Plenty if you don’t want grid tied, otherwise your local utility probably has an list of the ones they’ll accept somewhere. There is a list of things an inverter will have to be certified to be able to meet for grid tied such as anti-islanding requirements, and in this case i’m afraid you’re almost certainly better off to be going with a reseller the inverter manufacturer actually recommends than playing Amazon roulette.

From my understanding here it tends to be easier to just stay off the grid for very small systems, either by just plugging in a few panels to a battery and small dc to ac inverter(with appropriately rated fuses between all connections) or else getting an automatic transfer switch and treating the whole thing like a generator.

That being said RVs and camper vans are a thing here, and there may be some more plug and play systems in that direction but small 12v systems are a bit out of my wheelhouse.

Unless you’re meters have a whole lot more protections built into them than ours I don’t think that they would have anti-islanding or grid frequency protections built in, that latter at least seems like it has to be done at the inverter level.

If it is the case than why bother with any registration or monitoring at all beyond requing a smart meter for anyone with a grid tied inverter?

As for the meter reading itself it’s going to depend on whether the inverter is connected to the gird, and if it is whether or not the inverter is set to grid export or only to provide as much power as the home is using at the time, possibly minus something for reactive power or some such.

Surely ability is determined by having the proper inverter though? The panels are irrelevant as without a proper grid matching inverter all connecting to the grid is going to do is destroy the inverter.

Also, as someone who is currently going through the process of registering a grid connected inverter here in the states, surely the whole point of the registration process is the part where an appropriately licensed electrician comes out to physically verify that the inverter is grid compliant and anti islanding, as that is the part that is likely to actually kill someone if it is improperly installed or configured.

It’s also something the government/utility has to take on trust to be declared, as a miss wired generator or battery backup transfer switch poses the near exact same risk.

It will probably happen eventually for gas stations in very rural areas, but keep in mind that you only really need one gas station in a given county staying open to keep gas vehicles viable, and you don’t really need all that much traffic to keep a pump open, especially if there arn’t any other options and as such you can increase margin drastically.

Personally I tend to think that the Bengal famine is better compared to the Holodomor, as it is closer in time, area, and effect. If there is a lesson to these things though, I think it’s that it doesn’t matter what economic system you use of the people in charge are fans of eugenics, and that’s why it’s so important that there be strong independent checks on the government and politicians, minority representation, multi-party rule, etc…

No shit, in a fossilized economy everything emits carbon, and low co2 new steel production is still in its infancy. Nevertheless it emits far, far less carbon than running a natural gas plant for the same power, and as the article points out, can and is continually reused forever with no new carbon emissions beyond that of the enegy used to transport the material and power the arc furnace.

The startup cost in carbon just means there is a delay in between when a turbine is built, and when it is produceing zero carbon energy. Studies show that even the most steel intensive offshore turbines repay this debt in under a year, and again, this is why we need to be getting as much wind energy online as soon as possible.

If going to a smaller turbine design means that you save four months worth of startup carbon, but means a wind farm only captures two thirds as much wind energy over its three hundred month design lifespan then going with the smaller design will have effectively cost nearly a hundred months worth of output to save four. While that two thirds number is going to very by project constraints, the reduction doesn’t need to be very large to work out to a net carbon savings, even if you couldn’t recycle steel at all.

As things like available project land, projected ongoing maintenance budget, and most often capital availabllity ultimately constrain a given projects size and net generating capacity, it makes sense to go for the larger turbines that more efficiently make use of these limited resources, instead of the practically unlimited in this context supply of steel.

In short, optimizing for steel use is effectively producing kilotons of ongoing co2 emissions to save tons of co2 once.

Precisely, good stable wind blowing when we need power is not something we have an unlimited amount of, like times we can recycle steel. The steel in todays wind turbine is the steel in a thousand years from now’s turbine, where as the co2 that got pumped into the atmosphere because that turbine wasn’t enough is also the co2 killing people in a thousand years. The higher you get a turbine above the ground, the less turbulence it will see, and the more constantly it will be in the right range to generate power.

The more you can count on it, the less battery and hydro you need to cover when the winds not blowing, and thusly the less space and turbines you need.

As for labor efficiency, i’ve always though of the goal of solarpunk to be a world where we’ve settled out into a way of life that can be maintained long term and where people are free to do what they want and help out where they can instead of worrying about if they’ll earn enough from the megacorp to have heat and food next month.

