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Solar Power Eliminates Utility Bills in U.S. Home
skyhawker writes "Yahoo! News is running an article about a New Jersey home that uses solar power to provide 100% of its energy needs, including fuel for the owner's hydrogen fuel cell-powered automobile. From the article: 'Strizki runs the 3,000-square-foot house with electricity generated by a 1,000-square-foot roof full of photovoltaic cells on a nearby building, an electrolyzer that uses the solar power to generate hydrogen from water, and a number of hydrogen tanks that store the gas until it is needed by the fuel cell. In the summer, the solar panels generate 60 percent more electricity than the super-insulated house needs. The excess is stored in the form of hydrogen which is used in the winter -- when the solar panels can't meet all the domestic demand -- to make electricity in the fuel cell.'"
How MY neighbors would feel if I loaded up their roof with solar cells...
Hmm?
And this is the reason so few people (including me) are "green".
Deleted
I'll get right on that!
He eliminated his electric bill, but couldn't eliminate the fact that he is in New Jersey.
I just read all 37 pages of the Home Owners Association guide. While it doesn't strictly forbid solar panels on the roof, They are going to have to be the right color and anything visible has to be approved before construction. They definitely don't want any windmills, decorative or otherwise, not even as part of the mailbox!
So how, exactly, can I put some of this technology to work in stealth mode? Apparently this is not part of the neighborhood beautification plan?
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From the article:
"Caminiti argues that the cost of the hydrogen/solar setup works out at about $4,000 a year when its $100,000 cost is spread over the anticipated 25-year lifespan of the equipment. That's still a lot higher than the $1,500 a year the average U.S. homeowner spends on energy, according to the federal government."
Still interesting tho.
Don't sever your connection. If you have any surplus energy, the supplier will pay you for it.
nothing
From the article:
Caminiti argues that the cost of the hydrogen/solar setup works out at about $4,000 a year when its $100,000 cost is spread over the anticipated 25-year lifespan of the equipment. That's still a lot higher than the $1,500 a year the average U.S. homeowner spends on energy, according to the federal government. Even if gasoline costs averaging about $1,000 per car annually are included in the energy mix, the renewables option is still more expensive than the grid/gasoline combination.Mind you, once you've bought the equipment, there are only the maintenance costs over that 25 years, where as the price of energy will undoubtedly continue to increase. And the price of solar cells is dropping, so the cost may go lower than $100,000. I for one would love to have solar -- not having to pay for electricity, being able to run my Christmas lights 365 days a year, and not losing my power in a blackout. Also, if you generate excess electricity, you can sell it to the utility companies, and actually make a buck when you have excess power.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Solar power is nice since it does not pollute when in use and generating power. However, mass production of solar cells is very taxing for the environment. So I can't help but wondering which is worse: 1000 sq. ft. (which is, accounting for chip packaging and other overhead, still a HUGE silicon area) or heating the old fashioned way (e.g. with gas, which is less polluting than say coal, and using decent insulation) and using a car that is not a fuel-hungry SUV...
place by not paying the bill 6 months in a row. It's amazing, your monthly electric costs will drop to 0 very quickly!
Monstar L
People are whining about how it costs a half-million dollars. It is so expensive because of low volume. We need early adopters like this guy to start the ball rolling. Once more people buy into this form of energy production, the cheaper it will become.
Why bother.
For those who don't want to bother with the expense of buying and installing your own PV system, there's Renu. With a $500 deposit, they'll design and install an grid-tied PV system for you and charge you only for what it produces at the current rate, which you can lock in for 5 or 25 years. And if you've got a 25 year contract they'll move the system when you move.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Of course it will be expensive for the early adopters. But as solar panels mature, and more energy independence options become available, it will be much more economically feasible. The first people to do this don't do it for the monetary savings (or if they do, they're wrong), they do it to make a statement that it can be done.
Yeah, at $0.5M US, it's a steep price to pay just to be free of utility bills, or just to be "green". But please don't forget that it still has value.
;-)
This early adopter is proving that you *can* be self-sufficient using solar energy. That's a big deal. And, if a people -- and more importantly, organizations -- start seeing solar energy as having potential, more people will fund research into improving the technology and making it cheaper. At least, that's the hope.
Early adopters help drive the price of technology down, so don't be so quick to judge this guy's choice -- he's helping to make solar power more available to the masses, in his own small way.
Besides, in being the first, he'll probably make back his $500K in promotional considerations and/or the lecture circuit.
