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• You don't measure power use in watts, silly people - you measure it in watt-*hours*. It's all about watt-hours. How much you generate, how much you use, how much you store - all watt-hours.
  
• So how much power do I get for $17,000? Not a whole lot... about 5 KwH a day (a 6th of what we used to suck down from the grid - read your power bill sometime, it's eye-opening). My array peaks at about 1000 watts x ~6 avg. insolation (sun) hours a day = 5KwH (since the output curve dips in the morning and afternoon. But with compact fluorescent lights everywhere and major appliances all overhauled, we get by comfortably. Battery backup is sized for 3 days with *zero* sun. The inverter (Trace 4024SW) can pump out 4kW if needed (10kW in short spikes) which more than covers anything we'd run all at once, including the well pump. I also have a 8KwH gasoline genset for backup, but I have used it only once so far. As time goes on I will probably add more array to the system - it doesn't always catch back up as fast as I would like after a cloudy spell. Luckily there is lots of ready expansion capacity in the system.
  
• My power is cleaner than your power. I'm not talking about the pollution, I'm talking about the waveform :) Trace inverters make machine-room, raised-floor-quality power, for my whole house. I telecommute full-time, and run all my systems off it (desktops with efficient LCD displays and 2 laptops), and they are all very happy.
  
• I got all my gear, including God's own batteries (Concorde Sun Xtender AGMs) from Solar on Sale - friendly service and outstanding prices.
  
• My arrays are ground-mounted, not roof-mounted (makes it easier to brush off snow). Total yard footprint - about 50 sq. ft.
  
• Really interested in this? Read Home Power Magazine, the ultimate geek journal on power hacking. The entire current issue is always available online for free download in .pdf format (way cool).
  

But the idea of using hydrogen as a energy storage medium for peak power demand is viable, and using a fuel cell to power your home or business and using the excess heat for space heating is quite possibly ecconomical. Now if we could combine that with rooftop solar cells...

On an only tangentially related topic, the last couple of Home Power Magazine issues (most recent one available for download) have had some articles on solar hot water heating. They very convincingly claim that the return on investment is substantially better than you could possibly expect in the stock market long term:

An investment in a solar water heating system will beat the stock market any day, any decade, risk free. Initial return on investment is on the order of 15 percent, taxfree, and goes up as gas and electricity prices climb. Many states have tax credits and other incentives to sweeten those numbers even more. What are we waiting for? Forget the stock market. If you have invested in a house, your next investment should be in solar hot water.

There are various schemes using plant oils to power engines, moslty diesel engines. Some of them are as simple as mixing it in with the regular diesel gas, which requires basically no modification, but I think the engine doesn't like to start with this mixture, so you might want to be able to switch to a pure source for starting.

The best method does some chemical magic on the oil to make it into biodiesel which can be run in a basically unmodified engine. As with most fuel conversions however, there is some concern about various plastic hoses which might react chemically with the new feul - but this seems to be a minor concern.

For all the details, and a fun read, get thee hence to veggievan.org. And almost no discussion of alternative energy would be complete without a link to Home Power Magazine - download the most recent issue.

Essentially, you're taking a lawnmower engine and hooking it up to an alternator extracted from a car. The article suggests using a GM alternator which features a built-in voltage regulator. The output of the alternator is about 14v, and you'll hook this up to one of those cigarette-ligher based 12v->120v voltage inverters. Better yet, charge up some batteries and save the excess power for later.

For more info on running your life on 12 volts, check out Home Power magazine, where you can freely download the entire current issue as a PDF.

Check out http://www.homepower.com for more information on realistic costs and solar/battery setups.

Interested in weather forecasting?

Well, first you have the solar cells. Fancy new ones will probably cost $10 per watt...

Of course, you aren't just going to nail the solar cells to a tree, so also figure in the cost of a nice frame.

The rich imperialist systems also include a charge controller, but our friends might prefer to save the $100 or so and flip a switch when the battery is fully charged.

How long will all this last? My guess is that the cells may (may!) last 10 years, the battery as long as five, and the frame maybe a few years.

Did that include battery back up? I thought costs should be around $20k-$25k.

Personally I think Solar power in the U.S. should be supplemental power. Durning the day, the solar panels feed extra electricity into the grid, and at night, a home draws from the grid. They you wouldn't have to worry about batteries and all their hazardous materials.

