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Students Show Off Super-Efficient Solar Homes
mmol_6453 writes "An article at voanews.com describes the 'first-ever solar decathalon,' where the students show off effecient solar-powered homes." As a former Airstream resident, tiny efficient homes have a special place in my heart. Anyone in the D.C. area who can get out there and take pictures, links to photos would be much appreciated in comments.
They've clearly never been to Scotland then. If it's raining 'all' the time you genuinely do have less sunlight ;-)
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Often the compliment of a lot of rainy and cloudy weather is plenty of wind. But you're right, sun is not a constant, there's also the lattitude factor as well.
The politicos solution, build solar power capacity... Only problem is they would have to cover 1/2 of southern California to cover the power debt that this area has. What they need to do is build 3-4 Nuke plants that will take up a small area, and supply the power needed to run this place for real.
Solar is a nice niche way to produce a little bit of power, but when you need multiple MegaWatts, nothing beats a real source of power that can be depended on for decades to come Time for another (Mod -1 Troll) for me, but at least I will tell it like it is
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
I just found a retraction on the web and wrote it up on my website. Check out the two articles right at the top about the Daily Evergreen plagarizing a joke page about a Filopino ship being named "the big ass spanish boat".
Go ahead and mod me down, it's OK. But I just had to tell somebody.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Ok I just realized my math was off there, so $3000 would have each house produce 1kW, which would mean you would need 1000 homes per megawatt, or 3000 homes for 3 megawatts, aka a "few" megawatts.
That said, for very small niche applications it is nice, but when you have an industrial deficit of electricity, you need to build power plants, and frankly no one here is willing to do that in California (gotta love the BANANA people)
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
Your numbers need a bit more adjusting. $3/hr might buy you the panels if you're getting a heavy subsidy from somewhere. You may want to get an inverter and batteries to actually run your house off of those panels though. I think we got quoted at $8-10/W total. You also might want to account for the fact that you're only getting about 8-10 hours of usable sunlight per day. Another thing to check is how many homes and how much money it will cost if you actually scale your generation up to the size of a nuclear power plant. A large plant (Palo Verde in Arizona) does about 3700 MWh.
Well, like I mentioned tax rebates and power company incentives bring it down to that point. Also, in my area the power company will allow you to reverse the meter (thus helping put more power back in the system when they need it most), elminating or at least reducing the need for a large battery system. I forget if you still require an inverter using that system... I forget the details of how the systems work.
Finding the electricity attained from covering an entire county in panels is crazy, not like that's going to happen. Lets be even MORE realistic!:
.070 watts/sq inch * 8 hrs = .56 w*hrs/sq-in
... that translates to a 100ft*100ft panel for each house.
Monthly average residential consumption of electricity in the United States in 1999 was 866 kilowatt hours. (Source: US DOE)
Now that thats out of the way, luckily you live in California and get 8 hrs of sunshine every day (optimistic!).
So at
(source: http://howstuffworks.com)
so 866,000 W*hrs/(.56 W*hrs/sq-in) = 1546428 sq-in
While even this may be feasible, thats much larger than most roofs where I life (and others I've seen).
Plus! A 17ft * 17ft panel costs $16,000 (source: http://howstuffworks.com) so its hardly even financially feasible. (Even if you saved all your money for all your electric bills for 10 years.)
- Rob
WebMaster:
BinFeeds
XXX Thumbnailed Image Newsgroups but
http://www.solartech.umd.edu/IMAGES/progresspics/p rogress13/P9047464.jpg
Haha! Thou hast given me the (Score: -1, Redundant) of shame, but it does not hurt, for I am Karma Whorez0|2 and cannot be defeated!
The idea that solar panels take more energy to manufacture than they produce in their lifetime is not true. It is NOT a zero-sum process. Assuming solar panels require about 40% of the energy they will produce in their lifetime to manufacture, you are getting a 150% return on energy investment.
Solar panels are certainly energy intensive and dirty to manufacture-- but they get a whole lot cleaner after your first generation:
1. make panel from energy from fossil fuel
2. put panel on roof
3. use energy from panel to make next panel
This, of course, doesn't remove the need for nasty semiconductor manufacturing chemicals, but there IS a net gain. The system isn't zero-sum because the sun is dumping a whole lot of energy into it. You DO get more out than you put in. 150% more, roughly.
Whether that's enough to make it worth it financially is a different question altogether.
Screw photovoltaic cells. A solar/radiant heat powered Sterling engine driving a conventional electric generator is the way to go for a cleanly manufaturable generator.
Granted you still have to deal with the smelter polution for the metals in the generator, but metal smelting is nowhere near as dirty as semiconductor manufacture.