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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."
trix are for kids mutherfucker!
That's right and responsible energy use is for adults. I like to see things like this, and as some might decry the amount of involvement one must provide to effectively commit to a project along similar lines. Though I personally think people (especially in the U.S.) could really benefit from having to be more involved in the production and usage of the energy they consume.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Simple fix, trade kwh for kwh until net zero is reached and then sell excess for wholesale. Of course you would do this on an estimated annual usage basis just like the 'budget' billing most power consumers have to prevent huge spikes in their bills during certain hot or cold months.
As for putting the power company out of business, I'm all for it. Whoever had the bright idea of privatizing a utility should be shot. Fundemental public services should not be privatized they should be public and operating in a fully transparent manner. Roads, Schools, Libraries, Utilities, and Health Care.
I think this is a long ways off, and I'd imagine that if this starts happening, they'd start installing more/bigger transmission infrastructure, rather than a voluntary-shutoff communications infrastructure. They may even increase their connection fees to do so. The power company wouldn't want all that power to go to waste.
Err, 240*200 = 48kW.
First off, if the solar constant changes by a factor of 4, this guy's wiring is going to be the least of your trouble. Second, NEC ampacity standards are for tolerable voltage drop, not wire overheating. A 200A-rated line will actually carry a lot more than 200A. Third, many of the newer electrical panels have a main breaker that everything goes through. They are thermal, so they don't care which direction the electricity is going through them. If not, the inverter will usually have an output breaker of its own. Fourth, the house itself is consuming a good fraction of the power it's generating.
Geez, what are you, some sort of communist?!
Who wants a working healthcare system when you can privatise it make a big budget surplus to spend on winning votes and create a huge mess that you can blame on your opposition once they're in office.
It's not like heathcare, power & water are vital services or anything...
Two Parts Swash, One Part Buckle
People in third world nations spend a MUCH higher proportion of their total work/income on securing food and energy than we do in the western world. If all you cared about was providing for your basic needs, you could work 10 hours a week, or just sit at home and collect welfare. There are many reasons why people work as much as they do, but the cost of energy has little to do with it. Most of us work because we either find enjoyment in the work itself, or because we want to splurge on luxuries, AND be able to make a statement about our earning ability. Why do you think guys buy expensive cars, and women like wearing flashy jewelry? Because the cost of electricity is so high that it's forcing everyone to buy shiny objects? Don't be a friggin' idiot.
Your ignorance of economic principles is truly mind-numbing.
The word "thinking" doesn't really belong in that sentence ....
By coincidence, today is the day I got my first yearly bill for my new photovoltaic system. Where I live (Orange County, CA, with Southern California Edison as my utility), people who have residential PV systems get billed yearly rather than monthly. A year is also pretty much the minimum amount of time for which you need data in order to find out how your system is performing, since both your energy production and your energy use fluctuate seasonally.
My bill for this year was $353.63. The system is nominally 4.4 kW, and cost $28k after rebate. It's covering about 90% of our use, which was almost exactly what we shot for -- if we produce more than we use over 12 months, they don't pay us for the excess.
People always want to know the number of years until the system pays for itself. Basically that's utterly impossible to predict. There's a reason that they exclude energy from the consumer price index -- it's because energy prices are extremely volatile. If the increased price of fossil fuels starts to be reflected in the cost of electricity, then I'm going to look like a financial genius. The other thing that's completely unknowable is how fast the technology will progress. If there's a breakthrough in technology five years from now, and the price of panels per kilowatt comes down by a factor of two, then I'll wish I'd waited. It's also kind of funny hearing the quick-buck psychological attitude a lot of Americans have toward investing money in something like this; from the way people talk, you'd think they were going to take that money that could have gone into photovoltaics and invest it in some kind of magical pixie dust that was guaranteed to pay a steady 20% annually until the end of time. And finally, beware of anyone making blanket statements about whether PV is ready for prime time or not. It completely depends on factors like the price of electricity in your area, which way your roof faces, your latitude, the amount of cloudy weather, and the amount of shade. PV is like Linux: it's ready for prime time for some people, and it's not ready for prime time for other people.
Find free books.
isn't civilization, and the fact that you think it is indicates a deeply flawed view of the world.