You probably already have checked out this website if you were in the market for a solar solution, but in case you haven't Homepower

Good luck in your quest. Check out GreenMountain and purchase "cleaner" electricity. It's a start (if you are in on of the deregulated states.)

Think for a moment about what you are saying. Battery backup? It almost doubles the cost of a solar power solution, plus it greatly increases the risk of something going wrong. Batteries aren't exactaly environmentally friendly.

How can a few KW from Solar panels and a inverter compare to the MW's produced from Coal, Gas, & Nuclear plants? (little know fact, when modern scrubbers are installed in smoke stacks, coal becomes as clean as gas, but until the government forces generators to take that route, or we start a pollution credit program, we are not going to see cleaner air.)

It is my understanding that the DR was receiving the solar panels for low cost (or free). DR is a small country, I don't see how the rest of the world would benefit from what we give them, or how the rest of the world could afford a solar solution.

Finally, oil isn't used to generate electricity. Oil generators make up 1% of the electricity generated in the US. Wind power makes up a similar percentage.

Check out Homepower for a real world look at the cost of solar.

The U.S. Government's budget this year includes $280 Billion in PORK! By contrast NASA's budget is $14B this year. If only some of that money went into energy research or 1000's of good causes which would reap better returns.

This sort of low tech micro solar has been spreading rapidly throughout the third world for life critical power needs in remote areas and for rural lighting projects. Helped mainly by charitable and philanthropic groups it really is a boon to those who use it. Want to see more examples (Burma, Vietnam, Mexico, Costa Rica, Nepal, Africa, etc) and lots of details on exact system desgins , layout and costs...check out Home power magazine here grab a PDF of the latest issue ..always free. Back issues are avail. via their SOLAR CD rom series.....

If the government really cared about getting alternative energy in use here in the US, they'd enforce net metering laws. What this means is: you hook up your [wind|solar|thermonuclear] electrical source to the grid, and when you put electricity back into the grid you get credit for it. Simple enough. With older technology, all that was required was a device to make sure that your current was in phase with the grid, and your meter would run 'backwards'. Now with the new, electronic meters, doing so would make you PAY for the electricity you put into the grid! This is absurd. In many states there are LAWS that REQUIRE the utilities to implement net metering, but they are being blatantly ignored. If you want more info, read Home Power Magazine, which has really good info, all in an archive for FREE! (but hey, subscribe, send them some money, it's a worthy cause).

There was an article in the last issue of Home Power about a guy who makes his own biodiesel. Seems to be a pretty simple, if time consuming, process. He goes around his local area and gets the old vegetable oil out of the fryers at restraunts, filters out the food then mixes up his fuel. Granted, it can be a bit on the dangerous side, so kids don't try this at home.

I will post some more about this tonight when I get home. There were some URLs and stuff in the story.

1. Stay away from used motor oil in your system. Stay away from oil, period. If you have a leak or a line rupture, you could have a hazmat/groundwater pollution problem that's worth more to clean up than your house and land combined. Stick with water and ethylene or propylene glycol; they are easy to handle, easy to pump and biodegradable.
2. Before you think about solar heating systems, think about insulation. Every watt of heat you can keep from leaking out of the house is a watt that does not have to be generated or captured.
3. Many solar panels are laminated onto plate glass. I don't know how much hail these are able to stand. This panel is rated for one-inch hail, but I wouldn't expect it to handle two-inch. The only way to protect a panel against hail is probably to put it on a tracking stand and turn it vertical (edge-on to the hail) when your conditions were bad. Making a hail-detector that can trigger the stowing process soon enough is probably a problem with no off-the-shelf solution. If you are talking about a solar-thermal panel for heating water, it's likely to have its cover glass busted in a hailstorm. You might be able to deal with this using a plastic top layer, but I have no idea who makes such things. Try doing a little research.
4. Solar (photovoltaic) panels love the cold. The cell voltage improves as the temperature goes down.
5. If you have strong winds in the winter, definitely think about a wind generator. You can probably heat your house with the power generated during winter gales; a 10 KW machine is good for better than 30,000 BTU/hr if you dump the output to heating elements, and several times that much if it runs a heat pump.

If it's a new house, meaning you haven't broken ground yet and you're still talking to the architect, then you can make the energy savings work. If it's an existing house, then there's quickly diminishing returns.

