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I have no detail testing results (too many other things have been happening), but I have run 8S 24V 55AH of LiFePO4 in parallel with 4 7S 5AH Tesla 2170 packs for a couple of years now in my mobile solar power testbed. It's still running well enough to keep two 65W mobile refrigerators (one as a...

I could argue that this isn't my exact situation. I already have a panel with a bend, and it is a fairly sharp kink in one spot on the long edge. I'm thinking of smoothing it out into a (comparatively) gentle curve. I guess I should wear safety glasses at all times while doing that, anytime I am...

I'm using 100W hard panels because I can fit four of them on the minivan roof without hanging out on the edges like the Dodge in the photo above, with four more flexible panels to be added underneath, they will slide out when the vehicle is not in motion (that part is more complicated, I've been...

That does seem likely. Still, it's interesting how visibly that glass is bent, with no sign of cracking. It doesn't ride around on the vehicle at this time, but I have been handling it, to remove and stow it most every night, and unstow and set on the vehicle most every morning, for about a year.

They will ride on top of a minivan, low on the roof when the vehicle is in motion or in need of a degree of stealth, optionally lifted and tilted when parked where maximum power production is my priority. Today I tested a Reflectix-type barrier between the panels and the roof, which seemed...

Another silly "question". And off-topic.

Because they don't see a better choice! Also (probably), because those who are saying that wouldn't be employed in that capacity if they were not true believers in "Change!" Again, you are dismissing it right now. Maybe you really don't know you are doing that? The situation you have described...

Of course it is, _now,_ but that is a consequence of political decisions to pursue "Change" at the expense of stability.

That wasn't the straw man. I didn't attempt to reply to your question because that would have been silly. With the advantage of hindsight, it was perhaps optimistic of me to expect you to address the substance of my comment. Are you posing a straw man straw man? "Backseat driving" the grid...

Straw man. My argument isn't that we should do nothing (to "Change") complex systems, it is that we should do nothing (to "Change") complex systems most of the time (when no alterations are clearly justified, after careful consideration, by experts who are intimately familiar with the...

Perhaps. Except, it's characteristic (from my now fairly lengthy amateur study of such things) of arguments for... A massive effort to re-make the grid (along with many other such things), by an ideology which never made the case with reasoned argument, supported by objective measurement, but...

Oh yeah? I have a story: Years ago, my brother and I (and my dog) were spending a few nights in a campground, and got to talking with the neighbors, a young couple from Australia (my brother and I were young then). Somewhere in the conversation, I asked them what about the US impressed them the...

You might be projecting. It is your comments which have repeatedly misrepresented mine. No one has claimed that controlled loads don't exist, or haven't been in use in some places. The easily verifiable experience of operators of power distribution systems, over many decades, is that the systems...

That all strikes me as quite a lot of complexity, which I doubt 1 in 10 people around here (Silicon Valley) would have time and talent enough to learn to to even guess usefully what happens in a situation where many devices got their logic scrambled.

Media repeatedly blaming is not evidence which refutes my claim. Neither is your opinion that "it's tiresome nonsense". Do your comments have a purpose, if they are not attempts to cast, eh, FUD on the substance of my comment, or defend yours? I think it's fairly clear that there are sound...

Maybe this will add perspective:

Also ad hominem fallacy is not supporting evidence. It isn't reasonably in question that large complex systems can fail catastrophically, in ways which range from difficult to practically impossible to repair in a timely fashion, it's history.

It's a straw man because no claim has been made that it absolutely cannot run, for a while.

This is somewhat my view, although I might prefer to call it reasonable preparedness, hoping to avoid my choice to make some small move toward absence from the grid becoming part of a "movement", and that movement becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Life is complicated, I guess.

In fact, that was the time when Unix was barely moving away from the thinking that operators must never remove power without going through a normal shutdown, lest the file system be corrupted. And, although my example was intended to present my workstation as a metaphor of a canary in the coal...

No such point has been made. It is not making a point to falsify a straw man fallacy, without having addressed the substance with even ordinary evidence, when the assumption (that we can just add things to a complex system without need for considering at length the long term stability) is...

That's one reason I wound up with what I call my mobile solar power testbed. I am living in the purported world headquarters of the high tech revolution (Silicon Valley), and they can't keep the lights on . I first noticed over 30 years ago, when I got a Sun Workstation on my desk, and...

There are always "no issues" until there are.

Probably, to understand my point, you need to be able, and willing, to understand that the normal behavior of complex systems with interactions which are not fully understood, even by the designers, is collapse. The reason we are accustomed to the power grids not doing that, and feel surprised...

Me too!

I think I've looked at every comment here without seeing mention of what I have read are the real technical problems of supporting large numbers of grid-connected solar systems, without sufficient income. What I think happened is that (without getting into political attacks) incentives for...

I say use lasers for solar panel array camouflage. Make a hologram of some (bucolic country, maybe) scene which sort of matches the surroundings. Never get the video feed to the camouflage hologram swapped with a map of your MMORPG battle map.

Well, my internet search turn up this (after I ignored a lot of questionable links). From the abstract, I guess the industry went to N-type a while back, because they last longer: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1661892

Generally, the slower the better (for LiFePO4 battery life). But it should be a LiFePO4 capable charger (the charging curves differ somewhat from lead acid).

What about the (online) "buyer education tax"? Learning that took a lot.

I have a LiFePO4 12V battery in the back, I forget exactly why, charged from my 24V system with a cheap (communist) Chinese buck converter (with CC "limiting"). To keep my starter battery topped off, I connected it using a cheap (communist) Chinese SAE cable, or three (one end, extension, other...

_Again?_ I'm having "is Renogy going out of business" discussion deja-vu all over again! It was just last year, wasn't it?

What about the trailing edge? I think what I have read about aerodynamics implies that a longer, smoother transition on the trailing edge is as important, or even more important, than smoothing the leading edge.

That was what I was looking for, plus a little. And I saw that higher voltage, briefly. Then, the controller pulled it down to about the same voltage, except at (of course, since I had 2/3 as many strings), 2/3 the current.

That is unsurprising, the efficiency of DC-DC conversion is, above some minimum, typically declines somewhat, the higher the difference between input voltage and output voltage. So, if you con't get those Watt-hours lost to reduced efficiency back in output during marginal conditions, you won't...