Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Correct me If I am wrong... but... we are producing 1kW with our pretend $3000 array on our house. Now, lets say you get that peak power for 8 hours a day. 8 hours *7 days * 4 weeks we get 224kilowatt-hours each month. * your rate... .1103... we get $24.70 as your monthly return... without factoring any of the other benefits (clean energy, power outages not as large a problem, etc...). It will take about 10 years for the array to pay for itself. However, as I mentioned before, this is about alot more than just saving money. You are pretty lucky, in my area rates average 16 cents per kWh, making monthy savings about $35.
Throwing about hyperbole does not help
.01 = .031 KWh/m2/day
.031 = 343 x 10^6 Kwh/day
Doing a quick calculation and using the sq mileage for San Diego County of 4281 sq miles and the nominal energy density of solar at that latitude of 3.1 KWh/m^s/day and a 1% conversion factor gives:
3.1 KWh/m^2/day *
4281 Sq Miles * 2.58 x 10^6 Sq Meters/ Sq Miles = 11 x 10^9
11 x 10^9 x
Or 343,000 Megawatts-Hours for a small California county.
Not that I am proposing to cover an entire county with PV panels but if you are going to "tell it like it is" then do.
BTW, can we bury the Nuclear afterproducts in your backyard?
> but at least I will tell it like it is
Or at least how right-wing kooks want you to believe it is.
You're overlooking two things. First, solar thermal. Most of our power demands are for thermal applications, which are cheap and easy to do with solar. Photovoltaics get all the press because they're "sexy", even though they don't collect much power.
Second, demand. It's very, very easy to lower demand without changing lifestyle, because we currently waste enormous amounts of energy. California demonstrated that during the last manufactured energy crisis. Basically, if *any* effort is made to lower energy use, demand drops dramatically. In particular, it's easier, cheaper, and affects our lifestyle less to lower demand, rather than pouring more money into centralized power generation so we can turn around and waste it again.
PV cells are clean? It sure would be nice if everyone could ignore the costs of manufacture. Just because it generates energy from sunlight you are already getting doesn't make it clean.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
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