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The Electric Revolution

Dabop said:
Remember thats $8280 AU dollars- thats about $5357.60 US
View attachment 64826
And also remember- thats not a 'DIY' where you need to know what you are doing picking and choosing and then hooking it all up (correctly??? probably not from many of the DIY installs I have repaired over the years lol))- thats a 'pick up the phone and call someone' price- you literally need not know anything except 'I want electricity!!!'

Phone (or email), wait a few days max, they come in and do everything- and you are then to all intents as if you are ongrid- except you aren't....
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That does make a difference. Cheap is my middle name and I do know what I'm doing. (At least some of the time.)

What's really amazing is that we're looking at at maybe $1400US for the same setup with sodium phosphate. (I'm assuming that sodium phosphate batteries electrical characteristics allows it to be a drop in replacement for lithium phosphate.)
 
Assuming they can actually deliver for the price- its gunna play hell on the mains grid- in Australia already hybrids are the majority of new installs, because the power companies have slashed the pay rates on power generated from rooftop solar- many are already seeing that they are very close to not needing an actual electricity connection at all- especially when simply adding a 'few more drawers' would take you over the edge into not needing it ever- and with electricity prices skyrocketing (many people are already hardly using any power from the grid, but are now getting slapped with large 'access fees' and the like- often as much if not more than what they are paying for the actual power....)

Considering that if the 20-30 gigawatts of residential rooftop solar starts 'going away' from the grid (and yes, people here are starting to look at that option quite seriously, even in suburbia...) then those companies are going to be hit with a 'perfect storm' of unintended consequences....
As in they get less power 'for free' (they are paying practically nothing for generated solar from residential homes- thats why the hybrids have been taking over from gridties,...), need to add new generating capacity (20-30GW worth lol thats how much Australia's residential rooftop solar contributes every day- not cheap building brand new 'conventional' generating plants at that capacity...) while losing income streams as well....
 
Dabop said:
Assuming they can actually deliver for the price- its gunna play hell on the mains grid- in Australia already hybrids are the majority of new installs, because the power companies have slashed the pay rates on power generated from rooftop solar- many are already seeing that they are very close to not needing an actual electricity connection at all- especially when simply adding a 'few more drawers' would take you over the edge into not needing it ever- and with electricity prices skyrocketing (many people are already hardly using any power from the grid, but are now getting slapped with large 'access fees' and the like- often as much if not more than what they are paying for the actual power....)

Considering that if the 20-30 gigawatts of residential rooftop solar starts 'going away' from the grid (and yes, people here are starting to look at that option quite seriously, even in suburbia...) then those companies are going to be hit with a 'perfect storm' of unintended consequences....
As in they get less power 'for free' (they are paying practically nothing for generated solar from residential homes- thats why the hybrids have been taking over from gridties,...), need to add new generating capacity (20-30GW worth lol thats how much Australia's residential rooftop solar contributes every day- not cheap building brand new 'conventional' generating plants at that capacity...) while losing income streams as well....
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It's a very real existential threat to utility companies.
 
Jack by the hedge said:
Gosh. You guys with your sunshine! What power capacity is your solar installation? The 4kWh we generated today would be a drop in the bucket to charge a car.
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The panels produce 5-10 kWh, but we invert at maximum 6 kWh. We have a 12 kWh house battery (it's BYD, same technology as in the car). Surplus charge when this is full is fed into the grid for a credit. The car has a 60 kWh battery (450 kms range), and we have a 10A / 8 kWh car charger in the garage.

So...! Charging the car alone takes all 6 kWh coming in from the panels plus 2 kWh from the house battery. So first we let the battery charge to 100% (typically that's by about 11 am.) then put the car on the charger. By the time the house battery gets down to about 50%, the car battery has added 40-50%. We rarely drive enough to use up that amount of car battery. Then we stop the charging, and let the afternoon sun top up the house battery again. Repeat as often as necessary to keep the car topped up. Meanwhile, the house battery keeps plenty of reserve to run all our household stuff - reverse-cycle A/C, oven, dishwasher, washing machine, etc. Only rarely do we "flatten" the house battery and need to resort to grid power.
 
