[aprssig] Shack backup power

[Brian B. Riley]

I was looking through some old posts and couldn't resist.

  … please tell this to the grid-tied people among  the 2 million who went without power in the American SouthWest recently or among the millions in the NorthEast after Irene.

Here at Wulfden I received 'help me' calls from three local homeowners with over 16 KW of PV between them and not a single electron flowing (or being credited!) even though the sun was shining quite brightly. Two of the three had minimal grid driven battery backups for 'bare essentials' that had long since run flat.

Here at Wulfden we were comfy, and cozy … water was running, lights were on … and I still haven't had cause to run my  generator since the end of winter.

  How many Nukey-Poo facilities went into programmed shutdown because they lost reliable power for control systems? How many were scrammed because rivers were beating on  their front door?

 These are the 'rare' outages that were dismissed because of low probability, yet they happened before even a fiscal quarter had gone by since this point in the conversation.

  Yes, Bob, in a perfect world untroubled by extremes of weather, grid-tied makes sense, but if we learned any lessons from this recent bout with Ma Nature we would start taking greater account of outages.

On Jun 4, 2011, at 4:58 PM, Bob Bruninga wrote:

> For a shack system, designed about one's average operating load, on any day when one does not fully use the shack to that average, then all excess solar energy is also wasted, because the batteries have no room for today's excess solar power.. (Generally).
> 
> That's why grid-tie wins hands down.  Every penny of solar energy is credited to you no matter how or when you use it.



--
cheers ... 73 de brian  riley,  n1bq , underhill center, vermont
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