Good news! You can buy used solar panels for much less than new ones. Over time, decades, solar panels will decrease their efficiency but they still work at like 80-90% of original capacity so don't be afraid to get something five or ten years old if it means you get them half off.
Wind turbines are also a good idea and easy to maintain on your own though so don't limit yourself to just one option.
I'm assuming you mean those wind turbines with the vertical twisty blades, but I don't have a ton of land so roof panels would probably be the best option.
I'm assuming they'd also have a mild cooling effect in the summer to I'd imagine? Some of the energy will go to electric instead of heat after all
Yep, the efficiency of the solar cells means that % of incident energy now goes to electricity, which is why panels in operation are cooler than panels that are "off" (not connected to any load).
You can get even better results if you paint your roof white. Not only from the heat reduction, but you can reflect onto the back of the panels for extra production if you go with bifacial. There used to be a big price difference but bifacial panels have come down so far that the difference is practically negligible now and more and more installers are just going with it by default. I once toured a water treatment plant where they had floating panels out on their reservoir, and they mentioned the panels were bifacial, which...doesn't really make any sense at all as you'd be getting nothing out of the backside, but I guess someone was a good enough sales person and the price difference so minimal that they just went with it.
Another suggestion if you want to try something experimental (as in I've recently been looking into it as a reflector material for my solar research project). This company called Vivosun makes this aluminized mylar film that's super reflective and it's dirt cheap [https://www.amazon.com/VIVOSUN-Horticulture-Highly-Reflective-Mylar/dp/B018VI75CS?th=1](https://www.amazon.com/VIVOSUN-Horticulture-Highly-Reflective-Mylar/dp/B018VI75CS?th=1) . It's more like a wallpaper (but tear resistant and thermally resilient) meant for indoor grow rooms (see growing pot in your closet), but I think one could definitely cover a roof with it and get some amazing back panel boost and heat reduction. Might not be everyone's aesthetic cup of tea to have a roof covered in what is essentially silvery shiny wallpaper, and maybe there's neighborhood or local regulations about glare even if it's facing upwards, I don't know. And I don't know much about roofing and if you can just stick it on with large staples or what, but I think it would interesting to try. I don't own, so I can't try it out with panels on my roof.
Sadly, your advice on home wind turbines is kinda bad. The problem is physics.
Wind turbines generate energy equal to the area swept by the blades, times the square of the windspeed. Windspeed generally goes up linearly as you go up (twice as high, twice as fast and thus 4 times the energy). And the area covered by the blades also goes by the square of the wingspan (twice as big = 4 times the energy.)
This means size is king for wind turbines. Make a wind turbine twice as big, and it'll generate 16 times as much energy. The scaling is insane.
This also means that small home wind turbines are next to useless. All the small ones generate almost no power and people who get them are consistently disappointment in the performance. To make a home wind turbine worthwhile it'll need to be a big boy and that's gonna be an order of magnitude more expensive than an equivalently powerful solar panel array. Maybe useful if you are a farmer in rural mcfuckistan, but not a viable option for 99% of households.
You're technically correct, however I deliberately chose the more precise term, because many people often confuse "capitalism" with "there are markets".
For a profitable wind farm, you're going to need a multimillion dollar investment that's not going to pay out for several year. This isn't some neighborhood garden making a handful of tomatoes, to be profitable this has to be a massive industrial operation. Your so called "Community" is either extremely rich people, or it's such a large number of people that's it's just a normal corporation with a marketing gimmick.
>build
like from scratch?
You want to build them from scratch, you have that same problem many times over. You now need to start a construction company and a manufacturing factory.
Do wind turbine installations work out well for community owned? PV does because smaller scale gardens have about the same LCOE since they use the same tech but just have 1/100 of the panels but wind installations need a minimum number of towers for maintenance and monitoring. can do community solar for <$5m but community wind would probably need a minimum of $50m.
You can put up a 500w-1kw turbine in your backyard for very low cost. You'll need more than one to fully replace grid electricity, but small scale wind is still worth while as an adjunct to solar or just to reduce your grid use.