While you still need someone to do dangerous and unpleasant things like climbing turbines, ideally you’re only asking as few people as possible to do so as you need.

And given that even in that future people will still be paying the price in lives for the GHGs we emit today, we owe it to them and possibly us if we live long enough to shrink the river of co2 we’re putting out as fast as we can, as every fossil plant that is replaced by clean energy today is decades of that’s plants cost gone.

They use steel more effectively, but use other resources like wind, land, labor, and electronics less effectively, and all of which are harder to recycle. It also didn’t mention household or village scale as much as was still comparing very large grid scale systems, which is important as once you get much smaller than that energy efficiency falls off a cliff.

Finally, while a detailed look into a specific resource can be very interesting, it’s important to take a holistic look at how energy sources compare and not just evaluate on one figure.

Ultimately, as our ability to manufacture steel is not currently a major constraint to decarbonization, more important limitations like installation and maintenance costs are going to be dominant at least for the next few decades. Similarly as the low hanging fruit like electricity generation make up less and less of our collective GHG emissions, we’ll have more resources like plentiful wind energy to throw at problems like decarbonizing steel, as its still a problem will have to solve sooner or later.

The biggest concern in this place is the effect on collapsing the aquifer like has happened across the border in Pakistan. Overuse of water rights is difficult to enforce, but at least farmers had to trade one valuable liquid for another. By contrast with solar your only cost is upfront, and as such farmers are effectively penalized for turning off the pumps and not taking all they can to an even greater extent.

Now obviously it’s better to not be burning diesel and this was still a problem before electrifying, but it’s still seems bittersweet in this case.

And gobal warming means the rivers will soon be hot enough that about half of all salmon species stroke out in them. Replaceing clean energy with fossil fuels, which is the definitional result of removing clean energy from the grid while any fossil plants remain connected, not only hurts salmon numbers today, but ensures that for hundreds upon hundreds of years into the future there can be no salmon.

There is a reason why despite the no change to the number of dams and thouse same dams getting easier and easier for salmon to cross salmon runs have still tended to decline, and keeping methane plants that would otherwise be shut down today operating for decades to come does not help with that.

Neglecting all the stronger hurricanes, monsoons, floods, elimination of coral reefs, forests, and habitat, we can fertilize trees and reintroduce salmon, we cannot refrigerate the rivers.

The salmon and their cultural impact have definitely been the driver of this and similar projects, and toxic algee blooms can and often are mitigated for far less than the cost of removing the dams. I also did not say that there was no local ecological benefit, mearly that there is a gobal ecological cost with far more direct impacts on human and habitat mortality as well as an impact on gobal salmon populations.

Note Oregon is moving away from methane plants, not completely eliminated from the entire Western Interconnection, indeed parts of the same grid are still building entirely new methane plants.

Even neglecting that the same money and resources could have been used to build more clean energy infrastructure instead of removing it, this is a very clear case of delaying cleaning up the grid in favor of perceived local benefits.

It actually is a very clear example of a one or the other thing. If we assume that power companies generally prioritize using renewable power over fossil, which given the cost of fuel they definitely do, and the gird will try and meet demand, then every kilowatt hour of clean energy removed from the grid is by definition a kilowatt hour of dirty energy added to the grid.

Had these dams continued generating electricity than that electricity would have taken the place of electricity produced by burning methane, and indeed given the often dispatchable nature of hydropower, it would have replaced methane from some of the dirtiest and least efficient methane plants on the grid, as methane plants designed to rapidly change power production are less efficient than ones operating at a constant output for long periods of time.

This is not clean power generation that will be built and start generating power at some time in the future, this was clean energy that was built and was operating for decades being removed, and as a result large quantities of methane are being burned as we speak that would not have been in a world where we waited on decommissioning these dams until after the last fossil plant was taken off the north american grid and then the fish that don’t stroke out because of the hotter river water were reintroduced.

Instead we are burning more methane gas today, we will continue burning that much more methane gas for every day until the last methane plant is shut down and which will now come that much later, and the results of burning that much more methane gas as well as the leaks in the infrastructure used to support it will continue to kill real people in the worlds poorest and most vulnerable communities each and every year for hundreds of years to come.

To answer the title, several methane power plants that would have otherwise been shut down years ago get to keep operating for another twenty or thirty years, we loose significant potential for storing solar energy though the night, and we hit the point where the rivers get warm enough about half of all salmon worldwide stroke out and die just that bit earlier.

