why run inverters? Wouldn't it be more efficient to run direct DC appliances? We have a building on our farm without power and it'd be ideal to be able to charge batteries and run lights at night It seems to me that we would have to upsize batteries in order to make up for the loss in converting to AC
- belval 1y ago
  > Dumb question, why run inverters? Can't say for OP, but DC appliances are just difficult to find, usually more expensive due to economies of scale and not as uniform in voltage (12/24/48V) as AC appliances. If your battery is in a shed somewhere it's also much easier to run a smaller gauge AC wire than setup distribution for your DC power. Most large system are also 48V so you need to get it down to 12/24V which adds components anyway, at which point you might as well just have an inverter and not worry about any of that.
  - bruce511 1y ago
    You also need some sort of battery management, and inverters typically have this built in as well. So yeah, you can get by without an inverter, but then you need a battery charger manager so as not to overcharge, and (depending on the battery chemistry) something to cut off the battery as it runs down. (Lead acid for example shouldn't go below 50%).
- vhanda 1y ago
  Not who you're asking. I really don't see why we're still using A/C inside our houses / apartments. I understand that the transmission loss is lower when sending A/C, so it makes sense, but then nearly every device in my house has their own AC to DC converter. Just have one AC-DC converter per building. I'd like the future to just be USB-C sockets in my house. We have USB-C PD 3.1 which supports up to 48v, I imagine that would be good for all devices. There are probably safety reasons why this future might be difficult.
  - bityard 1y ago
    That would have been a good argument to make a decade or two ago but these days switch-mode power supplies are very efficient, and GaN ones even more so. I have a small mess of 12-ish volt computer/network equipment in the corner of my office and looked into running it all off of one $40 high-amp power supply to eliminate all the wall warts and bricks. By the time I figured out power distribution and termination, buck/boost converters for the things that aren't 12V, it all seemed like a lot of work compared to just spending a couple hours tidying up the cabling and hiding the wall warts. You can live in the future now and install power outlets with USB-PD built right in, although a quick glance suggests they top out at 65W. Fine for phones and tablets, might not keep a gaming laptop charged while in use.
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 1y ago
This sounds awesome! Do you have a tech blog or writeup on what things you used, what parts broke down, or what kind of things needed to be fixed over time?
antisthenes 1y ago
> It’s strange to me that people in rural areas pay for electricity. It makes no economic sense, at least here in the Caribbean. When I took a vacation to Aruba, I was very disappointed to see very limited solar and EV adoption. Public transportation (buses) were running on gas, as were most personal vehicles. It was nuts to me considering there was only 1 overcast day out of the 7 I was there, and you definitely don't need any energy for heating, ever.
beachy 1y ago
That sounds like a dream gig. Do you find it satisfying running your own utility?
- K0balt 1y ago
  It is enormously satisfying to be doing something that is so useful to people close to you. I just wish I could focus more on that instead of other projects, but c’est la vie.
teleforce 1y ago
This is truly interesting and inspiring. Is there any documentation of your solar microgrid systems for learning purposes? Or better can anyone visit your farm for learning the microgrid systems? I just found these article back in 2017 and 2022 on microgrid installation in the Caribbean and they looks like promising off-grid solutions for tropical islands [1],[2]. [1] Why Solar Microgrids May Fall Short in Replacing the Caribbean’s Devastated Power Systems (2017): https://spectrum.ieee.org/should-a-devastated-caribbean-leap-forward-to-renewable-power-and-microgrids https://spectrum.ieee.org/should-a-devastated-caribbean-leap... [2] As rich nations haggle over climate solutions, storm-ravaged Caribbean is taking matters into its own hands (2022): https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/15/world/caribbean-solar-power-microgrids-climate-cop27 https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/15/world/caribbean-solar-pow...

by K0balt 1y ago

account-5 1y ago

Would imagine it's the initial cost of seeing all that up, and then the cost of maintenance. For me personally, where do you even start?

