How's your water supply, Islander? I like our evaporative cooler for the house except on rare humid days. Well, except that it died and needs to be replaced. It's one of the main reasons we get by with a 1.5 kW solar system and haven't paid an electric bill in about 10 years.
It depends. We are working on getting municipal water, but it's not here yet. We have an ejido (this is community well water) hookup, but it is pretty seasonal (and needs to be pre-filtered). Otherwise we use water trucks. The trucks are easy to get, and the system works well enough (we have a 10,000 liter cistern), but the cost has gone up and is pretty variable. I've looked into condensors - the environmentals are pretty good here and we have spare power now, but the yield isn't really enough for a whole house supply, and they are spendy.
How's your water supply, Islander? I like our evaporative cooler for the house except on rare humid days. Well, except that it died and needs to be replaced. It's one of the main reasons we get by with a 1.5 kW solar system and haven't paid an electric bill in about 10 years.
This must be very exciting for you getting off the grid. Keep us updated on how it's going. Enjoy that cup of coffee
well it was pretty late when we energized it. But we did get some input:
Red is consumption, yellow is solar yield. The pool pump shut down just before 5, so that let the yield be enough to put a few amps back into the batteries. Plenty still to make the overnight, so we'll just let it ride until tomorrow morning and see what it does.
So I've been working on/planning this for a while. Power at our southern outpost is sketchy at best and expensive. We have a pool pump that runs most of the day and sucks a lot of power. When there are storms the power goes out, when too many gringos turn on the AC in August, the power goes out, when the water truck hits the power line down the street.... the power goes out. Basically the power isn't really reliable. Generators are expensive and noisy, and I sell Victron (batteries,inverters,power equipment) gear for a living, so this just sort of make sense. Our ROI on this setup is going to be about 2 years, but I got some deals and my labor is cheap when I'm the customer. Normally it would be closer to 5 years. But it also qualifies as emergency / standby power. I may eventually put a small generator on it for additional backup, but it doesn't really need it - the quattros have a second power input and internal transfer switch, so it's simple to do.
This is a pair of 5KVA Victron Quattros. They are set up to run split phase, so all of our 240V appliances will work. The middle bit there is an autotransformer - it balances the loads and let's the quattros work together in perfect balance. Lithium batteries are below, a pair of big solar controllers are on the right wall.
This is the solar array out back:
This is the solar array, it is just over 6.5KW. This is overamped a little bit for our setup, but that just lets it start making more power earlier in the day (and later too, and will be a little better when we get clouds and such). This is enough to run the pool pump and all the normal household stuff and charge up the batteries for overnight as well. You can even run the air conditioning on it to cool the place down. Right now we don't have enough battery to run air conditioning overnight, but that's a near future upgrade that just involves plugging in more batteries.
We can monitor and control most everything from afar, and it lets you do some really cool analysis and reporting.
Right now we are waiting for the final hookups. I should have sun power for coffee tomorrow morning.
This must be very exciting for you getting off the grid. Keep us updated on how it's going. Enjoy that cup of coffee
So I've been working on/planning this for a while. Power at our southern outpost is sketchy at best and expensive. We have a pool pump that runs most of the day and sucks a lot of power. When there are storms the power goes out, when too many gringos turn on the AC in August, the power goes out, when the water truck hits the power line down the street.... the power goes out. Basically the power isn't really reliable. Generators are expensive and noisy, and I sell Victron (batteries,inverters,power equipment) gear for a living, so this just sort of make sense. Our ROI on this setup is going to be about 2 years, but I got some deals and my labor is cheap when I'm the customer. Normally it would be closer to 5 years. But it also qualifies as emergency / standby power. I may eventually put a small generator on it for additional backup, but it doesn't really need it - the quattros have a second power input and internal transfer switch, so it's simple to do.
This is a pair of 5KVA Victron Quattros. They are set up to run split phase, so all of our 240V appliances will work. The middle bit there is an autotransformer - it balances the loads and let's the quattros work together in perfect balance. Lithium batteries are below, a pair of big solar controllers are on the right wall.
