Who on fedi has adopted balcony solar? Since Colorado has paved the way, we are considering it. I would love to hear about people's actual experiences, how much power they have been able to harvest, any issues, one panel vs. two panels, etc.

Please boost for reach.

#Solar #SolarPower #BalconySolarPowerSystem

RE: https://bots.grimshaw.house/posts/6a7d8798-64ae-0522-bf5a-61e841c776a4.json

My #solar panels face due west, looking right at last nights #eclipse, you can see the small dip in generation at the end of the day.

I’ve had solar panels on the roof for nearly 5 years, but didn’t get a battery initially because it was a bit spendy. I’m seriously considering getting one now though. It’s still not cheap, but will eventually pay for itself thanks to the difference between what the energy co charges me for power vs their buyback rate. That’s as long as I stay in this house - I don’t have any plans to move currently. It would be good to be more independent from the money-hungry energy companies.

#solar

Thank you fedi friends for your responses! I’m still considering whether or not it’s worth investing in a battery. Just been chatting to someone at my solar company and they assured me that I could uninstall the whole system if I move and want it for another property. That wouldn’t be free of course, but cheaper than installing new from scratch. That does future proof the investment a bit more. If I want to have a battery system that works during power cuts there’s an additional cost ($1900) to install the emergency power supply thingy. We get power cuts sometimes during big storms (it’s very windy here) but I’m not convinced that additional cost is worth it. Going to think about it all a bit longer!

#solar

Will people be exporting #solar battery power during the #eclipse to help out? I will be, but that's automated. It's not peak production time anyway.

The world’s biggest solar telescope caught vortexes on the Sun’s surface

We expected them to be there, but they had previously been too small to see.

Archive: ia: https://s.faithcollapsing.com/pd5de

#astronomy #astrophysics #science #solar-telescope #sun #vortexes
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/the-worlds-biggest-solar-telescope-caught-vortexes-on-the-suns-surface/

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Image of the surface of the Sun, showing lots of dynamic features.

Here's some info about the microcontroller setup I used to manage my solar-powered web server. Link to code repository included.

https://www.uplode.org/howtos/microcontroller/

#solar #solarpunk #selfhosted #selfhosting #permacomputing #arduino

More of this, please...!

#Solar companies partnering with #MaineFarmers for land management

by Jamie Azulay, Jul 28, 2026

#HollisME - "#Nexamp, a #RenewableEnergy company with several solar farms in Maine, is working with local farmers to manage the land beneath its panels. In Hollis, Jonathan Tibbetts was contracted to bring his flock of about 40 #sheep to an approximately 20-acre field.

" 'Basically, what their job is, is to keep the grass below the panels,' Tibbetts said. 'When we leave, we don’t necessarily want it to look like a lawn, but we want the vegetation managed.'

"Nexamp leases the land, and it prefers to avoid heavy machinery powered by #FossilFuels to maintain it.

" 'It’s kind of a no-brainer. It’s more #sustainable. The costs are good,' said Keith Hevenor, Nexamp's communication manager. 'It’s safer in a lot of ways than running mechanical mowers through #SolarFields where you can kick up a rock or do some sort of damage.'

"Nexamp is grazing 2,000 acres across sites in the United States. Eighty sites, with a combined 600 acres, are being grazed in Maine. These partnerships keep operations environmentally friendly while also supporting #LocalAgriculture.

" 'Land access for farming is getting harder and harder for every farmer,' Tibbetts said.

"Tibbetts was running out of space on his farm, but now his business is growing with access to the Nexamp field.

" 'I can go out and put sheep on solar and make an income,' he said. 'To me, that’s still agriculture. It’s just not what people are used to.'

"The partnerships reflect a new age of agriculture, which some farmers are adjusting to while others are struggling to accept the changes.

" 'Solar is controversial, but the reality of it is, it’s here,' Tibbetts said.

"Hevenor hopes the critics who say solar companies are stealing farmland eventually come around. He argues the company is only borrowing these fields temporarily.

"State-mandated decommissioning plans allow the land to return to its previous use if that is what the property owner chooses to do.

" 'If you come in here and build an #AmazonWarehouse or a #Datacenter or a neighborhood, it’s permanently gone,' Hevenor said.

"Hevenor said many of the landowners Nexamp leases from are farmers themselves.

" 'I can see how somebody in their 70s who’s just trying to keep the farm and is looking for some type of income, who isn’t able to farm the way they were 20 years ago, it’s an avenue for them to keep their farm,' Tibbetts said.

"Nexamp has fields out of state being grazed by pigs and cattle. Hevenor said that could be a possibility in Maine in the near future."

Watch video:
https://www.wmtw.com/article/solar-companies-maine-land-management-livestock-farmers/73178986

#SolarPunkSunday #MaineFarms #SolarEnergy #RenewablesNow #Agrovoltaics

#solar #solarpunk #solarpower

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Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature Just saying, if we lived in a rational society, we wouldn't look down on people who have trouble paying their electric bills. We'd put solar panels on their rooftops to help them out and make the grid stronger.