It still doesn't make sense to pay you the same rate that you pay them.
Consider the situation where you produce as much as you consume, but not at the same time. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that you produce lots of power during the day, and then use lots of power during the night, such that the two are equal. Your net power use is therefore 0, but you're pushing lots of electricity to the grid during the day and pulling a lot at night.
Should your bill be zero?
I would argue that it should not. The power company is still maintaining the transmission lines, is still running the generation plants that you rely on at night, and the electricity you're giving them is not going to completely make up for that. The power company in this case is acting as a middleman, in the good sense, in that they ensure that stuff gets to where it needs to be. Middlemen can only make money, and thus provide their service, if the producers charge less money than the consumers pay.
Now, it may very well make sense in a broader political sense to make the rates be the same in order to encourage exactly this sort of independent generating capacity, but from the limited point of view of the economics of electrical generation and distribution, the rates should not be equal.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
hahahahaha, oh man you can't be serious. We all know how effective the government has been at all of those things....
Well, hasn't it? The Roads, Libraries, and Utilities seem to be working just fine under government regulation, at least here in California. Schools are uneven -- some are very good (e.g. most public colleges and universities, and some elementary schools and high schools). Health Care is lousy, but it's the privatized portion that's lousy. The public portion (Medicare, etc) works as advertised.
I think some people are so deep into their cynicism about governmental incompetence that they rarely stop to check if their cynicism is borne out by the facts...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
According to the Wall Street Journal the S&P500 from 2000-2007 only returned 1.6%, and if you include the absolutely dismal 2008 (thru June) economists are already calling this the "lost decade" since returns over the past 10 years are pretty flat. Worse when you factor inflation. With returns like that, solar panels would've certainly been the better investment. At the least, you wouldn't be as subject to local Edison's blackouts and other various fiascoes, which for some reason seem to be getting more and more common and taking longer to fix each time.
Just the thought of being independent from the local power grid woes is pretty appealing.
{ - Generic Guy - }
Schools are not uneven, they're horrific.
I'll agree on that one. A kid taking twelve years of science classes, and yet not being able to read or critique an experiment in science journals is terrible. But when they graduate not even knowing what a journal is, or how to create an experiment, that's just broken beyond imagining.
Everything will be taken away from you.
You know, that's why libertarians remind me of religious fanatics. If something good happens, it's always because the free market has managed to score a success. If something bad happens, why, sure, it's because of government interference. It doesn't matter what, where, and when, or what the real numbers are - as soon as someone says that, in practice, in known privatized industries certain inefficiencies are observed, a libertarian will immediately counter by, "Well they are still regulated to some extent, so what did you expect? It's all because of that pesky regulation!".
Well, those who want good healthcare I guess.
We have a "socialised" healthcare system here.
I can have extensive spinal surgery for $0 outlay.
My wife has had our two children in her very own private room for $0 outlay.
It may not be perfect, but I feel it's a heck of a lot better than the mess that's the USA healthcare system.
Two Parts Swash, One Part Buckle
Having socalised healthcare costs a lot of money.
Not having socialised healthcare costs a lot of humanity.
Your call.
It's been a long time.
[quote]You get all those libertarian fools thinking "Oh if the current big bad government is smaller, things would be wonderful".[/quote]
Actually, you shouldn't speak for Libertarians, because I think most libertarians would agree with your good/bad delineation. However let me ask you a simple question .....
Which is easier to control ... Big Bad Government or Small Bad Government?
The point of smaller being better isn't because of "good vs bad" it is because Smaller = less government = more freedom to change how it works.
The current monstrosity that is Governance today is wholly out of control, with little or no ability to make any sort of meaningful change. We are a gnat on the elephant's back, we may annoy it, but it isn't going to change because of us.
As for private vs public control, you are 100% right. I wish we had a governance that took issuing of corporate licences more seriously and would lock more of the short sighted, bad management class and toss them into pound me in the ass prison for their malfeasance, more often.
Stealing from a bank with a gun isn't nearly as violent as stealing from the same bank with dubious business practices. I think there should be a whole bunch of people thrown in jail over the current banking Mortgage scandal.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.