this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2025
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Neat breakdown with data + some code.

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[–] acchariya@lemmy.world 1 points 3 minutes ago

It's practical for someone with limited space for panels on a small room, but I ran these calculations by moving almost all loads to daytime, sizing the panel array to the (minimum daily usage + efficiency losses) * buffer factor for days long storms or equipment failure.

Start with the comparitively cheap panels if you have the space, move electrical loads to the daytime and design the house for thermal momentum, and size storage to the minimum inclusive efficiency losses times buffer. If you have the roof space the panels are the cheapest part and you should usually way, way over panel.

The most important thing is having thermal mass enough or living in a climate that allows your home to not need thermal input or extraction at night. Heat is expensive and exponentially moreso if you need to produce it from conventional storage.

[–] kalkulat@lemmy.world 6 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Author's diagram is about summer. Fall, winter, spring is about heating-degree days. If you're heating your home with electricity, you'll not get there with batteries.

So, working towards a solution, there are other ways to store excess energy than in batteries. One example is sand, which can be heated to very high temperatures. Insulate a sand container well and its storage can do a lot of home-heating.

Example: https://www.livescience.com/technology/engineering/a-scalding-hot-sand-battery-is-now-heating-a-small-finnish-town

We'll need to put a lot of different methods into use. There are many practical ideas out there, and they'll need to be tried.

[–] bstix@feddit.dk 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

The sand storage is used for district heating. It's not much of a substitute for single homes that have electrical heating or are off-grid.

It's a great way to balance both the electrical and the heating grids so that more electricity from renewables can be used to offset other means of heat production, but it needs to be done by the district heating supplier. I doubt it makes sense for individual houses.

[–] frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 44 minutes ago

Right, you really need scale for sand batteries to work. It would be difficult for individual people to do, especially in suburban London.

District heating also works better in denser housing. In other words, not suburban London.

Dunno what heat pumps are available in England, but that's probably the best option here.

[–] tal@olio.cafe 13 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (3 children)

What I want to do is find out what the maximum size battery I would need in order to store all of summer's electricity for use in winter.

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/

Wind speed averages in the United Kingdom are generally highest in the first and fourth quarters of each calendar year – the winter months.

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/

[–] pstils@lemmy.world 7 points 6 hours ago

Right but he’s not serious, he’s just doing a “in theory, what would it look like?”

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 7 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

I could probably get away with putting solar panels on my roof but I think my neighbours would have something to say about a wind turbine. They're pretty loud.

[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 hours ago

Ugh! Just tell your neighbors to shut up or at least keep it down.

[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 hours ago

WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR YOU OVER THE SOUND OF MY NEW WIND TURBINE. YOU SHOULD SEE MY ELECTRIC BILL!

[–] BombOmOm@lemmy.world 7 points 8 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Buffalox@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] freebee@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 hours ago

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...

[–] tal@olio.cafe 9 points 8 hours ago (9 children)

I'd be pretty comfortable saying that buying enough battery storage to power-shift a year of power is more expensive.

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[–] PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml 8 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (11 children)

Something very important that anti-nuclear but otherwise environmental minded people should realize is this sentence: " There's no practical way to build domestic batteries with this capacity using the technology of 2025."
Also applies to grid storage. There does not exist a chemical energy storage solution that can substitute for "baseload" power. It's purely theoretical much like fusion power. Sure maybe in 50 years, but right now IT DOESN'T EXIST. Economically, practically, or even theoretically.

Why do I bring this up? Because I've seen too many people think that solar and wind can replace all traditional power plants. But if you are anti-nuclear, you are just advocating for more fossil fuels. Every megawatt of wind or solar, has a megawatt of coal or gas behind it and thus we are increasing our greenhouse gas emission everytime we build "green" generation unless we also build Nuclear power plants. /soapbox

[–] frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 38 minutes ago

That is completely wrong, and only shows you haven't kept up with developments in storage.

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 7 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

It's very infuriating talking to people about this because they never really accept that nuclear power is necessary. They spend all their time complaining about how it's dangerous (it isn't) and how it's very expensive, and how you don't have a lot of control over its output capacity. And yeah, all of those are true, but so what, the only other option is to burn some dead trees which obviously we don't want to do.

Just because nuclear has downsides doesn't mean you can ignore it, unless of course you want to invent fusion just to spite me, in which case I'll be fine with that.

[–] frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 43 minutes ago (1 children)

This has been studied, and we don't need nuclear. All the solutions are sitting right there.

https://www.amazon.com/No-Miracles-Needed-Technology-Climate/dp/1009249541

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 2 points 7 minutes ago

Well I'm not going to buy the book to find out what they are so all I'm going to go ahead and say is this. Yes there are solutions such as battery storage (although they do tend to be extremely explodey) and using the power to pump water around, or using mirrors to heat up salt in insulated containers, but they are all very specific solutions that will only work in very particular situations, which we don't always have.

[–] PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml 4 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

The new tack is to conflate nuclear energy with fossil fuels. As in assuming that nuclear energy is "legacy" power generation, and that obviously we need to use modern gernation like solar and wind, and magical grid-level storage technologies that don't exist. Also ignore that baseload power is still required, and is currently fulfilled with Natural Gas and Coal.

[–] frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 17 minutes ago

There is absolutely nothing required about baseload power. It's there because the economics of generating power favored it in the past. You could build a baseload plant that spits out a GW or so all day, everyday for relatively cheap.

That economic advantage is no longer there, and no longer relevant.

[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 3 points 6 hours ago (3 children)
[–] PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml 3 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

Do some quick math. How much pumped hydro in terms of acre-feet would be required to power a hypothetical city like Chicago at night? Where would this theoretical reservoir be built?

[–] frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 39 minutes ago

That's a completely unnecessary way to do things. The mistake you're making is that this specific way must provide all power.

It doesn't. You combine methods for a reason. The wind blows at times when the sun isn't shining, and vice versa. We have weather data stretching back many decades to tell us how much a given region will give us of each. From there, you can calculate the maximum lull where neither is providing enough. Have enough storage to cover that lull, and double it as a safety factor.

Getting to 95% water/wind/solar with this method is relatively easy and would be an extraordinary change. Getting all the way to 100% is possible, just more difficult.

[–] Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 9 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

acre-feet

I can't stop laughing at this as a unit of measurement

[–] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 0 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

It's easier to visualize than 325 kilo-gallons.

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