Posts By Ronald Brakels, Author & Fact-Checker At SolarQuotes

Trina Solar’s Honey Plus Polycrystalline Panel Sets A Sweet Record With 19.86% Efficiency

October 21, 2016 2017-04-18T15:25:21 by 4 Comments
trina honey panel

Trina have set a record 19.86% aperture efficiency for polycrystalline.

Trina Solar announced a new world record for solar panel efficiency on Tuesday. The announcement was made via a press release that was mostly comprised of words.

But that wasn’t all it contained.  Oh no, this press release was far too important to get by just using them. It also contained numbers, punctuation, and percentage signs.

Exactly what the particular arrangement of all these ingredients they poured into their press release actually means is a little tricky to work out. But, for your elucidation, I shall now attempt reading comprehension and I am not even going to use a net. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Solar Panels Tagged With: ,

Has Maxim Just Killed The Microinverter & DC Optimiser?

October 20, 2016 2019-06-25T14:57:22 by 47 Comments
3 maxim chips compared to a micro inverter and dc optimiser

Are these 3 little chips all you need to optimise your panels for maximum energy output?

Maxim Integrated is a Californian electronics company that has been going strong for 33 years and has only ever been delisted from the Nasdaq Stock Exchange once.  As you may be able to tell from their name, they like to integrate things and have developed a way to optimise the power from individual solar panels using 3 tiny chips embedded in the panel. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Solar Inverters Tagged With: , , ,

Chevy Bolt Electric Car Reveals How Cheap Batteries Really Are

October 11, 2016 2017-04-18T15:30:08 by 19 Comments
chevy bolt and 6 x LG Chem Resu 10

You can buy 60kWh of storage in a Chevy Bolt for a similar price to 60kWh of uninstalled home battery packs.

Looking to buy some LG Chem batteries but don’t want to pay full price? In that case, I have a little scheme you might be interested in.

If you want to, you could buy an LG Chem RESU6.5 battery system which will set you back around $1,000 per kilowatt-hour of storage. Or you could do a little better by buying a RESU10 as that will only cost you around $900 a kilowatt-hour. But if you follow my advice you can net yourself LG Chem batteries for only $822 a kilowatt-hour.

There is a slight drawback to my plan in that you have to buy 60 kilowatt-hours of batteries to get them for that price. But trust me, it’s well worth it because if you buy these batteries you get a free stereo system! There is no denying that’s a sweet deal. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Battery Storage Tagged With:

How To Clean Solar Panels

October 6, 2016 2020-01-13T13:20:00 by 32 Comments
solar panel cleaning

Ronald cleaning the solar array powering his country residence.

I have already written about why it doesn’t make sense to pay people to clean your solar panels. I also wrote it doesn’t make a lot of sense to clean them yourself. Once you add in the value of your time, the chance of falling off the roof and killing yourself, and how cleaning panels usually only adds a couple of percent to their average output, it is not really worth it. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Solar Panels Tagged With:

New LG Chem RESU Batteries: Smaller, More Powerful And Cheaper Than A Powerwall

October 3, 2016 2018-01-17T14:14:30 by 132 Comments
powerwall and LG Resu 6.5 to scale

Smaller, cheaper, more powerful. LG Chem’s new batteries look very compelling compared to a Powerwall.

If you are in the market for a home battery and are tempted to buy a Powerwall, then I urge you to also consider the new range of LG Chem batteries announced last week.

Whilst LG have been unable to compete with Elon Musk for mainstream media coverage, the LG Chem RESU, or Residential Energy Storage Unit for the long winded, has been one of the biggest successes in on-grid home energy storage in Australia. While solid figures are hard to come by, it may have been used in almost half of all on-grid home battery installations.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Battery Storage Tagged With: ,

Australian Politicians Confuse Wind Power And Powerful Winds

September 29, 2016 2017-04-18T15:34:30 by 14 Comments
wind vs wind power

Which of our elected politicians can tell the difference? Read on to find out…

Yesterday all of South Australia was blacked out and parts of the state are still without grid power today. This occurred because a powerful storm damaged transmission lines and the entire state grid automatically shut down as a safety precaution to prevent more damage.

Restarting a grid after a complete shutdown is complex and requires several hours. And it took several hours for grid power to start to be restored.

There is no mystery to what happened. It is very simple:

1. There was a really big storm.
2. Transmission lines were damaged.
3. The grid shut down automatically as a safety precaution, like it should have.