Europe's nuclear power is increasingly failing amid rising heat and droughts.

France’s nuclear fleet has already seen a record number of heat-related outages this summer. Low river Danube waters forced Romania to shut both its nuclear reactors. Hungary is next.

Isn’t it time they switch to wind and solar already?

https://news.sky.com/story/hungary-to-shut-down-sole-nuclear-power-plant-as-danube-falls-to-record-low-13569304

#wind #solar #renewables #extremeweather #climate #heatwave #drought

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person cycles across a dry riverbed. headline reads: Hungary to shut down sole nuclear power plant as Danube falls to record low

NEW: Renewable energy developer Avangrid has pulled a long-standing and controversial solar project on Washington’s Badger Mountain, a site sacred to Indigenous nations, following years of delays and tribal objections.

By @Toastie
https://www.propublica.org/article/washington-badger-mountain-solar-project-canceled-avangrid?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mastodon-post

#News #Washington #Indigenous #Native #Solar #Energy #RenewableEnergy

Vertical photovoltaic outperforms south-facing?
#solar #renewableEnergy
https://www.autonocion.com/us/frankfurt-airport-solar-panels/

I came into possession of some old solar panels so I made a solar-powered web server with a raspberry pi. It's been sitting in my garden for two months running continuously on sun/battery power.

Perhaps the continuous uptime is not surprising given the extreme weather in London this summer.

It's been running the nginx start page for most of that time, but I finally made a little zine site and hooked it up to the web.

Channeling Gilbert White, Bruno Latour, lowtechmagazine, whathaveyou. Not much content there as yet.

A Concrete Garden: https://uplode.org

#solar #selfhosted #selfhosting #energy #permacomputing #sustainability #computing #lowtech

#SolarUpdate

We ran out of battery power overnight, for the first time since the 4th April 2026.

We have spent 16 weeks off grid.

In that entire time, we have imported just 60.1kwh of electric.

That's an average of 0.5kwh per day or roughly 14p worth of electric.

But we still pay 70p per day in the standing charge for electric.

The standing charge is 5 times more expensive than the electric we are using at the moment.

Despite all of that, it's actually been a poor year for solar compared to last year. With generation actually being down by 10-15%... Heatwaves and perfectly clear skies, are not actually good for solar generation because the heat reduces the efficiency of the solar panels.

We should have produced in the region of 680-700kwh a month for May & June based on the number of clear sky days. Instead we generated 550ish. Instead of generating 28-29kwh per day, we were generating 23-24kwh.

But that 22-24kwh per day has been more consistent. With the avg per day for July being 21kwh, vs 18.8kwh for May and 18.3kwh for June. We didn't use more, but we did export a little more.

#Solar
#Battery
#GoingGreen

I am pretty amazed, how fast and power efficient even those older Intel N4100 Mini PCs are.
My old Wyse 3040 unfortunatelly died recently, so I had to migrate everything to the more power hungry N4100 system.
But turns out, when you disable the TurboBoost, it's average power consumption is around 1,5 - 2,5W running with Debian and a Podman container with my Website, and some custom scripts for fetching stats by bluetooth and usb for the BMS and Solar Charger. Neat!
#selfhosting #solar #diy

How about a solar powered EV?

https://www.solarkycar.com/

#WeirdCarMastodon #EV #Solar

This is exciting - Monash University (China, Australia, I think?) has developed very cheap and much better solar panels @Feljin @greenparty_ie
https://reneweconomy.com.au/researchers-unlock-new-path-for-ultra-low-cost-solar-by-swapping-out-scarce-and-costly-metal-in-pv-cells/
#solar
(More scientific report https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aef5355

More of this, please...!

Two #Minnesota #SolarFarms seeded #NativeWildflowers under their panels, and 5 years of counting revealed #NativeBees had multiplied twentyfold, then crossed the fence to pollinate the neighbour’s soybeans

by Hugo Rojas, July 14, 2026

Read more:
https://www.ecoportal.net/en/two-minnesota-solar-farms-native-wildflowers/29160/

#SolarPunkSunday #GardeningForPolinators #Wildflowers #NativeGrasses #SolarPunk #Solar

Just installed Solar Assistant on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and for the first time I think I am understanding my solar set up. Good piece of software this.

https://solar-assistant.io/

#solar #selfhosting #software

https://www.pveurope.eu/e-mobility/france-rules-mandatory-solar-car-parks

#solar #solarandwind #solarcanopy #solarcanopies #cleanenergy #cleanair #sustainability #greenenergy #climatechange #bigoil #bigoilandgas

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FACTS THEY DON'T TEACH YOU. With Solar Canopies on large parking lots, France generates electricity like 10 nuclear power plants while cooling cars. The USA could harness 800 million uncovered spaces similarly.

Irish Times: “Craig Morris of the German Association of #PluginSolar said one in 10 German households now had plug-in solar.

