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Discussion (107 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I know in florida you have janky laws stopping you, but below 10kw it's still relatively easy.
I have a friend who installed <10kw of solar panels and they're now 97% off-grid in hot, wet florida weather with an old low-seer AC, single-pane windows and poor roof insulation which is roughly 60% of the energy usage.
The reason they got it is actually not to save money or anything, but to have power when grid goes down after hurricanes.
A landowner wanted to run power to their land, they got quoted 100k and possibly 250k to run less than 2 miles of powerlines.
The land owner fired back with the question of installing solar panels instead as it would be cheaper and free.
The representitive replied with: "Look around you, there's no solar panels because they don't work."
Less than 100k later, the landowner had full off-grid power via solar and a backup generator.
I guess at the end of the day they saw all the sunshine around them and said: "You're right, all that sun is mine and mine alone."
I think it would if it was indeed “essentially free”. Rooftop solar is unfortunately a racket though, and companies price-gouge like crazy and also collude to keep prices inflated.
But the very idea of not being dependent on the grid or fossil fuels, if one can afford it and costs are comparable, should sell itself.
But my dad watches Fox News so he brings up lies like how bad wind turbines are for the environment (coal anyone?) or how we shouldn't make ourselves dependent on China for solar (as if we aren't dependent on a lot of bad hombres for our current energy mix or as if receiving solar makes us dependent at all).
For a place that was two miles from a power line, I would think anyone would approve of off-grid.
There is a limit to the size of the instantaneous increases and decreases in generation that the other generators on the grid can compensate for
I set it all up myself, and while it is not trivial, it's not difficult either.
Learning to put connectors on properly, size cables and put lugs on properly, learn about earthing and breakers...just one bit at a time.
I'm about to set up another system on the roof of an outbuilding to supply power for a water pump and irrigation where we grow food. This will be much easier and simpler since it will have only one 48V lithium battery, but I'll still use Victron stuff and connect it to a Cerbo so it can be monitored.
If I sold this place and bought somewhere on the grid, the first thing I'd do is cut the cord and set up my own system again.
I looked at using an AIO for my PC build but ultimately went with an air cooler the size of a damned rubix cube and a high airflow case.
My room gets toasty with raytracing titles, lol
source: my 9950X, happily running air cooled.
(Embarrassingly, I have an M4 Max that can almost match it in the CPU-bound workload I care about while sipping some 45W. The rest of the industry really needs to catch up with Apple on power efficiency.)
Though I can totally understand, geeky people love details. I have a habit of getting way too detailed in my writings here. So I then spend most of the time editing it down to be as clear and brief as possible. I refuse to use an LLM for my own thoughts.
Probably a better choice as an appendix, move the good stuff up to the top. But overall its NBD.
Most people drive cars worth less than this.
You still need a few terabytes to enter the real cars territory.
I really have to wonder if people truly know how powerful any modern computer is. Like I just assume any modern PC with sufficient storage can handle a database with a billion rows of data. I think my phone probably could.
Now if you were, say, analyzing commercial satellite imagery of the entire US and trying to find rooftop solar, matching it against the database and finding data that wasn't in the dataset, that's something where your computer power would be way more relevant.
Come to think of it, you could probably use such imagery to construct a power generation network from power plants to transmission lines to utility poles. Of course some places have underground cables but there are other datasets for that.
Another interesting project is mapping the growth of solar. This would require access to commercial satellite imagery over time. I'm sure some government agency already does it. Or used to at least. Snapshots years or even months apart are less interesting.
Anyway, I guess the point is the author's computer is capable of way more than I suspect they think it is.
Because he wants to tell you about his computer it means he doesn’t know how capable it is?
In my native Netherlands I'd guess to see that peaking at ~south at say 15-30 degrees, with some lower peaks at east/west combos.
Curious to see what it would be in this dataset.
The CSS styles seem to dynamically unload and reload while I’m reading it causing the margins to jump and the fonts change, I’ve never seen anything like this before. FWIW I’m on iOS using brave.
It would be cool to modify them to be per-capita, although I imagine adjusting arbitrary hexes for population density would be a real challenge.
For that matter, I'd be interested in details of how "a team of researchers including alumni from NOAA, NASA and the USGS" (from the previous article) actually collected the data.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-025-05862-4
In the abstract: “We use these newly compiled and delineated solar arrays and panel-rows to harmonize and independently estimate value-added attributes to existing datasets including installation year, azimuth, mount technology, panel-row area and dimensions, inter-row spacing, ground cover ratio, tilt, and installed capacity.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility
Solar thermal can't really compete economically with photovoltaics.
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256809986804138.html
I'm old enough to remember Carter putting them on WhiteHouse roof and they were thousands of dollars then (and less efficient)