Brutkey

Guillaume Rossolini
@GuillaumeRossolini@infosec.exchange

I am feeling more confident in my little #solar experiment here

I was worried that absorbing 1-2 kWh per day (about a third of my daily use in the summer) didn’t mean anything in the grand scheme of things

I was also worried that since we have so much excess energy in the summer, my experiment was moot

But I’m coming to realize a few things【first: how I’m using my solar】


I have a 2 kWh battery/generator that I can easily fill on clear days, probably even several times over

I have my freezer on this 24/7, that’s the only appliance not plugged into the grid; that’s about 1 kWh per day of background use

Sometimes I spend my work from home days outside, plugged into this battery; that’s 1 kWh per day too, spread over 8h

As for surge uses, the vacuuming and the laundry machines also haven’t needed the grid for over a month; that’s another 1-2 kWh within a few hours but not every day

The vacuuming is the most surge-like of these examples【usage spikes】


I understand that usage spikes (noon & evening for example) are an issue for energy providers, especially when most of the energy comes from nuclear sources (as is the case in France)

Nuclear reactors aren’t meant for episodic production within the day, their cost is constant throughout the year and they are meant to function more or less constantly at their optimal level

Spikes mean unpredictability, and we can’t guarantee that there are enough dams, wind and solar to absorb tomorrow’s for example; which means having giant backup generators that run on fossil fuel, and I’m not in favor of those【excess in the summer at utility scale】


I’m not sure how energy providers deal with excess energy produced from domestic solar and such, but if negative prices are any indication, they aren’t doing great

This is also a spike, just in production rather than use, and it’s equally difficult to deal with this problem at scale

We would need storage at scale, and we don’t have that

So… We can’t really count on excess production spikes to excuse our behavior (consumption without regard, just “because we have excess anyway”)【disclaimer】


I am in no way an energy professional and I don’t work at a utility

I’m just a random trying his best