6 ms·
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 c
by 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 agoThank 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 agoFission 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.
- bruce511 1y agoTurns out, I'm already on fission. What I've done is tap into an existing fission reactor. It's some distance from my house, but there's a lot of excess energy there leaking out. I put up some collectors to capture it. Was really quite cheap to do, and I don't have to pay anyone to actually run the reactor.
- strawhatguy 1y agoThat’s silly, why make it political? If anything the political encroachment came from the green crowd first, cafe standards, EV mandates and the like. The best way forward has always been to explore all energy avenues, and that will include fossil fuels as well. At least you’ve included nuclear, but left out fission, strangely, which is the best hope of electric generation replacement we currently have. I’m tired of this team blue for electric (except Tesla now, lol) and team red for oil. They are choices with trade offs, and are friends, not enemies.
- bloomingeek 1y agoNo offence, but everything is political. Much of our lives are controlled by laws. These laws are all politically controlled. To say it's silly to make something political, usually suggests your supported political slant is difficult to justify. Trade offs are only possible when the party in charge is willing to work with EVERYONE, we don't have that now. Thus the criticism.
- mensetmanusman 1y agoPolitics is simply preference.
- strawhatguy 1y agoPolitics works through division by way of laws. Reduce the laws, reduce the division, and therefore politics.
- bityard 1y agoThat sounds incredible. This is the first year I've really started digging deep into solar generation and battery storage and it's one big fascinating rabbit hole. I've looked at it from a bunch of different angles and keep coming to the conclusion that for rural and suburban areas with the space for panels, off-grid solar is the future.