| ▲ | ronb1964 4 hours ago |
| I build off-grid camper vans for a living and install solar + lithium battery systems regularly. The technology has matured a lot in the last few years. What used to take a massive roof array and a bank of heavy lead-acid or AGM batteries to run basic appliances now fits in a fraction of the space with lithium. The limiting factor in real-world installs isn't the panels or the batteries anymore, it's getting customers to right-size the system for their actual usage instead of what they think they'll use. People consistently underestimate idle draws and overestimate how much sun they'll get. Scale that mindset problem up to a national grid and I imagine the challenge is the same. |
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| ▲ | gpm 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I doubt that issue scales to the national grid at all... national grids tend to dictated in size by more or less market forces not careful pre-planning... and capacity planning for new projects tends to have actual data about energy demand and weather patterns and so on. |
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| ▲ | morphle 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I build off-grid electrical campers (Mercedes eSprinter) with extended 600kWh batteries (11 times more battery capacity than the default model) and charge them from solar panels at home. I disagree with your negative mindset, people who ride in my eCamper quickly learn you can go 100% solar and use you camper at home to store all neighborhood solar and even charge other EVs from our eCamper battery. We make our own parallel battery cell dis/charger to extent the LFP battery life to 20000 charges (one a day for 50 years). |
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| ▲ | RobinL 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Wow, that's big! I'm curious, how much does the 600kWh battery cost nowadays? Amazing that the tech has got to a point this is even possible | | |
| ▲ | morphle 44 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 15kWh 48V LFP battery around $1800 with low quality battery management system in metal box on wheels. Car batteries need more expensive inverters if you want to fast charge them (150kW-950kW) and super fast discharge them while driving fast (>100 kW). Thus my 600kW extender comes to almost $62000 for vans and small trucks. Cheaper if installed as house battery. The Mercedes eSprinter 56kW van costs around $80000 new but we sell 3 year old vans like this for $4000 without battery. So refurbished and converted to eCamper with 1800 mile range you pay $6700. You can drive 3000 km (almost 1860 miles) with this battery in the eSprinter and eCamper. A normal size car would go twice as far with this battery but it's big and heavy enough that you need to tow it in a trailer. The crucial point though is the charging/discharging inverter (converter) that I purpose built (printed circuits boards) and a change to the car firmware. Without it the car will reject the battery, your acceleration would be less and it also would not last the same amount of discharge cycles. My battery electronics works fine for cars, trucks, boats, house and neighborhood batteries (up to 6mW per shipping container). We build entire smart grids around the batteries, solar panels and tiny houses. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Merik-Voswinkel/publica... | | |
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| ▲ | jacquesm 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Very nice. I have my eyes on Lithium-Titanate cells for my house, I can't wait until they go down in price enough. Weight and energy density are not an issue, but safety is and those cells are very good in that sense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-titanate_battery |
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| ▲ | hvb2 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Scale that mindset problem up to a national grid and I imagine the challenge is the same. Except that we have raw data there? The only question is how fast it grows, but since we're transitioning that's mostly a question of how fast you decommission fossil plants. |
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| ▲ | entropicdrifter 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, agreed. It's a lot easier to be empirical when the scale of the requirements is quite literally unimaginable without just dealing with raw numbers. | | |
| ▲ | lazide 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Germany’s renewables rollout would like a word…. | | |
| ▲ | hvb2 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | If you mean what they started in the 90s? That's not what this is about. The conversation was about not being able to rightsize today. Germany did jumpstart their market successfully but that was in a wildly different time. Want to talk about what a typical KWp of installed solar cost at the time? Hindsight.... | | |
| ▲ | lazide 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Germany has only a tiny portion of their total energy needs on renewables - if we’re being honest about the definition of ‘total energy needs’. Like in the camper van scenario, if we include winter heating and transportation? Oh boy. It’s getting better, but if we’re really honest very far from the truth |
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| ▲ | ryzvonusef 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| there is a youtube video I watched where an RV guy converted as many appliances and gadgets on his vehicle to Direct DC as he could, saved a lot on wastage from DC-AC-DC conversions. We need mundane home DC solutions. |
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| ▲ | turtlebits 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| While I agree with underestimating capacity, the problem only really applies to off grid. For regular homes, it just means less savings. |
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| ▲ | lazide 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | It means some other infrastructure (fossil fuels?) needs to take up the slack, and people underestimate actual costs at larger scales. It’s the big issue in Germany for instance - it’s all fun and games until Winter. | | |
| ▲ | uecker 12 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Germany has more wind in winter, so traditionally has more production of renewables in winter months. | |
| ▲ | turtlebits 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Which is fine, since you're still reducing your reliance on the grid. However, when you're off grid, underestimating capacity means your SOL and need to buy a generator and burn fuel on-site. | |
| ▲ | pixl97 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | And? Any coal not used in summer is coal not dug up. |
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