“irelandman firefighters’ association and insurance firms have said there is no increased risk from plug-in solar,” he said.”

https://www.irishtimes.com/environment/2026/07/15/rules-for-plug-in-solar-panels-being-finalised-but-not-before-end-of-summer/

#ireland #solar

Spoke to my 81 yr old mother today who cursed both the federal and provincial governments on their lack of climate action. She can’t believe we’re building pipelines instead of wind and solar. Folks, even the boomers are coming around! #ClimateChange #ClimateEmergency #Fires #Carney #DougFord #Boomers #Wind #Solar

@quixoticgeek Running electricity into a site first, and even trucking in containerised batteries - shuttling two or three or 34 between site and chargepoint for a bigger effort - has merit.
I happen to know of 42MWp of unused electricity in North Devon ...

(I own 2kW of it. )

It reminds me of the old saying that the bandwidth of a station-wagon full of backup tapes on a motorway is hard to beat.

#solar #trucking

Now I'm on a long train ride home, time to post a follow up thread answering some of the themes in the responses to my Solar railways thread I posted on the train I started this trip on.

A lot of the replies were along the lines of alternative railway related places to put solar panels. So I'm going to focus on those.

#Solar

1/n

🐑 Do Golfs Dream of Electric Sheep?

｢ Instead of using lawnmowers, a flock of 100 sheep is now grazing beneath more than 31,000 solar panels that help power Volkswagen’s manufacturing plant in Poznań, Poland (where it makes the VW e-Crafter commercial van, among other models). It’s a practical way to maintain the site while allowing researchers to study how farming and solar power can coexist on the same land ｣

https://electrek.co/2026/07/08/volkswagen-put-100-sheep-to-work-under-31000-solar-panels/

#solar #renewables

I've done a few posts about bad railway solar, so time for a photo of good railway solar. This bike parking shelter has a load of solar panels on the roof, that have short cable runs, are easy to clean, easy to do maintenance on, and generate a good proportion of the power as the stupid between the rails solar I moaned about the other day. The brick building has no solar on the roof yet, so lots of potential.

#Solar

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A photo of the bike storage at a DB station. On the left is a wooden shelter with solar panels on the roof. A big coniferous tree is next to it. In the centre of shot is a bike shelter, on the right is a red brick station building. In the background is a high metal tower for overhead power.

Thinking about the efforts of techbros to cram solar into all sorts of highly inappropriate places (between railway tracks, surface of roads, cycle lanes, a bench) is a bit like their attempts to cram AI into all sorts of inappropriate places. No I don't need an ai light switch. Etc...

#Solar #FuckAI

And todays gadget solar is this bench spotted outside Halle (Saale) Hbf. Whilst not quite as bonkers an idea as solar between the tracks (see previous rant). The extra ruggedisation required for the panels to make them suitable for sitting on seems an expensive way of doing solar. I find myself wondering if a larger panel that acted as a shade for the seating would not be a better option.

#Solar.

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A bench with three solar panels embedded in the top surface. On the end is the text "solar power bank"

I'm looking into complete #heating system inc #SolarPV + diverter or PVT while renovating an old property which currently lacks heating.

All walls will have improved isolation but I'm not sure whether a #HeatPump is a good idea as we like it warm ~23C, so oil is the alternative.

The house is mostly North facing (in SW UK), has a very old core (40cm stone walls) a less old section and two 1970's era extensions. A mixed bag!

Thoughts and hashtags to follow welcome.

#Renovation #Solar

#Switzerland bolted 5,000 #solar panels onto a dam wall 8,000 feet up in the freezing Alps where everyone said solar made no sense, and the plant now makes three times more winter power than any farm down in the valleys https://www.ecoportal.net/en/switzerland-5000-alpine-solar-muttsee-dam-winter-power/28487/ #Solarpunk

More baby steps on UK plug in #solar

Core of the interim standard is basically DIN VDE V0126-95 with tweaks for the UK.

Max 800W per house, doesn't yet cover batteries but otherwise really isn't terribly interesting.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6a31167d15f2a70fac7e6026/plug-in-solar-interim-product-specification.pdf

How can I find out (without a sales pitch) whether it’s worth me getting solar & battery installed - e.g. when will I likely break even?

About to get a quote for aircon and considering solar at the same time. My wife isn’t convinced on solar being worth it yet.
#solar #solarpanels

@StingrayBadger Add in cycle parking areas. Cyclists need shade even more than drivers do. #CycleParkingAudit #Solar #UK

All #solar panels temporarily switched off at 80 #Suffolk #schools following a number of #fires in roofspaces - whilst Suffolk #FireandRescue investigate.

Its not confirmed the fires occurred for the exact same reasons, but there's a lot of high current equipment involved which can get very hot indeed if things go wrong..

Alas, this has happened just as Reform have control of Suffolk County Council so might be used as an argument against solar energy (rather than ruthless capitalism and cost cutting which is more likely to have caused these issues)

https://archive.ph/qIr9z