Texas Adds Another Solar Farm as Ercot Grid Demand Soars | Hacker News Reader

Texas Adds Another Solar Farm as Ercot Grid Demand Soars

electrek.co

24 pointsm4639 comments

Love to see cheap solar energy getting produced.

Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48365168

201 MW for 53,000 homes is 3.8 kW per home. That's 10 x 400 W panels. Seems low.

It would be better to put them on the houses and save the land for crops.

Doing both sounds more effective. There's a lot of arid, scrubby land in Texas west of the 100th meridian that doesn't make for good farming without intensive water infrastructure. (I live just the other side of it in hill country farmland.)

The major issue is that there aren't a lot of good owned outright with grid outage battery supplied solar installers. The TX market is flooded by lease, lease-to-own, and rental solar scammers.

The largest solar installation online in Texas is 650 MW. There 9 installations currently under development that range in generation capacity from 800 MW to 1.2 GW.

The power needs of a house of course vary with many parameters. Our 100 square meter house in Nordic climate draws 1.2 kW on average over a year including charging the car. What are common numbers elsewhere?

The article mentions 2000 sq ft per home are needed. Ignoring longitude is that a good ball-park number for a DIY'er?

For a DIYer, you're looking at closer to 500 sq ft to get roughly 8 kiloWatts after losses, which is a solid amount for a home.

The Texas grid has a weird parallel with China.

Both are generating more electricity over time.

Both have been generating more electricity with fossil fuels.

Both have solar rollouts that if you compare using absolute numbers with smaller places are impressive but less so as percentages.

Both have carbon intensities that are going down over time.

Celebrated for their progress despite/because "They're not doing it to be woke"

You can basically tell any narrative by selecting your figures carefully.

It is about $4,500 per home. Turns out cheap electricity wins.

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