This is the solar array out back:
This is the solar array, it is just over 6.5KW. This is overamped a little bit for our setup, but that just lets it start making more power earlier in the day (and later too, and will be a little better when we get clouds and such). This is enough to run the pool pump and all the normal household stuff and charge up the batteries for overnight as well. You can even run the air conditioning on it to cool the place down. Right now we don't have enough battery to run air conditioning overnight, but that's a near future upgrade that just involves plugging in more batteries.
We can monitor and control most everything from afar, and it lets you do some really cool analysis and reporting.
Right now we are waiting for the final hookups. I should have sun power for coffee tomorrow morning.
Seems the good ole US of A is behind the 8 ball when it comes to implementing renewable infrastructure. I seem to recall Dutch companies being the lead on some of the wind farm projects underway off the North East Coast.
i'm in the dark about wind and geothermal swanson's law is probably positioning solar to make more economic sense renewables are going to help but they have reliability, storage and scale challenge as more intelligent people explore the needed transition, nuclear (SMRs) seem to make more sense for the base energy need i think the US has declining CO2 emissions but we should incentivize and accelerate production of better "green" tech globally there's a large population that are going to need much more energy as they modernize solar will help, especially in certain areas with copious sunshine
Israeli energy company Doral Renewables is spearheading the project, and will sell the power thatâs generated at Mammoth to Columbus, Ohio-based American Electric Power. Doral is the owner-operator of over 400 energy facilities globally, and has three other projects underway in the US right now
Seems the good ole US of A is behind the 8 ball when it comes to implementing renewable infrastructure. I seem to recall Dutch companies being the lead on some of the wind farm projects underway off the North East Coast.
The transition away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy sources is underway, with solar and wind farms popping up everywhere from the UK to China. A new project in the central US will pile on some significant green energy capacity, as the countryâs biggest solar farm starts construction.
The Mammoth Solar farm, as itâs been appropriately dubbed, will be built in a rural area of Indiana about 80 miles south-east of Chicago. Once itâs complete, the farm will occupy 13,000 acresâthatâs equivalent to about 1,000 football stadiums. Distributed throughout that space will be 2,850,000 solar panels, which will generate 1.65 gigawatts of electricity.
How big is that, exactly? Letâs do some comparisons. The biggest solar farm in the world is Bhadla Solar Park in India; it spans 14,000 acres and has a capacity of 2.25 GW. The biggest operational farm in the US is Solar Star in California, which cranks out 579 megawatts (0.58 GW). Mammoth falls somewhere in the middle, but will be almost three time as big as the California farm.
Israeli energy company Doral Renewables is spearheading the project, and will sell the power thatâs generated at Mammoth to Columbus, Ohio-based American Electric Power. Doral is the owner-operator of over 400 energy facilities globally, and has three other projects underway in the US right now: Goonies Solar in Pennsylvania (so named because of the rocks that litter the piece of land where this farm is going up), Deere Acres Solar in Delaware, and Anthracite Ridge Wind, also in Pennsylvania.
The transition away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy sources is underway, with solar and wind farms popping up everywhere from the UK to China. A new project in the central US will pile on some significant green energy capacity, as the country’s biggest solar farm starts construction.
The Mammoth Solar farm, as it’s been appropriately dubbed, will be built in a rural area of Indiana about 80 miles south-east of Chicago. Once it’s complete, the farm will occupy 13,000 acres—that’s equivalent to about 1,000 football stadiums. Distributed throughout that space will be 2,850,000 solar panels, which will generate 1.65 gigawatts of electricity.
How big is that, exactly? Let’s do some comparisons. The biggest solar farm in the world is Bhadla Solar Park in India; it spans 14,000 acres and has a capacity of 2.25 GW. The biggest operational farm in the US is Solar Star in California, which cranks out 579 megawatts (0.58 GW). Mammoth falls somewhere in the middle, but will be almost three time as big as the California farm.
Israeli energy company Doral Renewables is spearheading the project, and will sell the power that’s generated at Mammoth to Columbus, Ohio-based American Electric Power. Doral is the owner-operator of over 400 energy facilities globally, and has three other projects underway in the US right now: Goonies Solar in Pennsylvania (so named because of the rocks that litter the piece of land where this farm is going up), Deere Acres Solar in Delaware, and Anthracite Ridge Wind, also in Pennsylvania.