The Canadians experimented years ago with super-insulated houses located up on Hudson Bay. When I say superinsulated, I mean four-foot thick insulated walls with foot-thick panels that closed over windows at night. It wound up being that the body heat from the occupants almost heated the house. If you cooked, even in the dead of winter, you had to open a window. Some of the solar heating panels were disconnected because it actually overheated the house. If you insulated a Florida or Arizona house that much, you could keep it nice and cold inside. (Insulation doesn't just keep heat in.)

If it's solar power you want, well, that kinda works. You can live off it, but it takes a lifestyle change, and some rewiring. No distributed.net cracking for you, and you'll need to get rid of all those appliances (microwave, stove, VCR) that use power when they're not on (those little clocks and indicator lights add up). The Chicago Tribune ran an article a few months ago about apartment dwellers, in urban Chicago, who had gone solar. It can be done, it costs money, and a lifestyle change is mandatory. No blow-drying your hair, no clothes dryer, no electric oven.

Wind works pretty well, depending upon where you live, and depending upon zoning laws (neighbors may not want one looming over everything). There's some concern that wind power kills birds, but since they tend to place those flailing blades in prime bird habitat (open grassy fields), then it may not be a causal relationship. All the old windmills and wind-powered water pumps don't kill birds, so someone needs to get a big grant and do more research. It might be habitat/proximity, and it might be blade design. Maybe noisier blades would help.

What alternative energy for an existing home does do is cut down peak use, and perhaps spin your meter backwards sometimes. There's tax breaks for alternative energy sources, but basically be prepared to write the whole expense of installation off, and consider it paying off Mom Nature's bills. Figure $10-20k to get anything significant going. You'll need a big bank of batteries to store that peak power to consume during off times (like nighttime), or just spin the meter backwards and sell it to the local utility.

If you're lucky enough to have a running stream nearby, there are companies that sell mini-hydro devices. It's not a small dam, but just a small turbine that a head of water spins.

Try http://www.homepower.com as a great starting point.

Contrary to Bush's pathetic energy plan, the real solution is (in order), Lifestyle change, convervation, and consumption limiters (insulation, efficiency changes [better appliances]). Drilling for Alaskan oil won't create one watt of power for California since California doesn't have any commerical power plants that use Petrol as a power source. They may augment power generation with these things, but it's not really what you build a power plant from.

Interesting site to check out, if you're interested in setting up your own "alternative energy" source: www.homepower.com. They have information about how to set up your own DIY renewable energy kits.

And solar is by far one of the most expensive sources of electricity.

Fill it up at any corner station and drive a 1000 miles on a tank

Also, the original deisel engine could run on vegetable oil, and was designed to do so. Modern deisels need some slight modifications to the oil to use it without modifying the engine. The article above describes this process in detail.

Warning! The ingredients used to make the chemical used in the process are readily available and relatively safe to handle (methanol and lye), but when combined as in the article, they make sodium methoxide, a very dangerous compound.

Alternative Energy Engineering
Electro Automotive
Energy Conversion Devices, Inc.
Home Power Magazine
innEVations
Jerry Halstead's Car
Low Rolling Resistance Tires
Phoenix EAA
Unique Mobility
Wilde EVolutions catalog

I wish I had some good answers for you but I don't. I just moved into my first house and have been working toward solar power. Living in Central Florida, we have plenty of sun to spare. (Wind, too, but I'm sure the neighbors would be unhappy with a 75-foot tower in the backyard.) The question now is what am I going to do with it.

I've replaced all my incandescent lights with fluorescent. (You'll be amazed at how much flourescent lighting will save you each month. Not only does it use fewer watts, it doesn't produce nearly as much heat). I've made sure there is plenty of insulation. I'm getting rid of the electric water heater and putting in a solar version. The 15-year-old electric dryer is being replaced with a natural gas version (yes, gas is expensive but it's not nearly as pricy as electrons). There are also a few more appliances (all over ten years old) I'd like to replace but I've already blown my monetary wads so to speak.

I've been reading HomePower for inspiration and ideas. While building a solar system from scratch sounds like the best way to go about it, what I really want is a kit being that this will be my first attempt. I want parts I know will work together and a clear path to setting everything up.

I like the configuration you are proposing and your usage isn't too far out of line. (I've gotten down to 7.5 KW a day.) Most of what I've heard about Trace and Siemens is good. They both have a very loyal following.