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
Sure it's not cost effective. Prototypes and one-offs rarely are.
As a proof-of-concept, though, it's highly successful. This guy is demonstrating, not just hand-waving, that one can be entirely energy self-sufficient through solar power, even with the crappy efficiency of current mass produced photovoltaic panels.
Find a way to increase the efficiency and/or drop the price of the panels (and H2 storage system, fuel cells, etc) and it starts to look really attractive. More so if you want to build somewhere way off-grid. And without some of the attendant problems of a windmill.
The next time somebody argues that you can't live off-grid just on solar power, you can point to this guy. Then the argument comes down to cost-effectiveness, which depends on a lot of other factors.
-- Alastair
Hi all,
My wife and I have been building a green, eco-friendly home in the heart of oil-city Canada - Calgary, Alberta. We have been blogging about our experiences at ramsayhome.com. We have had quite the experience so far...we had to fire our first contractor, dismantle some of the work, continue with a new contractor, etc. Everything is back on-track though and we will be posting some new pictures this weekend.
From TFA: the cost of the installation was about $500,000, including about $50,000 of lead acid batteries.
I would suggest that the environmental impact of building this house, and recycling the consumables far outweighs the lowered energy consumption.
Just recycling an estimated 1 ton of toxic, heavy metal, lead a year (assuming 10 ton installation with life expectancy of 10 years), has a big environmental impact.
Solar panel manufacturing also consumes a lot of resources, and end up not beeing so clean overall.
A $500,000 investment would probably give a thousand times better ROI if it was spent on pollution reduction in india or china, or to save rainforest.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Yes, I'm a green and I act like an entrepeneur, not a terroist. From the article:
"You need to make the financing within reach of real people," Wentworth said.
That part is done as you'll see at my home page: http://www.jointhesolution.com/mdsolar
You can get solar for no more than you're paying now for electricity, no installation fee, no permit hassles, and no rate increases for up to 25 years.
I love what Mr. Strizki has done but I wish he'd heard of this opportunity first.
A big tank of pure hydrogen gas in your basement, eh? That's great! I don't see what could possibly go wrong with that.
In fact, you should celebrate a job well done. Have a cigar!
/run
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Most solar panels are covered under warranty for 80% of their maximum rated power output for 25 years, and the panels themselves are generally expected to last around 40 years, though efficency does decline over time.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
It's crucial to realize that it's not important what the average homeowner pays per year for energy. What's important is how many homeowners pay more than $4000 per year for energy.
many people would balk at the $100,000/25 year price tag of this solar home. that's 4000 per year for yout energy needs. Right now people pay about 1000 to 1500 per year on gasoline for their cars and another 1000+ to heat their homes. THe article says that people pay $1500 fo their energy needs but I suspect that might be per person not per home, since the figure is too low.
Since it's certain that energy costs are going to rise faster than inflation it seems like locking in $4000 per year cost would be terrific. So the real issue is capitalizing this up front, and working to make it even more affordable.
Moreover, if everyone did this then my tax bill could remove some of the kilobucks I spend on military, homeland security, oil industry subsidy, and heath and environment costs for pollution.
this guy is using solar to generate hydrogen so he can store the energy for winter time and run his car. That storage and conversion to transportation fuels is perhaps more significant than the efficiency.
It seems very likely to me that nanotechnology break thoughs are the kind of thing likely to at least double or quadruple the efficiency of going from solar to hydrogen, and probably have a similar effect on the conversion of hydrogen back to locomotion or electricity. So I could see the cost of this dropping in a couple decades. Does that mean we should wait for that? Id' say no. just like the pharma industry, the huge profits have also bought lots of medical research.
If the world power consumption stays on its current growth rate, and if anything it's poised to accelerate, then by 2040 we will need to double the worlds energy production. To put this in perspective, if you were doing this via nuclear power alone it would mean building a gigawatt plant every day for the next 30 years. There is not enough water to do it with biofuels unless there is a breakthrough. One can do it with Shale oil, but the carbon load will create a crisis. So while shale oil may clamp the price of oil, carbon sequestration will up the cost. It's very easy to imagine that world wide competition for energy will either lead to enormous prices, environmental crisis or war, unless steps are taken to create a variable marketbasket of more environmental and cost effective renewable energy sources. Oil will always be part of the mix but it can't be the only source.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It's more than a transmission charge for wishing to backfeed electricty onto the grid.