K0balt 1y ago
It grew organically so there was never a huge cost Really, except when we decided to build a building for The power plant because it was getting out of hand. It’s been a few thousand dollars a year in growth as we add batteries and panels. Also a bit of labor for installation of course, but we handle that in house.
- boringg 1y ago
  How much are you valuing your own time? Theres money cost, then theres time cost and the final one is in more remote communities with cold weather… insurance costs on failure… Also to be clear - good on you for building out rural off grid electrical. Its a fun project and satisfying no doubt (outaide of costa)
  - Moto7451 1y ago
    I don’t know the OP’s situation but I’ve seen that many coffee growers have to do this because in high altitude tropical areas there is simply no one who will do the work anyway. They also have a very different regulatory structure in practice to what we have in the continental US and Europe. I’ve spoken to people from Rural Georgia (which is about an hour from Atlanta depending on the direction you’re driving) in Microcenter that are usually there to wire up their farm or factory with sufficient network capacity to keep production rolling. They have mentioned that they have had to do their own trenching for last mile for various services. Sometimes that means they literally drive down to Herc rentals, pick up a trenching machine, and do it themselves since the wait for someone else to do it is months away and that’s a long time if your business needs internet, water, power, etc.
  - K0balt 1y ago
    It’s been an adventure, but it would be disingenuous to imply that a don’t enjoy the challenge. It is very satisfying to have your work be so useful to many people. As for failure, we have them sometimes, but our casualty downtime for the last 6 years is <15 minutes. We have a highly redundant system that can run on as few as 2 of the 6 inverters, 8 separate battery banks, 16 separate panel banks with 9 separate charge controllers, 2 generators, and a completely separate redundant inverter for emergency power, as well as a separate power reserve system for control and monitoring power.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Aurornis 1y ago
  > It grew organically so there was never a huge cost Really, Ahh, the accounting style of hobby projects. I’m very familiar with this because I do it, too. Nothing ever feels expensive if you just never add it all up and value your time at $0 because it’s fun.
  - K0balt 1y ago
    The total cost of the system so far is about $87k, and operating cost is around 4000 a year (includes equipment amortisation, slow expansion, direct operating costs). In all, for several homes, and a farm it’s very affordable. Getting power hooked up to a single house from the utilities is about $9000, so our buildout is roughly 2x what we might have spent just to get hooked up to the grid. We do buy carefully, and all the engineering is done by me. We have employees on the farm so much of the labor of installing underground cable etc was “free” (lol). Still, we are miles ahead of our costs if we were hooked up to the grid (which also would have cost us an additional $20k just for poles to get close, and we still would have had to bury the cables on campus along with the water and data, if we didn’t want ugly poles all over, so that part is a wash) I spend about 4 hours a week on utilities based projects, mostly engineering monitoring and control systems so that I spend less time working on the utilities. (So, futzing around with electronics because I have an excuse to) it feels like meaningful work that I care about, so that’s nice.
    - BubbleRings 1y ago
      Thank you so much for these posts! It makes me very optimistic about the future. For the longest time we all watched from the sidelines, hoping that the desire to turn off coal-fired power plants, and research often funded by tax dollars, would get the ball moving on solar. Now that the market has its magic invisible hand on that ball, it seems clear to me we have a path out of this mess. Rant your stupid “drill baby drill” crap all you want magats, we are going to solar, wind, and fusion our way to a better world, and there is nothing you can do to stop us.
      - aftbit 1y ago
        Fission first! Let's build more nuclear power plants too. We know how to do it, and it's only so expensive because we got scared and stopped. Economies of scale for clean, safe, reliable baseload power.

jedahan 1y ago

Would love a write up or links to resources for water extraction and treatment if you’d oblige.