Problem is fundamentally based in the setup and age of the grid.
Because the load needs to be balanced over the entire grid, intermittency is a bigger problem than it needs to be, and the overall load is much higher than it needs to be.
By letting home owners and companies and communities form their own grids, only taking and supplying the difference between their own needs, and using EVs as storage, the overall load on the system could be massively reduced, the risk of large blackouts basically eliminated.
It's much more a regulation/profit problem than a technical one.
 
Norman Alexander said:
The panels produce 5-10 kWh, but we invert at maximum 6 kWh. We have a 12 kWh house battery (it's BYD, same technology as in the car). Surplus charge when this is full is fed into the grid for a credit. The car has a 60 kWh battery (450 kms range), and we have a 10A / 8 kWh car charger in the garage.

So...! Charging the car alone takes all 6 kWh coming in from the panels plus 2 kWh from the house battery. So first we let the battery charge to 100% (typically that's by about 11 am.) then put the car on the charger. By the time the house battery gets down to about 50%, the car battery has added 40-50%. We rarely drive enough to use up that amount of car battery. Then we stop the charging, and let the afternoon sun top up the house battery again. Repeat as often as necessary to keep the car topped up. Meanwhile, the house battery keeps plenty of reserve to run all our household stuff - reverse-cycle A/C, oven, dishwasher, washing machine, etc. Only rarely do we "flatten" the house battery and need to resort to grid power.
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Does the car have V2L charging? By that, I mean can you use it's battery as a house load if you needed power?
 
acbytesla said:
Some will take your surplus electricity and effectively not pay you anything for it.
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That’s Australia! Currently I get less than 2 cents per kilowatt hour I feed back.

About payback time for batteries. I don’t have an electric car, there are only 2 of us and our electricity bill per year is $1000-1300. Even if it goes back to zero with batteries, if I purchase a battery for, say $10,000, that’s a 10 year period before the battery starts paying me back. This is why, while solar panel take up is through the roof, battery storage isn’t.
 
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Norman Alexander said:
The panels produce 5-10 kWh, but we invert at maximum 6 kWh. We have a 12 kWh house battery (it's BYD, same technology as in the car). Surplus charge when this is full is fed into the grid for a credit. The car has a 60 kWh battery (450 kms range), and we have a 10A / 8 kWh car charger in the garage.

So...! Charging the car alone takes all 6 kWh coming in from the panels plus 2 kWh from the house battery. So first we let the battery charge to 100% (typically that's by about 11 am.) then put the car on the charger. By the time the house battery gets down to about 50%, the car battery has added 40-50%. We rarely drive enough to use up that amount of car battery. Then we stop the charging, and let the afternoon sun top up the house battery again. Repeat as often as necessary to keep the car topped up. Meanwhile, the house battery keeps plenty of reserve to run all our household stuff - reverse-cycle A/C, oven, dishwasher, washing machine, etc. Only rarely do we "flatten" the house battery and need to resort to grid power.
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Um- you sure about those figures????
Because my system here makes 5kwh a day in winter- up to 8kwh in spring and autumn, dropping back down to about 6kWh a day in summer (due to the heat)
And thats with only 1.5kw of panels (6x250w!!!)
As in this makes 5-8kwh a day...
1760677621631.jpeg
A 6kw array in Brisbane makes around 30kWh a day... (almost 32kWh a day there) from the old place in Brisbakers....
1760677773160.png
If you have a 10kw array, that would make around 50kWh a day in Brisbane going by your location, you are down further south of me lol (I'm in the Darling Downs in Qld) so you'd be a touch less than that...
 
Dabop said:
Um- you sure about those figures????
Because my system here makes 5kwh a day in winter- up to 8kwh in spring and autumn, dropping back down to about 6kWh a day in summer (due to the heat)
And thats with only 1.5kw of panels (6x250w!!!)
As in this makes 5-8kwh a day...
View attachment 64832
A 6kw array in Brisbane makes around 30kWh a day... (almost 32kWh a day there) from the old place in Brisbakers....
View attachment 64833
If you have a 10kw array, that would make around 50kWh a day in Brisbane going by your location, you are down further south of me lol (I'm in the Darling Downs in Qld) so you'd be a touch less than that...
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I think he meant KW not KWh.
 
