Elon Musk proclaims the coronation of Powerwall 2.0
Today at 12:15 Eastern Standard Time, Elon Musk announced the arrival of the Tesla Powerwall 2.
Some people were enthusiastically looking forward to this announcement, but I was not. I fully expected to be underwhelmed, and as soon as Musk finished his two or three sentences on the actual system, I felt a near fatal lack of enthusiasm sweeping over me. [Read more…]
SolarWatt’s German homepage claims their panels are “Perfekt”. That’s a big call, but their warranty certainly seems as good as it gets.
When it comes to product warranties for solar panels, the American company SunPower has long been king with one that lasts for 25 years. Not only will they replace any of their panels that fail in that time, but they will send people around to install a new one free of charge and cart away the corpse of the dead panel for autopsy to discover why it died so young.
But SunPower is no longer king. They have been dethroned. Their quarter of a century product warranty has been beaten by the 30 year product warranty Germany’s Solarwatt has placed upon their double glass panels, which is three times the 10 year industry standard.
That is a very long time. With the average age of first time home owners in Australia now around 38 years, people could buy a set of Solarwatt panels for their first home and they won’t be out of warranty until after they retire. And maybe they’ll die of old age before any of their panels start to fail.
While in practical terms for most homeowners there is not a huge difference between a 25 year and a 30 year product warranty, But I am very impressed with the confidence Solarwatt has in their solar panels and I am interested in seeing if SunPower will eventually extend its product warranty to meet or beat theirs. [Read more…]
Trina have set a record 19.86% aperture efficiency for polycrystalline.
Trina Solar announced a new world record for solar panel efficiency on Tuesday. The announcement was made via a press release that was mostly comprised of words.
But that wasn’t all it contained. Oh no, this press release was far too important to get by just using them. It also contained numbers, punctuation, and percentage signs.
Exactly what the particular arrangement of all these ingredients they poured into their press release actually means is a little tricky to work out. But, for your elucidation, I shall now attempt reading comprehension and I am not even going to use a net. [Read more…]
Are these 3 little chips all you need to optimise your panels for maximum energy output?
Maxim Integrated is a Californian electronics company that has been going strong for 33 years and has only ever been delisted from the Nasdaq Stock Exchange once. As you may be able to tell from their name, they like to integrate things and have developed a way to optimise the power from individual solar panels using 3 tiny chips embedded in the panel. [Read more…]
You can buy 60kWh of storage in a Chevy Bolt for a similar price to 60kWh of uninstalled home battery packs.
Looking to buy some LG Chem batteries but don’t want to pay full price? In that case, I have a little scheme you might be interested in.
If you want to, you could buy an LG Chem RESU6.5 battery system which will set you back around $1,000 per kilowatt-hour of storage. Or you could do a little better by buying a RESU10 as that will only cost you around $900 a kilowatt-hour. But if you follow my advice you can net yourself LG Chem batteries for only $822 a kilowatt-hour.
There is a slight drawback to my plan in that you have to buy 60 kilowatt-hours of batteries to get them for that price. But trust me, it’s well worth it because if you buy these batteries you get a free stereo system! There is no denying that’s a sweet deal. [Read more…]
Ronald cleaning the solar array powering his country residence.
I have already written about why it doesn’t make sense to pay people to clean your solar panels. I also wrote it doesn’t make a lot of sense to clean them yourself. Once you add in the value of your time, the chance of falling off the roof and killing yourself, and how cleaning panels usually only adds a couple of percent to their average output, it is not really worth it. [Read more…]
Smaller, cheaper, more powerful. LG Chem’s new batteries look very compelling compared to a Powerwall.
If you are in the market for a home battery and are tempted to buy a Powerwall, then I urge you to also consider the new range of LG Chem batteries announced last week.
Whilst LG have been unable to compete with Elon Musk for mainstream media coverage, the LG Chem RESU, or Residential Energy Storage Unit for the long winded, has been one of the biggest successes in on-grid home energy storage in Australia. While solid figures are hard to come by, it may have been used in almost half of all on-grid home battery installations.
Which of our elected politicians can tell the difference? Read on to find out…
Yesterday all of South Australia was blacked out and parts of the state are still without grid power today. This occurred because a powerful storm damaged transmission lines and the entire state grid automatically shut down as a safety precaution to prevent more damage.
Restarting a grid after a complete shutdown is complex and requires several hours. And it took several hours for grid power to start to be restored.
There is no mystery to what happened. It is very simple:
1. There was a really big storm.
2. Transmission lines were damaged.
3. The grid shut down automatically as a safety precaution, like it should have.
If you don’t believe power lines were damaged by strong winds, here is a picture of high voltage, steel girder, transmission towers near Port Augusta. The wind bent them over so their tops touch the ground.
This picture shows how unusual the situation was. Transmission towers do not normally lie down on the ground to take a rest.
In addition to gale force winds there were also so many lightning strikes they would have been countless if someone hadn’t counted them and tornadoes. As more detailed information is reported we will probably learn if it was lightning strikes, gale force winds, or a big willy willy that provided the straw that safety precautioned the camel’s back. [Read more…]
Solar Panel Cleaning – It’s A Dirty Job, But Nobody Has To Do It
The day your solar panels are installed is the day you will get the best performance out of them. After that it is all down hill. Admittedly, it is a very shallow hill and it might take over 40 years to get to the bottom, but day one is going to be as good as it gets.
One of the reasons for this is dirt. As soon as your panels are out in the open in the clean air, or not so clean air, dust will start to settle on them, blocking sunlight, reducing their efficiency, and costing you money.
The obvious solution is to pay someone to clean those panels, or get out there and clean them yourself. And sometimes this obvious solution will be a sensible course of action. If a dust storm has covered your panels in dirt or pelicans have had a poop party on your roof, then it’s a pretty good idea.
But most of the time solar panel cleaning is not worth it. [Read more…]
The scene in the Brakels’ household last Sunday morning.
On Sunday morning the program Sunrise had a segment on solar power and battery storage. While I am glad whenever popular TV takes the opportunity to educate people on these topics, that wasn’t what happened here. It was the opposite of education, as anyone watching it could easily come away believing the following three things:
1. Battery storage pays for itself.
2. Battery storage cuts CO2 emissions.
3. Rooftop solar needs batteries to be worthwhile.
None of these things are true.
Battery storage does not pay for itself when used on-grid and it may be years before it does.
Home batteries do not cut emissions, they increase them. In the future they may allow us to decrease greenhouse gas emissions, but that point is still years away.
Rooftop solar by itself is cost effective. It is adding batteries that can make it uneconomical. The mistaken belief that rooftop solar needs batteries to be effective is causing harm to both the solar industry and the environment, as people are delaying installing rooftop solar until batteries become affordable. [Read more…]
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