K0balt 1y ago
I don’t have much in the way of links, but I can give you an overview. We have a fair bit of vertical scale in the terrain here. We extract our water from a shallow well in a natural crevasse between ridges. It is made of concrete blocks stacked in a circle, filled with gravel and pinned with heavy rebar. The above ground part is finished in a regular fashion, with the blocks filled with concrete and a concrete cap. The well is built of a circle of 12 blocks, and is about 16 feet deep- where we encountered hard bedrock. An underground stream flows over this bedrock, which we extract from. This raw water is pumped to a 300 gallon manifold tank about 160 feet above the extraction point using a 1HP centrifugal pump. From there, it flows down to the processing facility, where it is sediment and carbon filtered before flowing into either the 2600 gallon cistern, or back up the hill a bit to a 450 gallon upper campus distribution tank. Water passing through the processing facility is filtered and chlorinated, with the exception of the upper campus water, which is only filtered. The upper campus water flows to cabins in the upper campus, and also serves as the input water for the RO system. The RO source water is pressurised by another centrifugal pump to 70psi, and is fed through a pair of 150GPD membranes after being filtered to 1 micron and passed through another carbon block. We run a 4:1 “waste” ratio to give us good life on the membranes (typically a year). The mineral rich “brine” flows into the 2600 gallon cistern and is used in the regular water. We warehouse the drinking water in a 500-gallon tank at the processing facility. There is a dual distribution system for water on campus. From the cistern at the processing facility RO water and regular water flows through underground tubing to a network of 5 utility huts where it is distributed to various homes and outbuildings. Each building then passes the main water through another carbon block to catch chemicals and chlorine, and drinking water gets mineralization and carbon again at the point of use. The underground distribution network also carries 3 phase power, HVDC for solar, separate fiber optic networks for security, control, intranet, and ISP, as well as cat6 cables for RS485 control subsystems. The tank levels, pump controls, power distribution and usage monitoring, emergency and automatic casualty control shutoffs, etc are all operated over rs485 and modbusTCP to a server. It’s a lot of off the shelf stuff and some custom stuff that i have built. Someday I need to do a write up on that lol. Anyway, that’s the view from space.

Aurornis 1y ago

> It’s strange to me that people in rural areas pay for electricity. It makes no economic sense, at least here in the Caribbean. This comment was very confusing until I read the second sentence. Electricity prices in the Caribbean are very high, and I can only imagine that rural areas are even worse. Where I’m at in the United States a typical electric rate is around $0.10/kWh. Paying that nominal amount and avoiding the need to service additional equipment and deal with backup generators is an easy decision.

nullpoint420 1y ago
I’m jealous. Where I live in California the off peak rate is $0.32/kWh and peak rates are $0.58/kWh.
- Loughla 1y ago
  Rural area power co-op member here - flat rate 24/7 for residential is .13/kWh. Businesses/farms can get down to .10/kWh if they qualify. They proposed to update it to .15 so they could trim trees around the lines a little better, but it got denied by the co-op members as unnecessary.
  - baby_souffle 1y ago
    > They proposed to update it to .15 so they could trim trees around the lines a little better, but it got denied by the co-op members as unnecessary. Pge felt the same way and it did t turn out so well for them. I hope your coop is never found to be at fault for the next record breaking fire…
    - Loughla 1y ago
      So the increase was to buy spray equipment to attach to a helicopter. And a helicopter. One of the co-op ex-board members' son recently moved back to the area and had his license. . . It was a shameless cash grab by that family and was rightfully voted down by a wild majority of the co-op members. Every member of the board was replaced within 2 years of them proposing the increase as well. They currently keep all the lines clear via bucket trucks, and when they spray, they use ATV's and trucks. It takes most of June to spray all the lines, but they get it done easily. The actual physical infrastructure has been replaced almost entirely in the last 10 years through federal and/or state grants in combination with income from power charges. Also, these are just fundamentally different entities. PGE is a private entity that operates for a profit. Our power company is a co-op owned and run by its members. If they have any profit at the end of the year (once infrastructure improvements and safety net investments are paid for), the money gets paid directly back to the co-op members. It's a WILDLY different incentive structure.

pryelluw 1y ago

Where in the Caribbean?

thebiss 1y ago

What is your recovery plan in the event of a hurricane? I'm not fond of high electric rates, but in addition to generation those rates amortize and distribute the cost of storm recovery. A home or business with grid-tied solar pays interconnect fees for the option to get paid back a little for excess generation, and the option to decide to switch back to 100% grid power if a storm damages the on-site panels.

