> solar does not need artificial subsidies, and can pay for itself
That's true now, but wasn't true when those panels were installed. There were subsidies available to get the market kick-started.
They consist of an extra payment for every kwh you generate on top of the payment for delivering the power to the grid. The amount varied depending on when you signed up to the scheme, but at certain points it was as much as 50p/kwh (+ inflation, so more than that now).
It may also be worth spraying them with water when they are too hot. As they get hotter the efficiency drops a little. It's only a few percent, and usually it happens at the time you need the efficiency the least because it's sunny, but if you can combine cleaning and cooling and get a few extra w out if it, why not.
Solar panels are increasingly being oriented east or west instead of south, as while it reduces overall yield, it maximises power when it's needed the most - during morning and evening peaks.
I don't have numbers, but I suspect it alleviates issues with dust buildup and temperature.
The most interesting trackers to me, for DIY install in my yard, is a 2-axis tracker. Especially in summer, sunrise and sunset are quite a bit north of east and west, meaning a true south facing fixed set of panels wouldn't even see the sun yet.
Sadly, my investigations a few years back indicated that a suitably strong and robust 2-axis tracker that would withstand our local winds and snow loads is significantly more expensive than just buying more panels and facing some of them east/south/west to accomplish the same thing. Doing this on an existing shed also avoids some local zoning rules vs a dedicated ground mounted system.
I get the impression they are getting less viable because the extra cost and maintenance outweighs just putting more panels down. There are some calculations that suggest even mounting them on angled frames might not be worth the cost, depending on how dirty they get when you just lie them flat on the ground.
(This assumes that you have enough space, but for grid-scale solar this is not the limiting factor. The costs are roughly in order from most to least: the cost of the inverters and grid connection, the cost of installing the panels, the cost of the panels themselves, then the cost of the land to put them on)
I can speak to this somewhat. My panels are on adjustable frames. Typically I switch from flat (summer) to tilted (winter).
As always ymmv and depends somewhat on your location. I'm around 30 degrees from the equator.
During summer, lying flat gets a lot more power. And more importantly the start and end of the generating period is longer. Ie the panels get more sun in the morning and evening thankfully they were tilted.
In winter the sun is more "from one direction" and obviously is lower on the horizon.
The upcoming "balcony solar" legislations will allow up to a limit (iirc 1200W in Virginia) of solar to be directly be connected to the electricity outlets of a house to make our electricity costs lower without having to pay for a battery from what I understand.
Storage is one way to move time of supply to match time of demand. Offsetting the time of supply directly is simpler, although it probably doesn't offer a complete solution.
Yes, I meant I can get on board with automatically (periodically or based on some trigger or sensor) spraying the panels with water but I was hoping it isn't necessary to use Windex® or even dish soap on the panels themselves.
So do insurance based ones. And if you aren't 100% insured, that limit depends on how rich you and your parents are, and the balancing is often between health and other things.
The NHS is known for being pretty efficient when compared to other healthcare systems, especially the US. The problem is that there is no money and healthcare is getting more expensive.
There are incentives for high performance and efficiency. GPs are private partnerships contracted to treat patients. They can keep profits.
There's been attempts to do more private outsourcing (with the NHS still paying), but they tend to work out less efficient when you consider the whole system, because, for example they might only treat the easy cases and leave the hard ones to the normal hospitals.
Is there any material difference between a non-profit asking and people who work for the non-profit asking? Is the maker of the request made public or something?
It sounds like the organizations thing might just be to stop foreign nationals using that as a workaround.
Location: Oxford area, UK
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Email: rjmunro@arjam.net
About: Senior full-stack engineer, 25+ years. Recently shipped major Sofie TV studio automation features for the BBC and SVT (<https://github.com/Sofie-Automation/Sofie-TV-automation>); my contract is wrapping up and I'm looking for what's next.
My recent work is TypeScript/React/Node on systems that have to work live-to-air—timers, playout orchestration, real-time state—not just CRUD behind a login. Example: re-architected Sofie timers to move clock calculations server-side, cutting client timer ticks from 60/s to 1/s.
I also build the tooling around the code: shared ESLint/Prettier presets across the Sofie ecosystem, jamies-git-tools <https://github.com/rjmunro/jamies-git-tools>. I have given company-wide Git talks and have wired up CI on GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, Jenkins, and others.
30 years of volunteer live A/V (sound engineering, directing, vision-mixing, streaming, camera operating, video editing).
Interested in broadcast/live media, live events, full-stack TypeScript, and developer tooling.
> Google has been nuking accounts since their inception
Google has been dealing with accounts opened for fraud, spam and other evil bots since their inception. They should be nuking those. What's needed is some way of reverifying an account that was closed incorrectly, maybe some kind of independent ombudsman service or something to get the account back.
It doesn't work if the road is not straight for it's entire length. It takes the start point of a road and the end point and assumes the road is a straight line between. It should work on individual segments of roads, not whole connected ways. It should only include further segments if they are on the same angle to some threshold. It should include segments from other roads if they are connected and aligned (maybe the road changes name at a crossroads).
It could even include disconnected segments if they align and are nearby but there is a discontinuity in between - sometimes a road junction is drawn in detail in Open Street Map - Often if you are stood at one end of the road you can see through and past the junction.
I agree it's absurd and I'm in favour of some kind of wealth tax, but I don't get the connection here. This feels like a failure of infrastructure planning laws and things like noise regulations.
It's a bit hard to find good stats, but it's at least 1 or 2 a year, it could be more like 10 - plenty of domestic violence is caused by money problems, and those problems can often be gambling related.
That's true now, but wasn't true when those panels were installed. There were subsidies available to get the market kick-started.
They consist of an extra payment for every kwh you generate on top of the payment for delivering the power to the grid. The amount varied depending on when you signed up to the scheme, but at certain points it was as much as 50p/kwh (+ inflation, so more than that now).
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