Dabop said:
Yeah- but that doesn't make sense either- unless he's switching panels in and out of the array- my 1.5kw array is always 6x 250w panels or 1.5kw....
"The panels produce 5-10 kWh"
????
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Yeah, I didn't understand a lot of what he write. Such as (we have a 10A / 8 kWh car charger in the garage) 10 amps? That's nothing. When zi install one I'm sure it will be a minimum of 25 Amps and ideally 50+ amps but I haven't been shopping for them.
 
Rolfe said:
In the summer of 2024 I was running the car on the solar for a fair bit of the time. In Scotland. Then I got my export tariff which made it more sensible to export all the solar for 15p/unit and then charge the car and the house battery for 7p/unit overnight. I even export whatever is left in the battery in the late evening. Ker-ching.
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We have such schemes here too. Called "Virtual Power Plants". Only problem is that, in the case of a local outage, the "VPP authority" owns your power, not you. So they will take some of it about the same time that you need to use it!
 
lionking said:
That’s Australia! Currently I get less than 2 cents per kilowatt hour I feed back.

About payback time for batteries. I don’t have an electric car, there are only 2 of us and our electricity bill per year is $1000-1300. Even if it goes back to zero with batteries, if I purchase a battery for, say $10,000, that’s a 10 year period before the battery starts paying me back. This is why, while solar panel take up is through the roof, battery storage isn’t.
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There are now govt. incentives to install house batteries. And if you get a new solar installation (or upgrade) plus a battery, the incentives increase. Albo is pushing this pretty hard! In broad terms, it's probably way cheaper for the govt. to subsidise us proles to provide our own power than to build whunking great new coal power stations and grid networks for hundreds of billions of dollars.

Interestingly, we live in a pretty windy part of Australia here, but there's not so much push for wind generators at the micro level. Plenty of big 'uns across the ranges though. That needs a rethink.

And I may sound a tad right-wing here, but I still reckon we should keep an eye on newer nuclear technologies, e.g. Thorium and salt reactors, as things develop. Let's not be too stupid and discard these just on some silly bias. They may become safe enough and economically useful to pursue, you never know.
 
acbytesla said:
Yeah, I didn't understand a lot of what he write. Such as (we have a 10A / 8 kWh car charger in the garage) 10 amps? That's nothing. When zi install one I'm sure it will be a minimum of 25 Amps and ideally 50+ amps but I haven't been shopping for them.
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10A @230v is the standard 2400w 'granny charger' that plugs directly into a 10A powerpoint (power outlet) similar to this...
1760680413043.png
In Australia you can also get the 15A powerpoints which are common in many houses already...
Then you would use a slightly higher output 'granny charger' (still slow though)
1760680551934.png
Neither is a '8kw charger' (which needs a 32A MCB all to itself) and is always a fixed unit like the Zappi 7kw- or if you have 3 phase in the house, then a 22kw unit would be a better choice (the fixed units have 'charge throttling' which is very handy- just set the maximum current the circuit/house can handle- and it will automatically reduce the EV charging current if there are other high current items running in the house...
1760680857011.png
 
Dabop said:
Um- you sure about those figures????
Because my system here makes 5kwh a day in winter- up to 8kwh in spring and autumn, dropping back down to about 6kWh a day in summer (due to the heat)
And thats with only 1.5kw of panels (6x250w!!!)
As in this makes 5-8kwh a day...
View attachment 64832
A 6kw array in Brisbane makes around 30kWh a day... (almost 32kWh a day there) from the old place in Brisbakers....
View attachment 64833
If you have a 10kw array, that would make around 50kWh a day in Brisbane going by your location, you are down further south of me lol (I'm in the Darling Downs in Qld) so you'd be a touch less than that...
Click to expand...
Yep, 14 panels at 450-480 kW each - newer technology than the 250 kW panels you have. The system is officially rated at 7.5 kWh, but we have seen over 8 coming off the panels occasionally. The solar inverter is limited to 6 kWh, so that's our max "harvest". It isn't a big system by most standards, as you say. We are in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney. It may be colder up here, but sunshine is sunshine to solar panels!