When you have any solar system installed while being ON-Grid you will get your own accessable automatic system disconnect to remove you from the grid when the grid goes down to prevent "islanding" (you backfeeding electricty on the grid which could cause a repair lineman to be killed). The elec co's may also put in their own inacessable (to you) automatic disconnect which they then charge you rental fees on in most cases. So yes by code you must have your own disconnect on the system, as well as possibly having the elec. co's one as well.
Also many Elec Co's don't actually PAY you for the electrity you pump back out onto the grid, they have gone to a credit sytem, and they may limit how much of a "credit" you can recieve per year from them for backfeeding.
And on top of all that, as you mentinoed, you may get charged a seperate "backfeed" fee.
So really depending on the state you live in, the Elec Co you use, and the regulations they have in place it may NOT be feasible at all to go with an ON-Grid system that backfeeds but instead setup a Hybrid system where appliances that draw high AMPs on startup (like A/C units, refridgerators, freezers) are on standard grid outlets, while the grid feed is seperated from the output of your solar system and only used to seperately charge the batteries when the panels don't supply sufficent juice to charge them.
Oh and don't think you can get away by doing stealth solar backfeeds, most new meters they install these days won't run backwards, and if they think you are backfeeding they can easily swap out your old one with one of the newer models.
Parent poster is spreading FUD that hasn't been true for decades. Modern solar panels have a much longer life expectancy these days and enough bang for the buck to make the conversion worthwhile in expensive energy markets like New Jersey. I wonder if Elmer FUD here works for an energy company.
Incidentally, many homes across America have been "off the grid" for some time now. The solar array here is not news at all, nor is it even unusual among alternative energy enthusiasts. http://homepower.com/ has bee documenting this sort of thing for many years now.
What is the Energy Payback for PV?
Energy Payback of Roof Mounted Photovoltaic Cells
If you bring the insulation in the walls to about R50 (fibergalss is fine) and the ceiling to about R70 then you can get rid of the furnace. The cost of insulating the house is going to be in the taking the walls apart and putting them back together... the isulation itself should cost you about a buk per square foot.
Along with this you want to install a very good vapour barrier and calk the plastic together. Air seepage is a major loss of energy. Use a heavy polyethlene sheeting as well. Remember - you only need to do this once and after it is done it will pay you dividends for as long as you own the place. When you sell it make sure you ask for a premium.
Next... the way to do this is to screw a 2x2 spacer onto the studs. Then screw a 2x2 to the spacer. Use about 3 of them per stud. The extension should make the wall exactly 1 foot thicker. This is sort of important for the finishing.
The windows and doors will then be in pockets. You probably won't want to feel like you are looking through a tunnel.
So get some mirror tiles (1 foot by 1 foot) and glue them to the sides of the window frame. That will finish it nicely. Get a nice floor tile and glue it to the bottom. Now you can put plants in the windows where they belong! Any water will not bother the tiles.
You'll have to move all of the electrical services of course... and with the walls apart you may as well wire it properly. Put plugs near the corners... within say 30" of the corners. People like to put coffee tables and end tables in corners and need plugs nearby. Many contractors like to put the plug in the middle of the wall. This is a pain. Their reasoning must be that you can always pull the couch out and use an extension cord.
While you are at it - install at least cat 5 and lots of telephone jacks and cable TV jacks. These should not be daisy chained together like electrical... they should run back to a service center. Label everything with plastic tags that won't fall off.
These little details will not cost you much and it is just so NICE to be able to have a separate phone line for instance for the kids or for a tenant down the track. Make sure you have two phone jacks in each drop... the duplex boxes cost about the same as the singles and you might want to add a fax someday.
Note: The future of telephones is probably VoIP and you might want to run an Asterix server someday as this will provide both local and long distance services to any other asterix server at no cost. This means you can probably call up your phone company and tell them to take a hike and cancel your services. This alone will pay for the wiring in about a year or less.
Finally... if you can figure out a way... see if you can provide a way to run fiber optics. I _think_ one way might be to just install plastic conduit into each room. Its pretty easy to fish whatever cables you might need in the future through a conduit. I've not priced this out... Also - talk to an electrician about how the fishing will be done. Electricians are brlliant at this.
I redid my house about 10 years ago. I made some mistakes and not thinking far enough ahead was the big one. So I ended up trying to figure how I could run 10base-T over TV cables. Now we have wireless.
But I still think that in the future if we get fiber to the house then we'll want fiber in the house... and this means to each room.
