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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

Storage makes it better, but even just being able to charge your laptop, phone, car and run your air-con during the day would be a win.

I don't think most solar installations are designed to operate without a grid connection though, and even not all powerwall installations can run off grid.

Though I'm not sure that they beat a generator (diesel or connected to your gas line) if you really anticipate regular grid outages and probably won't for a while.

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>Storage makes it better, but even just being able to charge your laptop, phone, car and run your air-con during the day would be a win.

You mean the car that is parked during the day in your office parking lot a few tens miles away and the laptop and phone that you are carrying with you?

Seriously, without some form of (efficient) storage system, the whole thing depends on exchanges on the grid.

Off grid - as I see it - is a very nice solution (still with some minimal storage) for a hut in the woods, where everything is specifically designed for low power (and where you don't have a dishwasher, a washer, etc.), replacing - in a more environment friendly way - the noisy generator, but still it remains something good for youe being there on - say - every other weekend.

Having an el-cheapo (diesel or gasoline) small generator for emergencies is handy, but only for those hopefully very rare emergencies, the cost for a good quality (suitable to run often and in several hours stretches) generator and for the fuel is not competitive with solar (though of course the initial cost of solar is still higher).

Everyone seems to be forgetting that you can get paid to transmit your extra power back to the grid during the day. Air conditioning, for example, is high during the day. You might not need it at home but someone else will.

Some states/locales still don't allow resale back to the grid. I wish Texas did.

Edit:clarity

>Everyone seems to be forgetting that you can get paid to transmit your extra power back to the grid during the day

The idea in my previous post was:

>the whole thing depends on exchanges on the grid.

and anyway we were talking of off-grid setups.

I was talking about in the "hurricane just hit your state" situation, in which you may not be commuting to work as usual, though in future two car families with one car at home during the day will not be unusual.

In the normal run of things though, I agree, the correct and sensible thing is to be grid connected, and have sane regulations that ensure that excess from generating customers gets redirected to their neighbours and that everyone gets compensated fairly for their contribution to a well running grid so that incentives are correctly aligned.

This value will in most cases be more than utilities would be prepared to pay if left to choose a number themselves and they will unfortunately generate propaganda to make solar installations seem like free riders rather than go by actual studies of how much they reduce the peak demand. In both Australia and the USA studies have found Billions (with a B!) in savings thanks to solar installations.

How do solar panels behave with 150mph+ winds? I could imagine that they'd see significant damage in a storm like this. I believe roofs in parts of Florida have to be prepared to withstand high winds, not sure if that can be accomplished with solar panels.

If windows can be built to survive it, so can PV. Might be prohibitively expensive, but wouldn't a potentially sacrificial layer of plastic or wire reinforced glass a few cm above the PV panels suffice?

As I understood it it's not against damage but so that they wouldn't get lifted from the roof and become projectiles. Since they're probably light compared to their surface area, I can imagine that they'd fly around at least as easily as shingles. But maybe they can be attached well enough to prevent this.

I have a house down in Florida and it has solar, but not on the roof. When storms come, the caretaker hits a switch and they rotate to be upside down. They don't have a broad cross-section, so they should do okay in some pretty strong winds.

I have the same thing here, up in Maine. I live in one of the windiest places around and it hasn't been a problem. It gets flipped for blizzards, mostly.

There are some inverters on the market that can directly power a load with no battery or grid connection.

I guess this was one of the first: http://www.smainverted.com/how-to-explain-secure-power-suppl...

At $500 additional cost, calling it a design issue is probably the correct thing.

Of course an auxiliary plug is way less convenient than whole house power, but a couple thousand watts is way more convenient than no electricity.

We have one of these, and if the power goes out it's got enough power to run e.g. the fridge/freezer so your food doesn't go bad. It can't handle even momentary overloads, so it's not good for powering motors, but I've run our fridge on a UPS powered by the inverter and that works fine.

Exactly.

We need to decentralize energy generation (solar) AND cellphone signals (mesh networking).

Here I expound on it at length:

https://youtu.be/WzMm7-j7yIY

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