Solar Energy Rig

A small, real solar installation and its measured energy flow, built to learn rather than to impress.

Student Engineer.

A small solar installation built to learn: panels, charge path, storage and load, with the energy flow measured rather than assumed. It was deliberately modest. The point was to own every part of a working energy system at least once, at a scale where mistakes cost an afternoon rather than a program.

Between this rig and the wind turbine, renewable energy stopped being an abstraction for me. That mattered later, when battery systems became my profession. Sizing the panel, the storage and the load against each other was also my first real budget exercise, and energy budgets and money budgets turned out to obey the same arithmetic.

Status — Academic project, 2012–2016.