Make sure you check out the DOE's Million Solar Roofs web site. There is lots of good information there. Specifically, they have a state-by-state incentive guide that tells what incentives are available from where and how to get your system subsidized by any number of public and private groups.

Good luck. Once you get your system up and working, I'd love for SlashDot to follow-up with you.

InitZero

The point is, you can turn off the load side of the UPS, but the rectifier/battery charger/inverter will still draw power. Granted it's less power, but it's still power, and now it's doing absolutly nothing. It's one-thing to pay the penalty for this overhead when the UPS is doing actual work, but it's another when it just sucking up juice.

check out HomePower Magazine for the best scoop on renewable, off-grid power. Even if you don't want to go off the grid, most of what they talk about is applicable to rolling your own disaster recovery systems...

It's a magazine and a website. It's mostly about how to setup your own renewable (largely solar, some wind, a little "other") energy generation. But they've also got some tips/tools for reducing usage.
--
MailOne

http://www.homepower.com/

This is a great mag - nice to see others out there know of it...

On a related note, the most recent issue of Home Power has detailed stats regarding how much power various manufacturers' solar cells produce in their lifetime vs. the power consumed to produce them. I can't find a nuclear link tho.

I realize that there MUST be a few of you out there, who would rather be "proactive", and become a part of the solution, rather than just "place blame", and "point fingers", like most of the folks here, so follow this link to energy independence (or at least, reduction).

www.homepower.com

It is one of the best starting place's for learning about owning and building your very own "modular", "power station". You can become much more energy independent this way, and even remove yourself from the power grid, if you have the inclination, and money.

You will find is IMMENSELY satisfying to have some (or all), of your abode's lighting, and electrical appliances working just fine, during a blackout.

You want to impress the neighbors? Just invite them over during a blackout to have some hot cocoa, and watch a video. And then the look on their faces after the video, when you turn the lights back on and they "remember" that it's a blackout... Priceless! . Of course, this is just a nice fringe benifit, "iceing" on the cake, as it were.

And to ALL of the renewable energy "detractors" out there, SHUT UP!

You haven't lived off the grid, so your opinions mean NOTHING!

If you aren't applying a solution, you are a part of the problem.

Dig it?

The positive experience of thousands of "off the gridders" speaks volumes about how well renewable energy works. All it takes is a change in thought, and some cash.

Pull the Plug Party One day during the summer of 1999, I returned to my apartment to see a group of my neighbors gathered in the alley behind my garage, chatting with each other. I pushed the button to open the garage door. They were quite surprised. There was a power outage in my neighborhood, the first of many in Chicago that summer. None of them had power, nor would they for hours.

The answer? More goddamn power plants. Solar, nuclear, tidal, I don't care, but put them in, put them in service.

The demand spike alone is enough. The real problem is that there is no market in electricity at the consumer level. In general, people pay one rate per KWH regardless of time-of-day or state of the grid, and anyone can tell you that a KWH at 4 PM on a scorcher is worth a lot more than a KWH at 3 AM on any day of the year. But people pay no more for the 4 PM KWH, and they have no incentive to shift their demand to 3 AM.

There's a huge problem with lack of infrastructure, and I don't mean turbines and wires and transformers. The infrastructure that's lacking is the market at the consumer level, and the information technology required to support it. People can and do drive around until they see gasoline at an acceptably low price, but they have no way to put the dishwasher on standby until the price of electricity is reasonable. You could make a huge dent in your peak-hour electic consumption if you had an air-conditioner that froze water overnight and cooled your house with the ice during the day, but if your electric meter can't distinguish (or just as badly, can't tell you) the difference between a 4 PM and 3 AM kilowatt-hour, you have no way to benefit from this. The consumer could make a big cut in the capital costs of the grid, but the consumer has no way to reap the benefits even if they'd pay for the hardware. This is a failure of the market: the pricing information is not getting where it needs to go.

