89 comments on Some Notes on The Midwest Renewable Energy Fair, Solar Ovens, And Small Wind
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89 comments on Some Notes on The Midwest Renewable Energy Fair, Solar Ovens, And Small Wind
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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.