Slashdot Mirror
Switching To Solar Power – One Month Later
ThinSkin writes "After an interesting article on solar panel installation for the home, Loyd Case at ExtremeTech has written a follow-up after about a month of normal use. Posting an $11.34 electric bill (roughly 3% of previous months), Loyd shares his experiences using solar power and how it can be fun for the geek, with computer monitoring services and power generation data. Of course, solar power isn't all fun and games, given the amount of required maintenance — even unpredictable maintenance, like wiping off accumulated ash from fires in Northern California."
From TFA:
It was arranged so that PG&E will never have to pay you money.
There is also a $5 "connection fee" each month, so your smallest possible annual bill will be about $50. I used to hit that with a 4kW array (minute-by-minute stats are available).
So he saved about $330/month. It cost him $36K (which really cost $50K, but let's say). So it'll take 109 months to get back the money, or 9 years, not adjusting for inflation and investment opportunity cost. Let's say that brings it up to 12 years. Not including maintenance and repairs. It might even need complete replacement at that point. At 50K, which is the real cost, we're talking more like 16-18 years.
That's still a bit too long an investment for this to be really practical. Prices need to come down to about a four year payoff before I'd be really interested.
On another subject, I'm kind of glad to see someone who actually uses more electricity than I do. :)
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
There are indeed losses, but much less than you propose. Most solar DC to AC inverters are 90-93% efficient in their conversions - so only a 7-10% loss. http://www.beaconpower.com/products/SolarInverterSystems/docs/M4_M5_plus_datasheet_web.pdf The same goes for the conversion back to DC on the equipment side.
Residential solar installations typically have no batteries, so there is no maintenance cost for batteries, nor replacement costs. This type of installation uses the grid as a kind of giant battery, feeding power to the grid during the day and drawing from the grid at night.
Try Europe where you can get 35 hour work weeks and 35% unemployment.
I guess that the statistics would disagree, but why let facts get in your way!
Ahhh, what an awful dream. Ones and zeroes everywhere... and I thought I saw a two.
He says he put in $36,000 and will save $3,300 per year in payments to the power company. Now the historical annual rate of return of an S&P 500 index fund is 11.3% over the last century, so $36K put there would return over $4,000 -- enough to pay the $3,300 to the grid, have $700 left over and of course, still keeping the principal.
You're comparing apples and oranges here. If people always invested solely based on maximizing the expected average rate of return, then bank CDs wouldn't exist, bonds wouldn't exist, real estate and REITs wouldn't exist, etc. In reality, people are balancing the expected rate of return against variability. The reason bank CDs are paying something pathetic like 4% right now is that the banks have to guarantee that they'll pay you 4% on your money. The bank is essentially charging you for insurance against negative variability. Although there are a lot of unknowns involved in buying PV (what will electric rates do in the future? how much will the technology improve), they're a lot less than the unknowns involved in stocks. My S&P 500 index fund is down 19% from its peak value last year. There's a reason that most people build a balanced investment portfolio that includes both stocks and bonds; it's because mixing volatile and nonvolatile investments is a way of maximizes your expected rate of return for a given amount of risk that you're willing to accept.
And grid power might go up, but only so far. Because eventually the grid power hits the solar price, and the grid itself starts putting in solar sources at that price -- because it's cheaper.
Your logic doesn't work. When you own a PV system, you're part of "the grid itself." When I'm at work during the day, my PV panels are pumping energy into the grid, which is selling it to other customers. In my area, grid power has hit the solar price, for a south-facing roof with no shade; that's why I, a homeowner with a south-facing roof and no shade, have put in a PV system. You seem to be assuming that if rates go above a certain threshold, the entire state of California will suddenly magically cover itself with PV panels, because that will be the right thing to do according to the laws of supply and demand. That doesn't make sense, for a couple of reasons. First, there are huge variations in the price of land, the local cost of electricity, the amount of sunlight, which way people's roofs face, and how much shade they get. Second, there's a barrier to covering every house with PV panels, which is that most homeowners are short on capital. Your idea that the whole grid would suddenly go solar at some threshold is like imagining that everybody will suddenly drive a hydrogen-powered car if gas goes over $6 a gallon. We're talking about a massive infrastructure that doesn't change overnight.