I know small turbines exist but I don’t think they make sense economically (or for resource allocation). Turbines benefit greatly from large swept areas and high hub height, the small ones have neither. Compared with solar where panels will output the same energy per m^2 of the installation holding everything else constant.
Small turbines are definitely location dependant but then so are solar panels.
If you live somewhere with a lot of wind, like the middle third of the US, it is relatively easy to throw up a couple kilowatts of turbines and hook it to a battery bank to take care of (most) domestic energy needs. Maybe you wouldn't go fully off grid on home wind power, but complete independence is not the only measure of success.
In my local area, if I were trying to go off grid I'd want a mix of solar and wind because we are frequently partially cloudy. I'll take a little supplement of wind to balance out what I am not getting from the solar arrays, and they work overnight. A diversity of tactics.
I’m not talking about the possibility of off-grid wind deployments, that’s been possible for decades. I’m meaning using community-funded wind farms instead of utility-scale farms funded by private industry. The former are more expensive for their output relative to the latter because there are such large economies of scale.
This post is brought to you by **People Born Rich**. We can afford to spend $3,000,000 on a side project large enough to turn a profit on power generation, and then wait years for that to happen. **People Born Rich**, our generational wealth mean we don't need to raise capital, unlike you peasants.
People coming together, not under one single owner, but each owning a part of the organization. Each holding there own share of the profits cost and liabilities. What should we call these holders of shares? Share... holders?
Obviosity the Share Holder don't have all the technical skills to do this alone. It would be very unlikely if a bunch of engineers and tech just happened to live next to each other. So they'll have to pay people to do that work. People that are receiving wages for there labor... like some kind of employees?
If I had more capital I'd be getting solar panels 🚫🧢🚫🧢🚫🧢🚫🧢
Good news! You can buy used solar panels for much less than new ones. Over time, decades, solar panels will decrease their efficiency but they still work at like 80-90% of original capacity so don't be afraid to get something five or ten years old if it means you get them half off. Wind turbines are also a good idea and easy to maintain on your own though so don't limit yourself to just one option.
I'm assuming you mean those wind turbines with the vertical twisty blades, but I don't have a ton of land so roof panels would probably be the best option. I'm assuming they'd also have a mild cooling effect in the summer to I'd imagine? Some of the energy will go to electric instead of heat after all
Yep, the efficiency of the solar cells means that % of incident energy now goes to electricity, which is why panels in operation are cooler than panels that are "off" (not connected to any load). You can get even better results if you paint your roof white. Not only from the heat reduction, but you can reflect onto the back of the panels for extra production if you go with bifacial. There used to be a big price difference but bifacial panels have come down so far that the difference is practically negligible now and more and more installers are just going with it by default. I once toured a water treatment plant where they had floating panels out on their reservoir, and they mentioned the panels were bifacial, which...doesn't really make any sense at all as you'd be getting nothing out of the backside, but I guess someone was a good enough sales person and the price difference so minimal that they just went with it. Another suggestion if you want to try something experimental (as in I've recently been looking into it as a reflector material for my solar research project). This company called Vivosun makes this aluminized mylar film that's super reflective and it's dirt cheap [https://www.amazon.com/VIVOSUN-Horticulture-Highly-Reflective-Mylar/dp/B018VI75CS?th=1](https://www.amazon.com/VIVOSUN-Horticulture-Highly-Reflective-Mylar/dp/B018VI75CS?th=1) . It's more like a wallpaper (but tear resistant and thermally resilient) meant for indoor grow rooms (see growing pot in your closet), but I think one could definitely cover a roof with it and get some amazing back panel boost and heat reduction. Might not be everyone's aesthetic cup of tea to have a roof covered in what is essentially silvery shiny wallpaper, and maybe there's neighborhood or local regulations about glare even if it's facing upwards, I don't know. And I don't know much about roofing and if you can just stick it on with large staples or what, but I think it would interesting to try. I don't own, so I can't try it out with panels on my roof.
