this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2025
184 points (97.9% liked)
Technology
75233 readers
2964 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I mean, I think that it's probably not a good idea for this guy to try to go fully off-grid if he has access to the grid, but for the sake of discussion, if one were honestly wanting to try it and one is in the UK, I'd think that one is probably rather better off adding a wind turbine, since some of the time that the sun isn't shining, the wind is blowing.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/322789/quarterly-wind-speed-average-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/
The UK is one of the worst places in the world in terms of solar potential:
https://globalsolaratlas.info/
But it's one of the best in terms of wind potential:
https://globalwindatlas.info/
Small wind turbines are really, really poor. You need to go high to access the good air-streams and wide to get useful efficiency out of the turbine. Any wind turbine you put on your roof will vastly under-perform for the cost spent on it.
Not true, a wind turbine is dirt cheap for the power it can generate compared to solar panels.
Here the problem is regulation that makes it impossible if you have neighbors within 500 m.
If it wasn't for regulation a wind turbine would be a clearly better investment than solar panels.
A huge advantage with turbines is also that it tend to generate power when you need it the most for heating your house.
That's because they are big mechanical whirring machines. Solar panels are dead quiet and don't throw intermittent shade and have a very low risk of causing damage in the surrounding. There's good reasons they are forbidden for the average household to put on top of the chimney...