Month: September 2023

New Orleans residents brace for salt water intrusion

Steven Guccione

I was in New Orleans this weekend and everyone is freaking out over this. With a massive drought in the middle of the country and rising sea levels, salt water is moving up the Mississippi river and is about to hit the water intakes for the city of New Orleans. I can’t help but add that this was predicted a long time back, perhaps decades ago. I will say it again, we aren’t prepared for what is coming.

New Orleans residents brace for salt water intrusion as Biden declares national emergency

“Power Supply Adjustment”

Steven Guccione

So Austin Energy added almost $200 to our August Power bill as a “power supply adjustment”. What a rip off. Thanks ERCOT!

Power Supply Adjustment — The Power Supply Adjustment is a dollar-for-dollar recovery that includes the cost of fuel for our power plants, the cost of electricity purchased from the grid and any net charges experienced as Austin Energy sells power to the grid.

UPDATE: seems these have been on our power bills for at least a year. Probably averaging $150 or so. My contribution to the Friends Of ERCOT fund.

New Orleans September 2023

Steven Guccione

I turned on the my phone last night as the plane was landing. A message from my daughter was waiting saying: stay at the airport! I wasn’t sure what that meant. It seems baseball sized hail was moving through north Austin, heading for the airport. The landing was a bit rough but everything looked fine at the airport. Except there wasn’t a gate available. Really? It’s after 9pm and I know they knew we were coming. Only waited 15 minutes on the tarmac but it made me nervous. No announcements about the weather from the crew.

We had come from a short trip to visit Mom in New Orleans. We joke when we booked it that a hurricane would probably hit while we were there. Something always seems to disturb our travels to visit family. Actually our daughter was supposed to come with us, but she picked up COVID just before we left and wasn’t able to travel with us. Maybe good luck for us. She was the only thing that kept us from getting on the road and driving right into this storm.

There were no warnings and no news at the airport. We hunkered down for about two hours, as heavy rain and light hail moved through. Texted our neighbors and they said our neighborhood was getting golfball sized hail. Plugged in our phones since watching weather radar had run down our batteries. We made it home before midnight to no serious damage to the house that we could see, just leaves stripped off of the trees covering the road and the yard. Oddly, the pool was overflowing. It looks like hail must have hit the butterfly valve on the side of the house that turns on the refill water. Glad we caught that.

Solar Testbed

Steven Guccione

It occurs to me that what I have built is a solar testbed. This is a word we used to use for computer systems not really made to perform work, but to run experiments. But I haven’t really thought about actual experiments. Some thoughts:

  • Full battery cycle: completely drain the battery, perhaps at night, they do a full charge, perhaps in full sun. How long does this take?
  • Output Measurement: not clear what the total panel output is. Are all loads coming from the battery, or is power shunted directly from the panels to the load? In the dashboard it isn’t clear if battery current and load current are distinct, or overlapping. I haven’t seen much more than 100W from my 200W panels, but I have only been using about 100W of load.
  • Maximum Load: so far I have only put about 50W – 100W of load on the system. Panels are only 200W max, but what happens (of anything) if the load is higher than the panel output? (I suppose this happens right now when there is shade. This all relates to how current is applied to the load).
  • Battery Fullness: there isn’t any measure of battery fullness, perhaps as a percent. There is a table that comes with the battery that maps voltage to percent remaining. Perhaps batteries vary too much to include this in the software, but I know I would type in a small table of numbers to see this sort of battery status.
  • Raspberry Pi Interface: my next step is to get a Raspberry Pi and load up the Venus OS interface and see what this buys me. I would like to log all the parameters at say, one minute intervals, perhaps averaged over 5 one second measurements. Then run the system for a week or so under a stable load and look at the graphs and see what stands out.