The power companies probably don't want this to happen. If people could actually be full participants in the market, they could sell power as well as buying it. They could stuff KWH into batteries overnight and try to make a profit by selling back to the grid during the day, and you'd see lots of guerilla solar installations (except they wouldn't be guerillas any more). You'd see lots of people running co-generators, and the real sophisticates would be doing things like burning natural gas to re-heat their water tanks between 3 PM and 8 PM while selling the electricity, and running off the grid for electricity the rest of the day. If electricity was a quarter a KWH, you could make a rather tidy profit off your hot water heater. But none of this can happen unless and until there is a real, minute-by-minute market in electric power where everyone can participate, and you know who's not going to let that happen.
"
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To make things worse, I'm under the impression that if we wanted to help out by generating our own power and putting our surplus on "the grid" for others to use, we either have to pay excessive amounts of money to jump through various procedural hoops, or are completely forbidden to do it.

"Home Power" magazine (they also put their current issues online in .pdf format) has a series of "guerilla solar" articles about people "sneaking" power they've produced onto the grid, which I find pretty amusing. Maybe enough people "sneaking" "illegal" power back onto the grid might help (and reduce reliance on ponderous corporations and governmental regulations to keep us powered.)

My god, did I just mix "Green"-style "Renewable Energy" and "Down with Giant Corporations" rhetoric with "Libertarian"-style "I should be able to get [power] wherever and want and sell it to whoever wants it" and "If I want to be self-sufficient it's my business"? Shouldn't "Green" and "Libertarian" rhetoric cancel each other out in a giant explosion or something?...

Well, its not wonderful - but it is considerably better than you are making out. Check out the Homepower site for example - a medium (roof sized) solar panel provides enough wattage he can backfeed to the grid while still running household appliances.
--

A well conditioned human can pedal at about 45 watts for 2-3 hours, 30 for a long time, and 60 for 30 minute bursts.

So, the human powered option is out for many applications.

The fibers *MAY* have applications in solar systems. What kills the cells is heat buildup more than anything else, and the concentrator *MIGHT* not allow infra-red to pass, but allow the other parts of the bandwidth to pass.
A company called (methinks) marathon solor used to have a light conentration system for its cells to boost output. Such a method is economical *IF* the cells are expensive and the fiber is cheap. (oh, and they are now bankrupt)

Given that you can now buy solar cells as shingles to go on your roof, I have to question if the economics are right to use fiber concentration on silicon cells.

Home power is a nice place for figuring out how to get off the grid, and this gent thinks the future for cheap solar is heliostats. Combine a heliostat with a helium-as-working-fluid sterling cycle prime mover, and you may just have a winner!

Another great resource is Homepower.

Using nature and technology to liberate.

If you are into 'getting off the grid'

Home Power

If this kind of thing excites you, consider co-generation with a sterling-cycle engine. With the external combustion option, you could power the heating with buringin cue:cat's

These people (jxj.com) are big into co-generation.

Co-generation on a small scale. 10% of the heat goes up the stack

The economics are iffy. It is absolutely being done by solar technologies (check out Home Power Magazine ; and in particular their "Guerilla Solar" Rogues Gallery, if you're really interested in sticking it to the Utility companies). However, unfortunately, nobody seems to be making money (or even payback) at it. Perhaps some kind of mixture of this Fuell Cell technology, electrolytic dissociation of water, local storage of Hydrogen (metal hydride technology springs to my mind), co-generation using waste heat/coolth from the metal hydride tanks and fuel cells, renewable sources (solar, wind, hydro), and natural gas could be made to pay off. Interesting design problem for someones M.Sc., no?

There are a lot of renewable energy solutions out there (photovoltaic, solar) and they are becoming more and more practical every year.

I saw some people post about selling electricity back to the grid one day. Well, this will be a lot sooner then you realize. One site I found, (Home Power Magazine), has profiles of people who actually are feeding electric back into the grid. Many of them say that their electric meters actually move backwards. Kind of cool :)

--Jon

How do you make liquid Hydrogen? The same way you make electricity, off at a plant somewhere.

Take a look at this article from Home Power magizine. It's a 5KW fuel cell system that runs off natural gas, kerosine, gasoline, etc. It uses a catalyst to extract the Hydrogen from the fuel source. It is still a little large for powering a car but it would fit nicely in a small minivan. It costs $6000-8000 US.

It is also the way now.

You are probably aware of Home Power Magazine. Take a look at the current issue that is on there. They have an entire office with all the doo-dads running on solar - and the office is in Wisconsin. They do have a gas generator for backup, but, as they say, the thing has spent an entire 50 hours online in the past year. That is not a whole heck of a lot of time.