Find free books.
in terms of measuring live solar data, there's an open source project at: http://www.solarnetwork.net/ that is collecting and charting live data from Outback, MorningStar and Xantrex devices. let me know if anyone has an interest in participating, or leave a note on the site. thanks!
Grid tie equipment is required to have automatic disconnection systems. Also, the linemen can pretty much wave a wand at the lines to see if they are live or not...
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Well done on assuming that Europe is one big member state with exactly the same health care, unemployment and whatever other statistics you want to quote.
No, France, Germany and the UK have completely different medical services, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. And that's just 3 countries, out of 27 in the EU alone.
They also have quite different levels of unemployment, but none of them are even close to the 35% you're quoting, they're more akin to about 6% or 7%. In fact, Slovakia is the highest at around 10%, still nowhere near what you're quoting. I'd like to see some sources for that bullshit.
What's more, you speak of the medical care in these countries as if it's vastly inferior to your own just because it doesn't always work out for the best for some people - yet you don't seem to realise that in the USA (I'm assuming that's where you're from based on your lack of knowledge about the EU) if you don't have health insurance, you're basically fucked if you get hit with anything worse than a bacterial infection or a broken bone. Sure, you might live, but you'll spend the rest of your life trying to pay that ridiculously bloated medical bill.
I'm not saying things are better in the EU, I've yet to see a "perfect" medical system, but to talk about it as if it flat out doesn't work is ludicrous. Quite frankly the British National Health Service is one of the best things to ever happen to the country, despite is flaws and failures - the fact that it's still around after more than half a century proves this and the first politician to suggest scrapping it is going to be performing political suicide.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Inverters designed for feeding excess power back into the grid not only must maintain phase lock but usually have provisions to continuously detect if the line has lost external power. If the utility power drops for any reason then the inverter disconnects and stops feeding power back into the line.
Not that it makes a difference in the overall argument (that none of the EU nations are anywhere close to 35% unemployment). But due to differing definitions of "unemployed" in different countries, perhaps a better measure of overall employment is per capita work force (basically, number of employed workers divided by total population). France and especially Italy do markedly worse by this measure than their unemployment figures would indicate (approx 8% and 11% lower than the U.S.). But it's still nowhere near supporting the initial 35% claim.
currently power generation is more valuable during the day, because thats when it is most used (especially in A/C dominated CA.)
That is the likely reason for a retail price compensation OK for solar generated by day. The solar is likely displacing more pricey natural gas, for cheaper coal/nuclear. Also possibly reducing net line load from the factory during peak draw...
Australia has a typical 37.5-38 hour work week (excluding lunch, so 40 hours including a 30ish minute lunch) and record low unemployment.
And public health care.
And a pension system for those who cannot work.
And an economy kicking the US's...
Disinformation and selective quotation at work. Do you work for the USA private health insurers?
Let's check:
To really inform slashdot readers you might add that more than 80% of private health insurance is done by ... not for profit, and that the share of not for profit vs for profit has increased by 10% over the past years. It might help USA citizens understand a few things about how private "for profit" is really working.
"private" health insurance covers less than 25% of costs, 75% comes from the mandatory public system.
And in the special case of France, the private not for profit insurance has nothing to do with government efficiency as always there's some ideology and creative accounting at work ("chronic deficits" is a political choice). Administrative costs of health insurance are 6% in France vs 15% in the USA, if you want to increase waste you know what to do.
For reference I cannot choose my private complementary health insurance provider which is the one of my employer by law (private market ? eh eh), I pay around 30 euros per month for it.
Social Security? IRS? Medicare? Please... there is nothing transparent about government waste. If it weren't for market based funding there would be no improvements in the health care system. Who do you think is going to do drug research for free?
Try Europe where you can get 35 hour work weeks and 35% unemployment. There everyone has the same mediocre health care and they STILL have to have insurance if they want any care beyond antibiotics or the setting of a broken bone.
Just a few minor corrections:
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.