Comment by marklit
2 days ago
A good percentage of Pakistan did this recently and removed 35% of demand off of their grid https://www.ted.com/talks/jenny_chase_solar_energy_is_even_c...
2 days ago
A good percentage of Pakistan did this recently and removed 35% of demand off of their grid https://www.ted.com/talks/jenny_chase_solar_energy_is_even_c...
I would love to have an air conditioning / cooling solution that is directly linked to solar panels with no batteries involved. Like the sun shines, we get electricity, we do the work. My main goal for this thought experiment is to come up with uses of solar electricity that is resilient to the unpredictable and unreliable energy generation from solar. Thoughts?
Supposedly water heaters are an amazingly good target for variable power. Water heating takes 18% of home energy use[0] and is already a well insulated storage device. Just heat it up as you are able with the day's sun.
If you are looking for a cooling solution, you could go the other way and make water chillers through a dedicated water tank. You would tie the HVAC to pipe air through a heat exchanger. Seems like all of that is well established engineering.
[0] DOE link on water heating https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/water-heating
> I would love to have an air conditioning / cooling solution that is directly linked to solar panels with no batteries involved.
I think that would be very viable with fridges, that represent a large share of electricity consumption among the poorest. Before electricity, people powered fridges by constantly buying ice blocks. They were just isolated boxes where food was stored together with the blocks. Perhaps it's just necessary to go back at the roots, and make fridges that take energy from solar panels and generate a lot of ice by day, and uses it to keep cold at night, with no need for batteries.
I love this idea but I don't know enough about the specifics. Isn't it really bad(TM) for the pump or compressor or something I don't know about for the input power to be variable like this? Like there might be an errant cloud somewhere.
The whole point of my thought exercise is to see if we can somehow make the cost go down. My understanding is that the panel can easily last twenty five years but the battery you'd be lucky to go beyond eight?
Edit: good news / bad news
Bad news: this is not an original thought
Good news: smarter people than me are already working on this. See solar Variable Frequency Drive (VFD). Basically, my thought is a pump is a pump. if you can build a pump to pump water to irrigate poppy fields, you can use the same pump to drive refrigerant in a refrigerator/ freezer / heat pump.
Though experiment? This is already a thing in the off grid community. In practice you need at least small battery to smooth out the power, but it doesn't take much home automation to kick on the mini split when the panels/inverters have power to spare.