Before you start... watch Total Recall. Arnie and Stone have a gorgeous view from their window. Note this scene... its not a window - its a flat panel display that looks like a window. I expect these will be common place within about a decade.
Regardless where people live they tend to live in houses most of the time and look out windows. I see no reason why a camera can't be mounted at a nice beach and the image displayed in real time in a display that looks like a window. The displays are being built by companies like Westaim (wed.to) http://www.westaim.co
The interior is heated with a single wood-stove. It also uses deep-well windows fixed to aim at the Sun during the Winter months, using glass treated with a one-way filter for IR light. Even in the depths of Winter, you find yourself stripping down to tank-tops and tee shirts at almost no fuel expenditure. This is the most impressive use of insulation I've ever heard of. I don't know any of the R-values or other engineering quantities of the various materials.
Insulation. It isn't sexy, but when applied properly, it's the single cheapest and most effective way to keep a home warm in the winter.
By contrast, I was renting a 100 year-old house with terrible insulation; even with a new roof and lots of high-tech fiberglass pink, we were paying stupid heating bills which were basically a quarter of our monthly rent. Sounds like your situation.
As an experiment, I lined one of the exterior walls, (on the inside), with tin foil which I covered over with cloth, leaving about an inch of space between the cloth and the foil. The idea is that the foil reflects the IR back into the room. (Like an empty chip bag; when you hold your hand inside and do not touch the plastic/foil then your hand quickly starts to heat up.) This in combination with the facts that heat rises, and that the room was on the top floor, the results were that it was the coziest room in the whole building; always at least 5 to 10 degrees warmer than anywhere else in the house under normal heating conditions.
When I finally get around to building my own place, I'll be investing heavily the smart use of lots of insulation. Buying lots of heating fuel or electricity to heat should be totally unnecessary given the technology we currently possess.
-FL
Solar water heating is very inexpensive and environmentally friendly (because no solar cells are actually needed, just something to soak up the sun's heat and a heat exchanger). You generally want to get a closed system heat exchanger, with a separate fluid loop, and not actually loop the water heater's water through the solar unit.
Battery backup is *NOT* inexpensive, nor is it environmentally friendly. Only lead-acid batteries have the kind of capacity required and they need maintainance and space and have relatively short lifespans (5-10 years typically). They require a separate charging system and a transfer switch. In short... if you have a good connection to the utility, putting together a battery system is not worth the cost.
The cheapest most environmentally sensitive solar electric system are standard solar panels and a direct grid-tie inverter. Not the shingles or any of the other experimental junk... they just don't have the life span or the efficiency. Zero maintainance, very long life. This is what I have on my roof.
In terms of (almost) zeroing out your electricity bill with net-meetering... well, it is fairly inexpensive if you have a newer home with energey efficient appliances. My system is somewhat bigger then a standard home needs, 2.5KW, and I can't zero out my electricity bill because I have a machine room. Note however that no solar system can even come close to the electricity requirements of a home Air Conditioner. If you need air conditioning you will never be able to zero-out your electricity bill with a standard 'home' solar electric system.
Solar Cell Manufacturing has gotten a lot better over the years. The environmental cost for manufacturing a panel is something like 6 months now vs the 30 year+ lifespan of the panel. Direct grid-tie inverters take up very little space and require no maintainance whatsoever. Generally you want to use a high voltage inverter, where the solar panels are linked in series instead of in parallel. Such inverters are a lot less bulky then LV systems (and the wiring is a lot less bulky too because it is high-voltage and low-current instead of low-voltage and high-current). My recommendation is a Sunny Boy direct-tie inverter. Never use an inverter which requires a fan.
Some states, in particularly California, have extremely good rebate programs. The Federal tax credit is crap.
Neighbors of mine have tried the shingles, and have tried flexible solar mats on their roofs, with terrible results.
http://apollo.backplane.com/Solar/
Funny, I've had two sets of batteries operating concurrently for 16 years and they are as good as the day I acquired them. That's 24 x 2 volt, 660 amp-hour flooded lead-acid cells.
I maintain them carefully, which is probably why I've never had to replace them, whereas others who think that batteries will look after themselves, seem to be replacing theirs every few years, at great expense.
I'm tired of hearing from all these people WITH NO EXPERIENCE WITH PV SYSTEMS telling the world how inadequate such systems are when I've been off-grid for years with no problems ever.
Then there are the guys who buy a PV panel or two, rustle up a few old car batteries, and think they can live utility bill-free forever...then whine like little girls when they don't get the performance they expected and there system craps out in a short time.