gopalv 1y ago
> those rates amortize and distribute the cost of storm recovery Not exactly when it is a farm out there away from a town. My experience is from a different era (90s) and a different kind of farm, but I spent a bunch of summers in one, which had power outages whenever the monsoons picked up. The trouble was that there was a single line feeding the farm from about 6km away, so if that went down a single farmowner complained - the rate payers who were in a denser urban area always got priority, because there were 600+ people who shared a transformer. The generator ran a lot when winds knocked power out, but the generator only ran when there was a big power need like running the well pumps or one of the winnowing mills. Even the winnower had pedals, because work doesn't stop. Every bathroom had a light with a 30 minute battery in it, which came on when the power went out - I guess if they had LEDs those same batteries would be 6 hour lights. They would have killed for solar + storage, because shipping fuel in for the generator was one of those annoying things you had to keep doing over and over again.
- p_j_w 1y ago
  >The trouble was that there was a single line feeding the farm from about 6km away, so if that went down a single farmowner complained - the rate payers who were in a denser urban area always got priority, because there were 600+ people who shared a transformer. The urban rate payers also subsidize the rural ones, so it makes sense that they'd be front of the line.
- devilbunny 1y ago
  I would have thought an isolated farm would have had propane on site - likely more than one tank. I don’t worry about outages much in my current home because the main line to ~1000 houses goes right past me, and I’m fed straight from it. If I’m out, it’s a very high priority line. Worst ever was about two days. It helps that our worst storms are usually in spring, so weather is mild.

roflyear 1y ago

What's your farm? How can someone reach out to buy small amounts of coffee from you, say 2-3 70kg bags?

sgt 1y ago
Where will the drop be?
- roflyear 1y ago
  You mean roaster? ceto.coffee

rz2k 1y ago

How has your experience been with the lithium-titanium-oxide batteries? Everything I read makes it sound like the optimal solution for safety and long life, but it doesn't seem like they have displaced other battery chemistries very much.

K0balt 1y ago
I’m excited to try them too… I’ll get back to you in 5 years lol.

MostlyStable 1y ago

For the US, the entire user base helps subsidize rural customers. I have recently had the thought that I'm curious how this subsidy compares to the price of creating local micro-grids for rural communities. Especially in places like California where it is long distance power lines running to rural communities that have started several major fires. I don't have the skill to do it myself, but I'd love to see an analysis of whether it would make more sense at this point to do solar/wind + batteries and backup generators for at least the smallest and most remote communities.

ZeroGravitas 1y ago
Australia has just completed 5 years of feasibility studies on this: https://www.dcceew.gov.au/energy/programs/regional-remote-communities-reliability-fund https://www.dcceew.gov.au/energy/programs/regional-remote-co... and moved to the pilot phase: https://arena.gov.au/funding/rmp/ https://arena.gov.au/funding/rmp/ A review of some of the feasability studies carried out in phase one: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629624001312 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462962...
pjc50 1y ago
The Scottish island of Eigg has its own micro grid built by the residents which works like this.

jhfdbkofdchk 1y ago

reminds me of that Hunter S. Thompson quote from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, "Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious [solar power setup], the tendency is to push it as far as you can.”"

K0balt 1y ago
Lol. Definitely! It’s a ratchet: Need more power: Buy more panels, they are cheap! Need more power: Buy more panels, they are cheap! Need more power: Buy more panels, they are cheap! Need more power: Can’t buy more panels, need more batteries to stabilize the system. Thankfully , batteries are getting better and cheaper! Lots of power, so much we need to find new ways to benefit from it! Need more power: Buy more panels, they are cheap! …… The economics of panels are basically 20 percent APR here over 20 years. Over 40 years it drops to around 10 percent for out of service life panels.

networkisfine 1y ago

Very interesting. I'm looking to do something very similar on a farm. Would you mind sharing some more design details? Questions that come to mind: What products are you using? Are you doing any AC-coupling between inverters? If not, are you just running your PV wires between buildings? Are you stepping up your AC voltages to 480v or so to cover greater distances with less loss? Thanks!

