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Comment on Solar is winning the energy race - The world’s cheapest power source is scaling at warp speed, pushing coal, gas and nuclear aside

Powderhorn@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

I paid ~$800 for 1.2kW of solar panels on my van in 2023. The 600Ah of LFP was an additional $1,700. I’ve not paid a power bill in 2.5 years. How anyone could choose to not go solar baffles me. I was paying $3/kWh through the city-owned utility. Nominally, it was somewhere around 15 cents, but after all the fees that Austin charges, despite using only 20kWh/month, my bill was $60 at minimum.

The city has now raised rates five times since I went off-grid, so a straight $60 times 30 months undersells the ROI. It would now be $75-80, and $80 times 30 months means I’ll have broken even by May.

Less than three years, and when the power goes out in town, I’m unaware of it unless I run into a complaint on Reddit.

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toynbee@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
… My power bill for February was $1900 …

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- hanrahan@slrpnk.net ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  holy shit, mine was $15 here in Australia so that’s about 50c in US dollars (some sarcasm) AND that includes charging my ecar. i have 8.4kW of solar on the roof and I get paid a grid feed in tariff for the extra kW I don’t use. We are conscious about doing electric intensive things when the suns shining though eg oven for baking, charging the ecar and ebikes, hot water on from 11-5 only etc
  
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- its_me_xiphos@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Holy crap. Do you live in a bitcoin server farm? Thats insane.
  
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  - toynbee@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    I don’t disagree that it was insane!
    
    But no, the reason is that I live in a decently sized old house in a cold area. We’ve dual zone climate control and I’m not sure either heat pump stopped running the whole month. I do run some servers but that’s true year round and most months my power bill is in various parts of triple digits.
    
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MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

despite using only 20kWh/month

Uh, that’s really a lot.

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- Powderhorn@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  
  According to the US EIA as of 2022, the average annual amount of electricity sold to a U.S. residential electric-utility customer was 10,791 kilowatt-hours (kWh), or an average of about 899 kWh per month.
  
  You think using 2.2% of that is excessive?
  
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  - MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    No, watt, not kilowatt. And US is,an outlier by far. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000-watt_society
    
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sanzky@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
that is an absurdly high price for energy. I pay on average between 20 and 30 euro cent per kwh

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