Heatwaves, droughts, and hurricanes are just that bit more powerful and commmon, and kill just a few more people each year for the next thousand years, but hey, the population of primarily one fish in one river will be higher for the next decade or two, and most importantly the fishing in that river will be easier.

I get that catching local salmon is culturally important for the locals, but I feel obligated to note the very real cost in human lives that will be paid primarily by the worlds poorest for centuries to come in order to stock one river.

Though it’s a car cry from perfect grid storage, as the vehicle isn’t connected during the morning and most of the evening spikes, and ideally needs to recharge overnight to be ready for the morning route so it can’t discharge at the time when grid storage is needed most in a place with plentiful solar.

Ohh I don’t think that we could sustain current levels of aviation with biofuels, though without their use as an lead substitute in gasoline and progress in reducing natural meat production we might be able to, just that it’s a lot more likely than getting a very slow to change industry to rebuild every single airport, aircraft, and fuel transport with a more expensive and less capable alternative.

Most of the limitation on chemical synthesis is from my understanding that it definitionally requires more energy than it produces, and as such doesn’t make much sense when that primary energy comes from fossil fuels which you could then have used instead. I also suspect that the cost while very high will be a lot lower than the amount required to basically rebuild the entirety of aviation from scratch.

I think placing Aviation in the good to uncertain category is rather generous given the energy density requires such a large shift in airliner design in an industry that has only recently stopped requiring an experimental fuel variance to use unleaded fuel in the same model of engines that have been operating on the ground with unleaded for about half a century.

Biofuel and chemical synthesis just offer a simpler and nearly drop in replacement, with the main limitation being it costs more so the airlines are trying to drag their feet as much as their lobbyists allow them to, and somehow I doubt a complete redesign of nearly everything in aviation is going to be less expensive than switching to biodiesel.

To be fair, at least in this case it’s looking into putting the panels on a structure above the road instead of the more commonly suggested drive on panel variation. Still pretty unnecessary for most of the world as spare land is something that’s more abundant, but it might be relevant for more space constrained nations and islands where open fields are more expensive than already government owned roadway.

The problem is that it almost always is a bespoke solution, because ever building is built differently, everyone wants different things out of their system, and your energy useage is also going to be different to your neighbors.

This is going to be a lot of research, but not an insurmountable amount, though keep in mind that you don’t know what you don’t know, so looking around and asking specific questions in places like diysolarforum will help. We all started somewhere, and when your looking at spending this sort of money the research time is worth spending.

From someone who is also on this journey, here are some things to keep in mind with this sort of thing.

If you’re sizing an solar system, look at your power company’s website for the last year or so of useage data to get a rough estimate, but you’ll need to keep in mind that adding an heat pump or ev will noticeably shift the neddle up. Personally, i can recommend an iotawatt for loving both how much energy your actually using, and tracking down what’s drawing power, though I have it set up to feed into home assistant.

Wind turbines are cool, but almost always not worth it on a personal scale unless you’re going entirely off grid or get really, really consistent wind. The laws of mathematics and PiR^2 means they just don’t scale down cost wise, and are thusly far more expensive per kwh of output compared to more solar.

While there are a lot of solar calculators out there, at least in the US PVwatts is pretty detailed, once you have a rough idea of the system you’ll need I recommend going finding a weather site that gives you your average monthly illumination in watts/m^2 and calculating out what the system will actually produce month to month, using the number, size, and efficiency of the specific panels your going to get to get a better estimate.

For your solar system, it sounds like you want an inverter with an SBU(solar, battery, utility) priority configuration. These exist but you’ll have to make sure that the inverter your solar provider gives you can be set to work this way, as most tend to save the battery in case there is a black out.

For estimating a heat pump, see if your thermostat logs how many hours it has run in the 12 months, and make get one that does if it doesn’t. Multiply that by the energy consumption of the heat pump to get an estimate of how much power it will consume.

You’ll also want to do or have someone do a hearing block load calculation, as well as bids from insulation contractors who do thermal camera surveys.

I also recommend watching this classic video by Technology Connections if you haven’t seen it already.

As a Fedora user I can confirm that this seems about right.

You worked for Murdoch and being fired for questioning authoritarian laws similar to the ones your boss was lobbying for came as a surprise to you?

This is also how passive RFID tags work, the tag harvests just enough energy from the scanning frequency to boot up a microchip and respond with its ID number.