How can I localise and form community if I isolate myself from the grid? I would no longer be able to share my surplus solar with my neighbours with an off-grid system.” “The shift to clean energy goes hand in hand with localisation. Terry had strong philosophical reasons for wanting to stay connected to the grid. It turns out that our standby energy usage is too low to be served by our inverter! However, it's still a good result.” Interestingly, that 70 per cent is lower than we expected given a substantially oversized solar array and battery. “In the first two months of operation, our house moved from 30 per cent to 70 per cent grid independence, in that 70 per cent of our energy is now generated by our solar system. The battery was added around six months after they installed the solar PV system, and immediately had an effect on the way they use electricity. Terry says he wanted a battery to maximise use of their own solar electricity and increase the household's grid independence. The grid is good, it will just be used in a different way in the future to support an energy system where consumers will have more control over how they make, use, store and share energy,” says Terry. “In the end we decided that we wanted to stay connected to the grid. While an off-grid solar system would have given them the freedom of no more electricity charges, a well-planned hybrid set up would lower their bills, while guaranteeing an electricity supply in a cloudy week in winter. The 4kWh battery system cost $9700, and was added to the 5kW solar PV system, installed around six months earlier. They installed what's known as a ‘hybrid’ system, which is a grid-interactive solar PV system with the addition of batteries. The decision was forced when they had to size the system.Ī solar battery system that was ‘off-the-grid’ would need more panels, a bigger battery and a different battery type in order to store enough electricity for night time use and cloudy days.Īn off-grid system sized for a daily household consumption of 10 kilowatt-hours per day could cost around $55,000 installed, according to estimates from not-for-profit organisation Renew. Ultimately, this mega-flare's discovery is less a cautionary tale for our planet than it is a caveat in the search for life on other worlds: Planets around magnetically hyper star systems like V1355 Orionis may not be the best places to look.When the time came to purchase a solar PV system for his Brunswick property in 2016, Terry and his partner knew they also wanted a battery system to store solar-generated electricity so they would use less electricity from the grid.īut whether or not the intended solar battery system would be connected to the electricity grid was up for consideration. It's not certain how, exactly, such a powerful CME would impact life on any hapless planets that got in the way - but the researchers said the effects would be far more catastrophic than those associated with even the worst CMEs to hit Earth. This blast far exceeded the star's escape velocity, launching trillions of tons of electrically charged matter outward into space in what may be one of the largest CMEs ever observed, the authors wrote. They found that the flare began with one of the most powerful stellar eruptions ever seen - a high-velocity prominence that burst out of one of the stars at more than 2.2 million mph (3.5 million km/h). Solar storm smashes hole in Earth's magnetosphere, triggering extremely rare pink auroras Mysterious 'sparks' on the sun could help scientists predict solar flares 1 million-mile-long plasma plume shoots out of the sun in stunning photo
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