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How do you only consume 10% of your total consumption in 1/3 of the years? Mining bitcoin in summer yo drive total consumption up?

Dylan16807 6mo ago
Are you saying it's cloudy for four months straight? And the panels are still making power during the winter. A detailed chart would be nice but a good starting point to imagine is 60-70 days that average 50% solar power and the rest of the year is full solar power minus a couple particularly bad days. Edit: In winter, in denmark, the amount of sunlight you get per square meter of flat ground is absolutely awful. But the amount of sunlight you can catch on a highly tilted solar panel is still pretty good, about half of the average output. So if you space them properly and overbuild based on the average, the 90% number isn't crazy.
- littlestymaar 6mo ago
  > Are you saying it's cloudy for four months straight? No. But it's cloudy most of the time for four month straight (in average there's only 200 hours of sun between November and February in Copenhagen. Yes, you read it right, that's not even 2 hours per day in average!). > A detailed chart would be nice but a good starting point to imagine is 60-70 days that average 50% solar power and the rest of the year is full solar power minus a couple particularly bad days That's an insane assumption! An average of 50% solar power during the day is the higher bound of what you can expect in the middle of the Nevada desert! (Because you know, the sun rises and falls during the day, it's never going to give the full power during daytime). And because there's night half of the time in average, even in Nevada you end up with load factors around 25%! (Go check the figures!) In winter in Danemark, the situation is obviously far worse! A 2-5% load factor is to be expected depending on the weather. (Just check the live data: we're in April, it's 11am and solar panels are delivering just 10% of their power right now https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DK-DK1/live/fifteen_minutes https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DK-DK1/live/fifteen... ) > the 90% number isn't crazy. If this number doesn't sounds crazy to you, it's just because you're completely off in terms of orders of magnitude involved. 90% is likely achievable in southern US with great effort, lots of storage for night times and significant over-paneling, but it's pure science fiction in Denmark.
  - Dylan16807 6mo ago
    > That's an insane assumption! [...] load factor No no no no, that line has nothing to do with load factor. I'm talking about half the kilowatts for the house coming from solar, and half coming from the grid. > Just check the live data There's no way those panels are optimally angled and out of shade if they're making that little. Are those panels installed in rows on the ground? Rows that are pretty close to each other? Panels on a roof, the steeper the better, will see a much higher load factor in winter. I'm other words, a home rooftop install will do much better in winter than a standard commercial install. That's a mixture of chance and optimizing for different things. A thought experiment: You have one big solar panel mounted very high, with a multi-axis aiming system that points it directly at the sun. Do you think the amount of power you can make is going to be that far off a linear relationship with the number of hours of daylight?
    - littlestymaar 6mo ago
      > No no no no, that line has nothing to do with load factor. I'm talking about half the kilowatts for the house coming from solar, and half coming from the grid. Assuming consumption isn't correlated with sun hours, these are equivalent unless you over-panel. With a load factor of 5%, you need to over-panel 10x to achieve 50% of your energy supply (in fact it's more complex than this and you'll need even more of that but that's an OK simplifying assumption). > There's no way those panels are optimally angled and out of shade if they're making that little Those are commercial solar farms, optimally angled under the constraint that the cost must be reasonable. > A thought experiment: You have one big solar panel mounted very high, with a multi-axis aiming system that points it directly at the sun. Do you have an idea of how much it would cost?! With Materials + installation + maintenance, such a mechanism would dwarf the price of the panels. There's a reason we don't deploy those at scale in practice … > Do you think the amount of power you can make is going to be that far off a linear relationship with the number of hours of daylight? In a country where 80% of the winter is cloudy, it's going to be very far, yes. The 10% power happening right now is because it's cloudy (light clouds, no rain, but still). It peaked at 40% in recent days with proper sun, but it happened only a handful of times in the entire winter.

Dylan16807 6mo ago

Are you saying it's cloudy for four months straight? And the panels are still making power during the winter. A detailed chart would be nice but a good starting point to imagine is 60-70 days that average 50% solar power and the rest of the year is full solar power minus a couple particularly bad days. Edit: In winter, in denmark, the amount of sunlight you get per square meter of flat ground is absolutely awful. But the amount of sunlight you can catch on a highly tilted solar panel is still pretty good, about half of the average output. So if you space them properly and overbuild based on the average, the 90% number isn't crazy.

littlestymaar 6mo ago
> Are you saying it's cloudy for four months straight? No. But it's cloudy most of the time for four month straight (in average there's only 200 hours of sun between November and February in Copenhagen. Yes, you read it right, that's not even 2 hours per day in average!). > A detailed chart would be nice but a good starting point to imagine is 60-70 days that average 50% solar power and the rest of the year is full solar power minus a couple particularly bad days That's an insane assumption! An average of 50% solar power during the day is the higher bound of what you can expect in the middle of the Nevada desert! (Because you know, the sun rises and falls during the day, it's never going to give the full power during daytime). And because there's night half of the time in average, even in Nevada you end up with load factors around 25%! (Go check the figures!) In winter in Danemark, the situation is obviously far worse! A 2-5% load factor is to be expected depending on the weather. (Just check the live data: we're in April, it's 11am and solar panels are delivering just 10% of their power right now https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DK-DK1/live/fifteen_minutes https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DK-DK1/live/fifteen... ) > the 90% number isn't crazy. If this number doesn't sounds crazy to you, it's just because you're completely off in terms of orders of magnitude involved. 90% is likely achievable in southern US with great effort, lots of storage for night times and significant over-paneling, but it's pure science fiction in Denmark.
- Dylan16807 6mo ago
  > That's an insane assumption! [...] load factor No no no no, that line has nothing to do with load factor. I'm talking about half the kilowatts for the house coming from solar, and half coming from the grid. > Just check the live data There's no way those panels are optimally angled and out of shade if they're making that little. Are those panels installed in rows on the ground? Rows that are pretty close to each other? Panels on a roof, the steeper the better, will see a much higher load factor in winter. I'm other words, a home rooftop install will do much better in winter than a standard commercial install. That's a mixture of chance and optimizing for different things. A thought experiment: You have one big solar panel mounted very high, with a multi-axis aiming system that points it directly at the sun. Do you think the amount of power you can make is going to be that far off a linear relationship with the number of hours of daylight?
  - littlestymaar 6mo ago
    > No no no no, that line has nothing to do with load factor. I'm talking about half the kilowatts for the house coming from solar, and half coming from the grid. Assuming consumption isn't correlated with sun hours, these are equivalent unless you over-panel. With a load factor of 5%, you need to over-panel 10x to achieve 50% of your energy supply (in fact it's more complex than this and you'll need even more of that but that's an OK simplifying assumption). > There's no way those panels are optimally angled and out of shade if they're making that little Those are commercial solar farms, optimally angled under the constraint that the cost must be reasonable. > A thought experiment: You have one big solar panel mounted very high, with a multi-axis aiming system that points it directly at the sun. Do you have an idea of how much it would cost?! With Materials + installation + maintenance, such a mechanism would dwarf the price of the panels. There's a reason we don't deploy those at scale in practice … > Do you think the amount of power you can make is going to be that far off a linear relationship with the number of hours of daylight? In a country where 80% of the winter is cloudy, it's going to be very far, yes. The 10% power happening right now is because it's cloudy (light clouds, no rain, but still). It peaked at 40% in recent days with proper sun, but it happened only a handful of times in the entire winter.