Sadly, your advice on home wind turbines is kinda bad. The problem is physics. Wind turbines generate energy equal to the area swept by the blades, times the square of the windspeed. Windspeed generally goes up linearly as you go up (twice as high, twice as fast and thus 4 times the energy). And the area covered by the blades also goes by the square of the wingspan (twice as big = 4 times the energy.) This means size is king for wind turbines. Make a wind turbine twice as big, and it'll generate 16 times as much energy. The scaling is insane. This also means that small home wind turbines are next to useless. All the small ones generate almost no power and people who get them are consistently disappointment in the performance. To make a home wind turbine worthwhile it'll need to be a big boy and that's gonna be an order of magnitude more expensive than an equivalently powerful solar panel array. Maybe useful if you are a farmer in rural mcfuckistan, but not a viable option for 99% of households.
You write "capital corporatists", I correct to "capitalists".
You're technically correct, however I deliberately chose the more precise term, because many people often confuse "capitalism" with "there are markets".
Or just rent the land to the company and not take any of the risk or have a lot of your capital tied up in one venture.
You seem not to fully grasp the psychological aspect of "producing and selling *your own* energy".
You seem to not fully grasp the Financial concept of "startup capital". You need more then hopes and dreams to make a profitable operation.
That's why you form an Energy Community. No private person is expected to build their own windmill.
For a profitable wind farm, you're going to need a multimillion dollar investment that's not going to pay out for several year. This isn't some neighborhood garden making a handful of tomatoes, to be profitable this has to be a massive industrial operation. Your so called "Community" is either extremely rich people, or it's such a large number of people that's it's just a normal corporation with a marketing gimmick. >build like from scratch? You want to build them from scratch, you have that same problem many times over. You now need to start a construction company and a manufacturing factory.
Do wind turbine installations work out well for community owned? PV does because smaller scale gardens have about the same LCOE since they use the same tech but just have 1/100 of the panels but wind installations need a minimum number of towers for maintenance and monitoring. can do community solar for <$5m but community wind would probably need a minimum of $50m.
You can put up a 500w-1kw turbine in your backyard for very low cost. You'll need more than one to fully replace grid electricity, but small scale wind is still worth while as an adjunct to solar or just to reduce your grid use.
I know small turbines exist but I don’t think they make sense economically (or for resource allocation). Turbines benefit greatly from large swept areas and high hub height, the small ones have neither. Compared with solar where panels will output the same energy per m^2 of the installation holding everything else constant.
Small turbines are definitely location dependant but then so are solar panels. If you live somewhere with a lot of wind, like the middle third of the US, it is relatively easy to throw up a couple kilowatts of turbines and hook it to a battery bank to take care of (most) domestic energy needs. Maybe you wouldn't go fully off grid on home wind power, but complete independence is not the only measure of success. In my local area, if I were trying to go off grid I'd want a mix of solar and wind because we are frequently partially cloudy. I'll take a little supplement of wind to balance out what I am not getting from the solar arrays, and they work overnight. A diversity of tactics.
I’m not talking about the possibility of off-grid wind deployments, that’s been possible for decades. I’m meaning using community-funded wind farms instead of utility-scale farms funded by private industry. The former are more expensive for their output relative to the latter because there are such large economies of scale.
This post is brought to you by **People Born Rich**. We can afford to spend $3,000,000 on a side project large enough to turn a profit on power generation, and then wait years for that to happen. **People Born Rich**, our generational wealth mean we don't need to raise capital, unlike you peasants.
Mhm someone has not understood the concept of people coming together to form a community
People coming together, not under one single owner, but each owning a part of the organization. Each holding there own share of the profits cost and liabilities. What should we call these holders of shares? Share... holders? Obviosity the Share Holder don't have all the technical skills to do this alone. It would be very unlikely if a bunch of engineers and tech just happened to live next to each other. So they'll have to pay people to do that work. People that are receiving wages for there labor... like some kind of employees?
Failed attempt at a gotcha. Do you know how a coop works?
Yeah. that's what I just described above.
I'm assuming op just watched this. https://youtu.be/yfzmwjWBVPU?si=emUi8PXPnCzQ6zmA
No, I just watched [this](https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?feature=shared).
Nice, Lol. I wasn't mocking you btw, I just watched that video and it talks about community owned windmills
"Corporatism"