K0balt 1y ago
Running the inverters in parallel synchronized in a three phase configuration, 2 per phase, 224/130. Since the power plant is centrally located, our longest run is about 270m. It’s at the edge of what we can do with the cable we have buried, so if we need to extend or add significantly more capacity we will probably go up to 440v for that segment, with a substation at the PED4 utility hut. Better efficiency in step up/step down is one of the reasons we chose 3 phase power. The panels are mostly centralized with each string being a home-run to the power plant but we are building out an additional 10KW on a rooftop about 200 yards away, so that will be 600VDC buried cable. We are testing small ( panel-back attached )grid-tie inverters for supplemental power at point of use, but we will see how much we can add before it results in stability issues. It would be great to be able to put a panel or two wherever it’s handy and just tie each panel separately into the ac distribution.

arwineap 1y ago

Naive question, why run inverters? Wouldn't it be more efficient to run direct DC appliances? We have a building on our farm without power and it'd be ideal to be able to charge batteries and run lights at night It seems to me that we would have to upsize batteries in order to make up for the loss in converting to AC

belval 1y ago
> Dumb question, why run inverters? Can't say for OP, but DC appliances are just difficult to find, usually more expensive due to economies of scale and not as uniform in voltage (12/24/48V) as AC appliances. If your battery is in a shed somewhere it's also much easier to run a smaller gauge AC wire than setup distribution for your DC power. Most large system are also 48V so you need to get it down to 12/24V which adds components anyway, at which point you might as well just have an inverter and not worry about any of that.
- bruce511 1y ago
  You also need some sort of battery management, and inverters typically have this built in as well. So yeah, you can get by without an inverter, but then you need a battery charger manager so as not to overcharge, and (depending on the battery chemistry) something to cut off the battery as it runs down. (Lead acid for example shouldn't go below 50%).
vhanda 1y ago
Not who you're asking. I really don't see why we're still using A/C inside our houses / apartments. I understand that the transmission loss is lower when sending A/C, so it makes sense, but then nearly every device in my house has their own AC to DC converter. Just have one AC-DC converter per building. I'd like the future to just be USB-C sockets in my house. We have USB-C PD 3.1 which supports up to 48v, I imagine that would be good for all devices. There are probably safety reasons why this future might be difficult.
- bityard 1y ago
  That would have been a good argument to make a decade or two ago but these days switch-mode power supplies are very efficient, and GaN ones even more so. I have a small mess of 12-ish volt computer/network equipment in the corner of my office and looked into running it all off of one $40 high-amp power supply to eliminate all the wall warts and bricks. By the time I figured out power distribution and termination, buck/boost converters for the things that aren't 12V, it all seemed like a lot of work compared to just spending a couple hours tidying up the cabling and hiding the wall warts. You can live in the future now and install power outlets with USB-PD built right in, although a quick glance suggests they top out at 65W. Fine for phones and tablets, might not keep a gaming laptop charged while in use.

h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 1y ago

This sounds awesome! Do you have a tech blog or writeup on what things you used, what parts broke down, or what kind of things needed to be fixed over time?

antisthenes 1y ago

> It’s strange to me that people in rural areas pay for electricity. It makes no economic sense, at least here in the Caribbean. When I took a vacation to Aruba, I was very disappointed to see very limited solar and EV adoption. Public transportation (buses) were running on gas, as were most personal vehicles. It was nuts to me considering there was only 1 overcast day out of the 7 I was there, and you definitely don't need any energy for heating, ever.

beachy 1y ago

That sounds like a dream gig. Do you find it satisfying running your own utility?

K0balt 1y ago
It is enormously satisfying to be doing something that is so useful to people close to you. I just wish I could focus more on that instead of other projects, but c’est la vie.

teleforce 1y ago

This is truly interesting and inspiring. Is there any documentation of your solar microgrid systems for learning purposes? Or better can anyone visit your farm for learning the microgrid systems? I just found these article back in 2017 and 2022 on microgrid installation in the Caribbean and they looks like promising off-grid solutions for tropical islands [1],[2]. [1] Why Solar Microgrids May Fall Short in Replacing the Caribbean’s Devastated Power Systems (2017): https://spectrum.ieee.org/should-a-devastated-caribbean-leap-forward-to-renewable-power-and-microgrids https://spectrum.ieee.org/should-a-devastated-caribbean-leap... [2] As rich nations haggle over climate solutions, storm-ravaged Caribbean is taking matters into its own hands (2022): https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/15/world/caribbean-solar-power-microgrids-climate-cop27 https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/15/world/caribbean-solar-pow...