Our installer told us of a local factory at Bathurst who covered their roof with 400 kW panels - something like 100 kWh coming in, as I recall. For a few years, they pumped most of that back into the grid for a decent income. Then the arse fell out of the payback scheme. ;)
 
Norman Alexander said:
There are now govt. incentives to install house batteries. And if you get a new solar installation (or upgrade) plus a battery, the incentives increase. Albo is pushing this pretty hard! In broad terms, it's probably way cheaper for the govt. to subsidise us proles to provide our own power than to build whunking great new coal power stations and grid networks for hundreds of billions of dollars.

Interestingly, we live in a pretty windy part of Australia here, but there's not so much push for wind generators at the micro level. Plenty of big 'uns across the ranges though. That needs a rethink.

And I may sound a tad right-wing here, but I still reckon we should keep an eye on newer nuclear technologies, e.g. Thorium and salt reactors, as things develop. Let's not be too stupid and discard these just on some silly bias. They may become safe enough and economically useful to pursue, you never know.
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Molten salt rectors have been advancing quickly (in some countries) but politics plays a big part in slowing nukes- as well as 'Nimby'ism...

Wind generators are the smaller scales don't scale well- the 1000w micro wind turbines you usually see 'will' give out 1000w- in a cyclone.....
In anything less, their output falls away very quickly indeed....
Like I showed before- this is a 1kw 'microwindturbine' output graph- it doesnt actually hit its peak until 11m/s!!!
1760681331752.png
My place rarely gets above about 5-7m/s- at those windspeeds that '1000w' wind generator would be struggling to get past 100w-300w...

Just a bit of a difference no????
 
Norman Alexander said:
There are now govt. incentives to install house batteries. And if you get a new solar installation (or upgrade) plus a battery, the incentives increase. Albo is pushing this pretty hard! In broad terms, it's probably way cheaper for the govt. to subsidise us proles to provide our own power than to build whunking great new coal power stations and grid networks for hundreds of billions of dollars.

Interestingly, we live in a pretty windy part of Australia here, but there's not so much push for wind generators at the micro level. Plenty of big 'uns across the ranges though. That needs a rethink.

And I may sound a tad right-wing here, but I still reckon we should keep an eye on newer nuclear technologies, e.g. Thorium and salt reactors, as things develop. Let's not be too stupid and discard these just on some silly bias. They may become safe enough and economically useful to pursue, you never know.
Click to expand...
I'm a liberal but I've been pro nuclear for 50 years. I care about what works. Nuclear works. But costs are out of hand. What matters to me is making the most economical energy.(preferably as clean as possible). I generally don't care if it is nuclear fission, fusion, ocean thermal gradients, tidal, wave power, wind, hydrogen,solar etc. Make it cheap and you improve lives.
 
Dabop said:
10A @230v is the standard 2400w 'granny charger' that plugs directly into a 10A powerpoint (power outlet) similar to this...
Click to expand...
One of these comes with a BYD as a standard fitting. We used this until the 10A charger was installed. Took about 40 hours to fully charge the car from about 10%. So the driving/charging regime took some management, but it was usually quite OK. We keep it now as an emergency charger.
Dabop said:
Neither is a '8kw charger' (which needs a 32A MCB all to itself) and is always a fixed unit like the Zappi 7kw- or if you have 3 phase in the house, then a 22kw unit would be a better choice (the fixed units have 'charge throttling' which is very handy- just set the maximum current the circuit/house can handle- and it will automatically reduce the EV charging current if there are other high current items running in the house...
Click to expand...
We have the 8kW charger on a dedicated 10A circuit, just like the oven. More than enough speed for us since we charge directly off the panels.
 
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