My cheap and simple 15-minute UPS device has waveform generation (?) and a battery. Surely with solar you often have to have huge batteries?
In hot climates you have some power use when the sun is up (cooling, pool heating,) but where I live I’d need my power most when the sun is absent in night and winter (power use is probably 80% heating). Any amount of solar power would be nearly useless if only available when the sun is shining.
> In hot climates you have some power use when the sun is up (cooling, pool heating,) but where I live I’d need my power most when the sun is absent in night and winter (power use is probably 80% heating). Any amount of solar power would be nearly useless if only available when the sun is shining.
Not a subject matter expert by any means but depending on how much sun you get, there are probably better options than solar for you (solar might not be the right choice for you).
Solar is increasingly popular around here though (latitudes 60-65) which I only assumed also meant that storage was also handled with batteries. Seasonal storage is probably not, but at least generation during the day and use during the night must be.
I learned from the article that lower temps helps efficiency, so perhaps our climate with short days and subzero temps for 5-7 months is still viable because of higher efficiency?
Keep in mind that thermal storage is cheap compared to electrical, just not efficiently reversible. E.g. you heat up a block of paraffin in a tub of water and it takes a lot of energy without large temperature changes due to the phase change. The output temperature would require rather large radiators or floor/wall heating.
At this temperature you could even dump waste heat of a computer (well, CPU and GPU, maybe DRAM, not the rest) into this thermal storage.
In hot climates you have some power use when the sun is up (cooling, pool heating,) but where I live I’d need my power most when the sun is absent in night and winter (power use is probably 80% heating). Any amount of solar power would be nearly useless if only available when the sun is shining.