Quote Originally Posted by PhilipA View Post
So the gen set is still there? So perhaps it is there in case there are a number of days without sunshine?

This sounds to me like a bloke I know who is a solar installer who said to me that his house was "off Grid".
I said "so you have disconnected from the grid then"
He said "er no I need to have backup, but that is the generally accepted term in the industry."
Regards Philip A
The generator is there, used intermittantly for testing and loading to ensure it works on occasion (monthly I think is the standard for a full load handover test) so that if there is a major issue with the farm (lightning strike, inverter bank fire) at least critical power can be maintained.

about 30% of telstras remote installation gear runs solely off of solar power but with generators for back up. Battery tech and inverter tech is more than up to the task, some of the telecom, now telstra exchanges have enough battery power to run the entire building (and in the day the entire copper network connected to it) for at least 4 hours. The old system in the exchange near the RPH in perth also had enough up its sleeve to export and pick up the critical load of the RPH on the same gear. Yes accepted that the system only had 4 hours life and there were several "not kidding around here" size generators with enough reserve on them to manage the whole lot with 50% of the generators dead (minimum 3 generators, 1 working one standby and one broken) BUT.. with enough smarts a distributed network of solar, wind, stirling engines, hydro power and other power sources should be able to run the batteries (or the mother of all supercap banks) indefinitely while under load.

Throw on board smarter design to reduce electrical load, improvements in elec equipment efficiency and that sounds like a bit of a winner.

me, I think small VAWTS supporting solar on tesla wall style systems would be an excellent starting point to reducing grid dependency in the short term.