There are other reasons to do solar now - one solar panel can typically supply 100w to your home wiring system by means of something like the Trace Microsine Inverter. For under $1000 you can hook one of these panels up to your house wiring and feed it back to the grid. They are UL listed devices. Hook 'em up, plug 'em into an unused outlet, and sell it back.

Also, for every panel you have hooked up, you are effectively removing 1000 pounds of carbon from the air that would otherwise be generated by coal.

This is really one of the only ways to go when you think about it. Currently there are warnings about the Northeast part of the US starting to feel the strain from there just not being enough electricity available. If everyone had just one panel hooked to their house, that would be an ungodly amount of power being generated for these high use areas.

Yes, it's still primarily petrol-powered, but I live in an area where malls don't have electric vehicle recharge stations, and where the nearest public-accessible CNG refuel station is 40 miles away. If the car runs decently, I'll probably buy it on principle.

When you move the discussion to alternate forms of energy in general, I've been doing a bit of reading (Energyland, Home Power Magazine, and Solar Design Associates) because of my wife's and my plans to build a house sometime in the not to distant future.

It seems that solar is technologically more viable than I expected. Even up here in un-sunny New England, there are some people living comfortable lives either off the electric grid, or connected to the grid only as a backup/secondary power source.

I don't see solar becoming mass-market in the current economic environment, mind you. In the U.S., the cost per kWh for electricity from the national grid is still far cheaper than going solar.

However, if a few more people answered to their consciences in addition to their bank accounts, perhaps we would see a few more of the recent crop of McMansions sprouting solar panels.

You wrote: "We need a way to show the oil companies that we're fed up of lining their pockets with cash" which is kind of funny since there are so many ways, and so many organisations doing so.
Rule #1: Buy NO unneccessary plastic items. I make an exception, personally, for my kids' legos. But I don't buy a new case for my computer just because the ATX form came out, I hacksaw the old one. Plastics are essentially a waste product of the petroleum industry.
Rule #2: Buy NOTHING from Exxon. Because we need to convince the Oil Barons that there are some things that don't blow over - and Exxon's had the most egregious crimes as well as being the last vestigal trace of the original Petroleum Trust (Standard Oil = S.O. = Esso = Exxon, you can confirm this easily).
Rule #3: Stop whining and do something. I am converting my truck to gas/electric hybrid ASAP. My bud Pete runs used fryer oil in his (unmodified) Mercedes diesel.

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Ballard Fuel Cells
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Energy Conversion Devices, Inc.
Greenpeace International Homepage
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Hydrogen Web (English/German)
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Low Rolling Resistance Tires
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Roofing Systems
Unique Mobility
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Wilde EVolutions catalog
United Solar Systems Home Page

--Charlie

I've already sworn to build my first and only house based entirely upon solar power, possibly with a wind backup. While it is possible to connect a solar home to the grid - and even push out your excess energy in return for monthly payments - dependency is something I'm determined to avoid.

However, solar is not only vastly expensive - the typical home can run you as much as $20,000 at building time, enough to pay for about 80 years of coal power - it is also unreliable. A solar panel captures 28% of sunlight's energy at theoretical maximum. In reality, your home's position on the globe and the variability of weather mean that you will probably need a backup system of some kind, such as wind.

Try fitting a system that requires vast, immobile panels onto a car. The Sunrayce Competition promotes the idea of solar powered vehicles, but so far the machines lag behind in reliability and power - and even are deficient in such exotic concepts as "passenger seats".

Solar power is the way to go. It's free, it's unlimited from a practical standpoint, and it's clean. But we aren't there yet.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!

I've already sworn to build my first and only house based entirely upon solar power, possibly with a wind backup. While it is possible to connect a solar home to the grid - and even push out your excess energy in return for monthly payments - dependency is something I'm determined to avoid.

However, solar is not only vastly expensive - the typical home can run you as much as $20,000 at building time, enough to pay for about 80 years of coal power - it is also unreliable. A solar panel captures 28% of sunlight's energy at theoretical maximum. In reality, your home's position on the globe and the variability of weather mean that you will probably need a backup system of some kind, such as wind.

Try fitting a system that requires vast, immobile panels onto a car. The Sunrayce Competition promotes the idea of solar powered vehicles, but so far the machines lag behind in reliability and power - and even are deficient in such exotic concepts as "passenger seats".

