Published on 06/18/2022 12:51 by zawasp

I’m a sucker for solar energy. I mean, why not, it’s free energy from the Sun. I installed a 3kWp system at our country house we have up in the mountains almost 2 years ago. The system is small, but enough to cover our energy costs, since we don’t live there permanently. With the subsidies we got from our government, the system will pay itself off within the next year.

I monitor its output and house power usage using an Intel Nuc box and Home Assistant, which I highly recommend if you’re into home automation.

Anyway, what does this have to do with Azure Static Web Apps, you say? Well, over the past 2 years the number of on-grid systems literally exploded in Romania (going from less than 1000 in 2019 to about 15,000, according to official sources, expected to top 30,000 by the end of the year). No wonder, giving the current energy prices. I wanted to check this growth in installed power, however the official sources only give us a daily snapshot, so it’s hard to see how this grows over time.

That’s where my passion of doing things fast for little money (if any) comes in. I’m starting to build a scraper of the official source and plotting the change over time. The technology will involve Azure services (Static Web Apps, Functions, Table Storage, and later possibly Redis and others) and CloudFlare (for caching, security etc.). As tech stack, it will use Angular and .NET with C# (type safety ftw). By the way, this blog is hosted for free as an Azure Static Web App. Yay!

The plan is to work on this on my (limited) spare time. The code will be public at my GitHub “org” page. For now the repo is a starter kit. The site will be here.

Start here for part 1.

Written by zawasp