It's like any geek project: you have to plan and maintain.
Calculate the size of your PV array, then add another 50% capacity to cover unforseen loads (which always appear). Those who tell you that the juice dries up at the first sight of a cloud are talking out their asses, as usual. You will still get plenty of amps from a decent array on even the cloudiest of days. The only time your PV panel power quits is at night. If in doubt, add a wind generator to your system.
Obtain the heaviest cable you can. I've seen big systems wired together with ridiculously thin stuff, just to save a few bucks. Result? Burning smells, dim lights, and dashed hopes. And do a nice tidy job with all cable runs and connections. Duct tape and blutak just doesn't cut it. Work like a pro or don't waste your time.
Get a decent regulator and inverter. Over-estimate you loads, so that the unit can cope with peaks you otherwise wouldn't have anticipated. And get the type you can download live data from, as the difference it makes in your ability to manage your system is immense. It's hard manage a thing when you have no clue what it's doing. Extra money, yes, but either spend the cash or stick to paying your utility, the Piss-Or-Get-Off-The-Pot plan.
Acquire the correct battery type. Most people seem to want sealed lead-acid or gel types, which is fine, but they are blackboxware, and almost impossible to maintain, since you don't really know what's happening inside them. I've seen many of those type die brand-new. Why? There's no way of knowing. These types may be "cleaner" to have around the home (no electrolyte top-ups), but in the long term they actually cost a lot more, since you have to replace them fairly often, and a random selection of cells are guaranteed to fail prematurely at awkward moments.
I prefer flooded lead-acid cells. No, you can't use cheap car or truck batteries and have a usable system. It'll be fucked within months, or even weeks. And "Marine deep-cycle" batteries are not much better. You have to use the right type, and as far as I'm concerned that's the (usually) 2 volt flooded lead-acid standby/telecommunication variety. Heavy as hell, very expensive to buy new, but will last most people's lifetime, literally, if properly maintained, which means you have to forget all that shit your friend's cousin's brother told you, and learn something. It's not difficult or time-consuming, but the results are very expensive and inconvenient for the retards to lazy or stupid to take the time to do so.
A working off-grid system is perfectly feasible, a fact which many of us with working off-grid systems can and will attest to. Yes, it takes work, time, and money, and probably cost you less to stay on-grid, but if you don't care about that, or have no choice, then it's easily doable, so ignore the fuckwads claiming it isn't, because chances-are good THEY HAVE NO EXPERIENCE AT ALL WITH THE STUFF THEY'RE BLATHERING ON ABOUT.
"In the event of war, my enlistment in the Armed Forces continues until six (6) months after the war ends, unless my enlistment is ended sooner by the President of the United States."
This is the "stop loss" clause. Of course, it might interest you to know that only a few critical job classifications are covered by "stop loss". The way most service members are being held over on active duty has fuck all to do with "stop loss". Morons continue to call all extensions of active duty "stop loss" because they don't bother to do any research. Most service members are actually being held on active duty by a much more mundane thing: contractual obligation.
You see, when you enlist, you are signing up for eight years. Sure, the recruiter said 3 or 4 years of "active duty", but the part the weasel recruiters don't mention is that the 3 or 4 years is only the minimum. They reserve the right to keep you around ducking bullets and crapping in a hole for eight years. When you sign up, you're betting that Uncle Sugar won't have a pressing need for your services at the end. Right now, he does. Tough shit, man. It was in the contract. I know all about this kind of shit. I enlisted for four years originally, and currently have a total of 6 years active duty service time. In my case my reserve unit was called up (twice) rather than me being held over, but it's all the same crap sandwich, really. I'm in my last year of obligation, so it looks like I might be able to keep it at that...
For those interested in how it really works, here is a good overview that will dispell a lot of the ignorance spewed by dumbass journalists and politicians.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
The "war" we are in now is a generational struggle between cultures, like the Cold War. Three is no end in sight.
Nobody in his right mind thinks the troops have signed on for a struggle that is going to last for decades.
If you want to be legalistic, then the only declared war was over Sadaam's WMD. That's long over. We're dicking around in a conflict now. If it were warfare, we'd be winning. It's not and we're not. What it is is nation building. Our guys mostly aren't fighting battles, they're trying to police a country full of hostile inhabitants, a task they're not trained or equipped to do.
Technically, I'm not arguing that the President can't use stop loss. What I'm arguing is that it is morally wrong to use a clause that's there for dealing with a state of war to turn the military into a police force.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.