Solar power is the way to go. It's free, it's unlimited from a practical standpoint, and it's clean. But we aren't there yet.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!

Sticks and Stones may break my bones but FUD will never concern me.

Well, you and most of the others commenting on this issue are sure willing to spread the FUD around....

1) Car battery disposal is not a major pollution problem (manufacture being another issue). Those little ever-readies that you're tossing blithely into the trash are one of the most pressing ecological issues of our time, but people driving electric cars recycle ALL their batteries (the spent cores are quite valuable) and most gas vehicle batteries are also recycled.

2) Point source pollution (i.e. power plants) is easier to control/prevent than distributed pollution (cf. privately operated internal combustion engines). Gas lawn mowers are one of the principal causes of air pollution in the US, incidentally.

3) Many people are supplied power from hydro, wind, or photovoltaic sources. If you actually become a part of the electric vehicle underground you will find that many people are generating their own power, or use power from commercial "green" providers.

Your statement "yes the energy does come from some coal or oil burning plant" is thus incorrect through overgeneralization, which makes it relatively accurate compared to most of what's being posted here. Your comments on ethanol and car prices are similarly FUDular.

Alternative Energy Engineering

Electro Automotive

Energy Conversion Devices, Inc.

Greenpeace International Homepage

Home Power Magazine

innEVations

Jerry Halstead's Car

Low Rolling Resistance Tires

Phoenix EAA

Roofing Systems

Unique Mobility

Wilde EVolutions catalog

United Solar Systems Home Page

People are doing this even as you whine it isn't possible/feasible. Home Power writes about it in every issue.

BTW, Home Power Magazine is produced with a bunch of Macs by a bunch of pretty interesting people who are by no means 'typical magazine' folks. These guys are more like a big family.

People are doing this even as you whine it isn't possible/feasible. Home Power writes about it in every issue.

BTW, Home Power Magazine is produced with a bunch of Macs by a bunch of pretty interesting people who are by no means 'typical magazine' folks. These guys are more like a big family.

I'm really glad that you pointed out the link to Homepower.com, because one of the things I've been thinking about is how communities can become more self-reliant and how we can eliminate single points of failure.

The power plant, right now, is a single point of failure, which is why it's so detrimental when it fails. Something like electricity has to be distributed.

My vision is a world of self-sustainable, self-governing communities, where worthless buildings such as McDonalds and Starbucks have either been replaced with miniature power plants or torn down to make way for community gardens and agriculture.

But that just might be the anarchist in me talking. ;)

One last thing, have any wobblies noticed that the image they use for Home Power is very *very* similar to the IWW sabotage cat?

Compare here and here.

Michael Chisari
mchisari@usa.net

My general plan is to ignore that there are humans anywhere around. They usually do the wrong thing and so they've been taught to keep there hands off the entire thing.

I never use more than 50% of the UPSes rated capacity. It gets better run times out of them and stresses them less. Often the UPSes are the only remaining power at a place and the temperatures in these places are often into the 90s while the UPSes are still doing their thing. Less load means they can effectively withstand more heat before they reach the end of the batteries. Further, things that matter more are more apt to be on their own UPSes, so they last the longest (given similar sized UPSes).

I avoid APC UPSes, since several I've had them fail in odd and unexpected ways (in particular boiling batteries so they reach end-of-life way too early.) APC is hitting a price point, not a quality point and has been unfriendly to the OSS movement. I've had very good luck with Best and SOLA

If you run Unix (or FreeBSD or Linux or...) I suggest UPSD to baby sit your systems. Most of the sites I take care of are effectively 'lights out' (i.e. nobody that is a systems person is there regularly) and UPSD has served me well. Power fails at site X and UPSD emails me. I can then call (being up to a continent away) and manage the problem as need be. Don't forget to UPS the phone system.

I've found that most of the time the outages come in two possible groups. 0-30 minutes and 2.5hrs and more. I make sure that all of the 0-30 kind of events are fully protected. Without generators the 2.5 hr kinds are not practically covered by normal UPSes. If you're prone to lots of power failures, then go look at Home Power Magazine and in particular Trace Engineering systems. The theme is generate your own power 24/7 and be much more reliable as long as one does some minimal maintenance.