If you don’t believe power lines were damaged by strong winds, here is a picture of high voltage, steel girder, transmission towers near Port Augusta.  The wind bent them over so their tops touch the ground.

This picture shows how unusual the situation was. Transmission towers do not normally lie down on the ground to take a rest.

In addition to gale force winds there were also so many lightning strikes they would have been countless if someone hadn’t counted them and tornadoes. As more detailed information is reported we will probably learn if it was lightning strikes, gale force winds, or a big willy willy that provided the straw that safety precautioned the camel’s back. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Solar Policy Tagged With: , ,

Is Solar Panel Cleaning A Waste Of Time And Money?

September 27, 2016 2024-10-01T14:56:09 by 122 Comments
a bird shitting on a solar panel

Solar Panel Cleaning – It’s A Dirty Job, But Nobody Has To Do It

The day your solar panels are installed is the day you will get the best performance out of them.  After that it is all down hill. Admittedly, it is a very shallow hill and it might take over 40 years to get to the bottom, but day one is going to be as good as it gets.

One of the reasons for this is dirt. As soon as your panels are out in the open in the clean air, or not so clean air, dust will start to settle on them, blocking sunlight, reducing their efficiency, and costing you money.

The obvious solution is to pay someone to clean those panels, or get out there and clean them yourself. And sometimes this obvious solution will be a sensible course of action. If a dust storm has covered your panels in dirt or pelicans have had a poop party on your roof, then it’s a pretty good idea.

But most of the time solar panel cleaning is not worth it. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Solar Panels Tagged With: ,

Misleading Statements On Sunrise Hurt Solar Industry

September 23, 2016 2017-04-18T15:36:26 by 24 Comments
sunrise

The scene in the Brakels’ household last Sunday morning.

On Sunday morning the program Sunrise had a segment on solar power and battery storage. While I am glad whenever popular TV takes the opportunity to educate people on these topics, that wasn’t what happened here. It was the opposite of education, as anyone watching it could easily come away believing the following three things:

1. Battery storage pays for itself.
2. Battery storage cuts CO2 emissions.
3. Rooftop solar needs batteries to be worthwhile.

None of these things are true.

Battery storage does not pay for itself when used on-grid and it may be years before it does.

Home batteries do not cut emissions, they increase them. In the future they may allow us to decrease greenhouse gas emissions, but that point is still years away.

Rooftop solar by itself is cost effective. It is adding batteries that can make it uneconomical.  The mistaken belief that rooftop solar needs batteries to be effective is causing harm to both the solar industry and the environment, as people are delaying installing rooftop solar until batteries become affordable. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Battery Storage Tagged With:

Goodwe’s GW2500-BP DC Converter: The Cheapest Way To Retrofit Batteries?

September 19, 2016 2024-08-18T20:23:38 by 15 Comments
goodwe bp

This yellow box is a DC converter (not an inverter) that lets batteries share your solar inverter.

If you own a solar system and want to add batteries then, in theory, the cheapest way to do this is to simply plug your batteries into your existing solar inverter. The solar inverter can then convert the batteries’ DC power into AC power, just like it does for your solar.

Unfortunately, in practice, regular solar inverters are not designed to be shared by solar and batteries, so this hasn’t been possible and battery upgrades have been jolly expensive as a result.

But Goodwe, a major Chinese inverter manufacturer, has just released a battery DC converter, going by the catchy name of GW2500-BP. It is designed to allow batteries to interface to existing solar inverters.

This DC converter may be the cheapest way to add batteries to an existing solar home. It will also bypass any restrictions that Australian network operators may put in the way of using battery-inverters, such as the Sunny Boy Storage.

By itself it won’t make battery storage pay, but it brings it one step closer to being cost effective. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Battery Storage Tagged With:

Cheapest Electricity Plans For Solar Owners Revealed

September 8, 2016 2024-01-25T16:57:19 by 31 Comments
ronald's head exploding

This is how I felt after spending 2 days trying to work out the best electricity plans for solar owners.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, electricity bills are confusing.

If you are one of those rare people who don’t find electricity bills confusing, then I have two things to say to you. Firstly, “Good for you”.

Secondly, “When are you returning to your home planet?” because I find it hard to believe you are human.

Because they are so confusing, it is very difficult to know which retailer offers the best plan for your household. Especially for people with rooftop solar, as they have the additional complication of accounting for feed-in tariffs. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Electricity Prices
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