SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Owners of home photovoltaic systems will soon be able to make their households even more sustainable, because PV power is also suitable for charging personal electronic vehicles. A home energy management system created by Fraunhofer researchers incorporates electric vehicles into the household energy network and creates charging itineraries.
The house of the future is environmentally friendly, energy efficient and smart. Its inhabitants can utilize rooftop-generated PV energy not only for household consumption but also to charge their personal electric vehicle. This scenario has already become reality for a collection of row houses built according to the "Passive House" standard in the German city of Fellbach in Baden-Württemberg. The group of new homes was upgraded as part of the "Fellbach ZeroPlus" project to include electromobility enhancements as well as a comprehensive energy management system. The initiative is sponsored by the German Federal Government's "Electric Mobility Showcase" program.
A couple Soylentils have done something like this, so perhaps this would be of interest to others who are considering doing likewise.
(Score: 3, Informative) by TrumpetPower! on Tuesday November 03 2015, @02:39PM
Either you're within shouting distance of the arctic circle, or the school is at the bottom of a canyon, or you're lying. Because that whopper you just let loose right there is as absurdly hyperbolic as something like, "Last time I looked, because I did look, the Lamborghini's entire engine didn't produce enough power to propel it to a walking pace without an horse to pull it."
The fact of the matter is that there's far more than enough residential roof space in the States for the entire country's energy needs -- not just residential, not just electricity, but all energy in all forms in all sectors -- with today's off-the-shelf kit.
My own home is a perfect example. A bit more than a third of the roof is covered in solar panels, and I generate about half again as much electricity as I use. Yes, I'm in Arizona -- but even Seattle, where it's as bad as it gets for solar in the States, gets no less than half the sunshine than I do. Plus, I have an insane cooling load for months at a time when the overnight low temperature never dips below 90°F and the daytime high can top 120°F. Where I only had to cover a minority of my roof, in Seattle you'd need to cover most of the roof. And the median is closer to Arizona than to Seattle.
I really don't get it. Why on Earth are so many geeks, presumably Libre Software fans, so down on solar and so up with nuclear? Solar is the Linux / BSD of energy: scales from tiny to monstrous, available to everybody, not encumbered by anything, and hugely profitable for the end user. Nuclear is the Windows of energy: grossly bloated, full of legal and technical traps, very opaque to the general public, purportedly friendly but always biting everybody in the ass, profitable only for Microsoft shareholders.
You want free energy? Go solar. You want to pay for energy through the ring in your nose? Go nuclear.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ledow on Tuesday November 03 2015, @04:02PM
UK. Several hundred metres of roofing (don't know exact area but it's a LARGE base of mostly single-storey buildings). Currently at 0.8KW. Most I've seen it is a handful of KW. Would like to see anyone run a server of any import on 800W of upy-downy-flaky solar.
Welcome to real life, where if you're not on the equator or in Arizona you get almost nothing. Your solar output dropping going from Arizona (34 degrees) to Seattle (47 degrees) halves your output. Almost all the EU is at higher latitudes, most of Asia, the northern states, Canada, etc. Agreed that the Southern hemisphere isn't quite so bad for such things, but there's more to the planet than the US - and you can't just fling a cable down and transport it without massive losses either.
This is very much a case of "it works here, it should work everywhere", plus that you have to have "the latest system" (or else you're considered "inefficient" - but you'll be "inefficient" next week too when your stuff is junk and unsaleable and you're told to just buy a new system again - hence my recycling concerns).
I honestly couldn't run a washing machine from anything I've been quoted for for my own house, without battery storage and being ultra-careful about usage.
School bursars, by the way, know this. It's a point of contention with them. They run the numbers and they just DO NOT add up for them. They may get forced to do so "for image" but in general they know exactly what's happening. I've watched any number of solar salesman fail miserably in front of a bursar with even a modicum of electrical knowledge. Schools are particularly easy targets especially when other solar is fairly useless (there are no domestic solar installations near me, but a few towns I drive through have a handful of "hot-water" solar systems only - I laugh because I've seen the prices on those exact models too).