Finally, all the UPSes are tested annually for run times and the batteries are replaced at slightly longer intervals than the manuals suggest. Also be sure the that users have flashlights or other emergency lights that work. I test those lights too, since no one else gives a damn about emergency lighting.

is that, much like asbestos, they are harmless until disturbed. My college runs alot of it's electrical transformers with pcb coolant - it works really well, and when they finally have to remove it, the only thing they will be able to do is knock a hole in the basement wall and carry the entire machine out.

But the article raises a good point: conventional methods of power generation (for example) are only "cheaper" because the bulk of their expense comes in the form of incidental medical expenses incurred by the community. The power company can light up your lightbulbs cheaply, but if they had to pay all of the cancer and lung health expenses caused by the smoke they pour into the air, even mr. Gates himself wouldn't be able to afford the electricity.

This boils down to an adult version of pushing your vegetables around your plate because you don't want to eat them. In the end, the solution is clear: invest in the research and development of solar and wind based technologies. These power sources are cleaner than fossil fuel tech, and most of their cost is in the form of people: solar and wind tech employs more people (at all skill levels) than any fossil fuel tech. If you count the incidental health costs, solar is cheaper than coal, and even without the health costs, solar is competitive in many areas.

In the end, the headline reads correctly in either direction: pollution causes stupidity, and stupidity causes pollution.

For more info, check out www.homepower.com, a great online solar resource.

You all are out of touch with the renewable energy field, these type of solar panels have been around since at least 1992.

If you want to explore solar and other renewable energy sources and applications, you might want to check out the best magazine to get info about it. http://www.homepower.com/

These folks have the monthly magazine "Home Power" and are pioneers in supplying their magazine in downloadable form on the net.

They also run their household and publish the magazine entirely "off the grid" with solar and some wind power.

There are no phone lines to their remote homestead, so they use a long distance radio link for voice AND a data link for the internet.

They have a bunch of computers, and are ham radio operators as well. They totally qualify as geeks.

Go Solar...

I got a brand-new solar panel system on my house right now, and it started pumping wattage into the city's grid yesterday.

To see how much of a battery bank you need to exist off-grid, you have to:

1. Calculate or measure your power consumption (including losses in wiring, inverters, etc).
2. Determine how long you have to go without recharging.
3. Multiply power by time to get energy.
4. Get a battery bank which will store that much energy.

This is not rocket science, and I'm amazed that you asked the question without doing your homework. If you want more information, surf over to Home Power magazine for a good place to start.
--
Deja Moo: The feeling that

True, though I doubt houses use 100 amps 24 hours a day!

Most current and new houses, and appliances (yes, PCs are guzzlers, but Netwinders and Laptops aren't) are based on the assumption of cheap power. Off-grid solar houses of today use MUCH less power, which is obvious when you consider the solar panel cost of driving the typical energy-inefficient house of today.

Some solar installations are designed to supply high peak power through more batteries -- it's not unusual for a solar home to be able to power all typical shop tools, but maybe not all at once. Ideally one can use "the (solar) grid" to supply the high peak power demands.

I'm no expert so check it out: Home Power Magazine, www.crest.org, Nation Renewable Energy Laboratory.

(*) Deployed means at significantly greater than the ~2% penetration now.

The editorial staff of Home Power advocates renewable because it's good for the planet. No disagreement from me on that point. However, they take the pragmatic attitude that solar/renewable is *NOT* cost effective. This, unfortunately, is true enough, under the current paradigm of "put panels on your roof, and hope for the best".

What if, some significant fraction of those (we) employed Boomers/Yuppies, invested our pension funds in a "Solar Farm" (for lack of a better term) instead of the bloody stock market.

A solar farm something along the lines of a remote (i.e. cheap land) but grid-connected site, with an array of energy collectors (solar, wind, micro-hydro), some kind of storage (elevated water tank with 100 meters of head?) in order to sell only at peak rates, a contract to sell *pure* green power (perhaps on a spot market: perhaps www.utility.com if they can be convinced to *buy* distributed as well as sell distributed), and a commitment to re-invest *all* farm-generated revenue into the energy-gathering activity of the farm, until retirement.

Exponential growth, anyone? De-centralized power generation, anyone? Ethical investing, anyone? Deployed renewable energy, anyone? First world solar, anyone?

Flame away. But remember: someone is going to make money from something along these lines. Why not us? And, why not help the planet at the same time?

(Or do you *want* to retire on Social Security?)