89 comments on Some Notes on The Midwest Renewable Energy Fair, Solar Ovens, And Small Wind
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
89 comments on Some Notes on The Midwest Renewable Energy Fair, Solar Ovens, And Small Wind
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
Search The Oil Drum with Google
Support The Oil Drum
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Campfire
- What "Lower Consumption" Means
- Tricking and Treating the Future
- Meeting Energy Decline Part-Way - Potatoes?
TOD:Europe
- The Future of Nuclear Energy: Facts and Fiction - Part IV: Energy from Breeder Reactors and from Fusion?
- The US stimulus and "green jobs"
- EROWI - energy return of water invested
TOD:Canada
- In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
- The Round-Up: October 24, 2008
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
TOD:Australia/NZ
- The Bullroarer - Saturday 7th November 2009
- The Bullroarer - Friday 30th October 2009
- Details of Solar Flagships Released
TOD:Net Energy
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- David Strahan
- The Energy Blog
- Entropy Production
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- Health After Oil
- jeffvail.net
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Finance & Economics Blogs
- Calculated Risk
- The Crash Course
- Ecological Economics
- Econbrowser
- Environmental Economics
- Infectious Greed
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Organizations
Peak Oil Primers
Beware email scams!
Beware email scams claiming to be from this site. We do not have any job openings. If anyone contacts you about a job at The Oil Drum, do not reply to them, and definitely do not give them any personal information or send them money. Read more here.
“It's difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it.”
—Upton Sinclair
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Nate Hagens, Gail the Actuary, Prof. Goose
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, Heading Out, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Sam Foucher, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Campfire: Glenn, Jason Bradford
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
- Emeritus: Stuart Staniford
- Technician: Super G
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.










GAIA Host Collective
I figure it all depends on what you wanna do with your electricity. Without batteries to store the energy you are using the grid for that purpose. What can you power with your solar cells directly? Probably not a computer, or microwave or mostly anything.
You can probably power lights (but during the day O.o?) or heating elements.
Of course I'm using the grid to store energy (well the grid doesn't store energy either but there's like a petawatt on the US grid at any one time). I'm grid connected anyways, batteries are a pain in the rear, and they paid me $3.50 a peak watt to do it. I dump all my power to the grid, run my house off the grid as always, and at the end of the year, me and the electric company will settle accounts.
If you are off grid, you will probably have batteries somewhere in your system. Remote traffic lights are powered by solar. There are solar powered cell phone battery chargers for backpacking and gabbing at the same time. Solar powered water pumps. Your energy reserve can be the gravitational potential energy of the pumped water rather than batteries. If you use solar power to heat a working fluid to run a heat engine, then the hot fluid is your energy storage and it can work all night long.