I have panels on my roof in England - today they generated 22.5kWh. That's roughly 3 times my daily need https://mobile.twitter.com/Edent_Solar/status/45541993526384...
The issue isn't generation as much as it is storage. My south facing roof should generate my yearly kWh - but I have no practical way of sorting that energy. A multi kWh battery like in a Tesla if just far to expensive to stock in my attic.
What are the issues with moving a liquid (water?) from a low storage tank (in say your basement) to a high storage tank (say in your attic) and then at night let it flow in the opposite direction to produce electricity? I haven't done the calculations, but would it require too much liquid or maintenance?
I'm also not sure what this would be called? Gravity Battery?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_energy_storage_project...
And cool, my guess at a name wasn't too far off:)
Let's lift 1KG of water up 5 meters.
That will require 50 joules of energy (5 * 9.81).
Suppose I want to store 5kWh of energy (half my usage).
1kWh = 3600000J
5kWh = 18000000J
1KG of water is 1 litre.
I need to store 360,000 litres of water - that's a bit too much did domestic use :-)
Is large here - but I think that's about right.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity