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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."
... even though it was raining cats and dogs today. I'm still using it withou
According to the article California will not allow homeowners to sell more power back into the grid than they are buying. He doesn't say why. I don't understand the reasoning for such a restriction, since the possibility of selling more than you buy would encourage wider adoption.
If 'the people' in Amendment 2 are 'the state' then Amendments 1, 2, 4, 9, and 10 benefit the state, not you.
Wait to winter time when there is less sun to see how much you save at that time.
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
From TFA:
This is actually quite striking. I worked on a solar/wind project last year and the solar panel we were using was an 80W rated panel (normally provides a little over 60W in full sunlight at these latitudes), but I never realized how much your eyes compensate for the variation in illumination levels. When it was cloudy in the winter, even when you could see perfectly well and thought it was rather bright outside, the solar panel was only pumping out about 2 or 3 watts.
The idea is that it tends to be windy and sunny alternately, which is somewhat true, so they market wind and solar as a good combo, but the fact is the amount you have to spend to get the same power from wind is way more than the equivalent amount for solar, and trust me there are lots of times when it was calm and overcast for weeks.
Still I think the most economical setup would be to find a way to reduce the hardware as much as possible. Let's say you have air conditioning for instance. Take a solar panel, use it to charge a single 12V auto battery, and then use a voltage sensitive relay to turn on a surplus 12V marine air conditioner. Basically the solar charges up the battery. When there's enough power in there, the air conditioner kicks on and runs for 15 minutes or so and drains the charge out of the battery. The sunnier it is, the more the air conditioner runs, and that means your central air (powered by the grid) runs less. The benefit is that you don't need to fuss with inverters and big battery packs.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
money going towards assets rather than a simple debt. Would you rather own or rent?
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
Sounds like someone who threw money at a problem better handled by conservation.
Believe me, i LOVE solar, but solar works better when it isn't the only solution.
Well a house in Calif* with a clear view of the sky & enough room for 27 solar panels is about $2 million. So it's a choice between saving $250 on electricity or saving $2 million on housing.
It sure will. Even in California or here in Florida you have fewer hours of sun in the winter. Since most people on solar are trying to live on far less energy than a human needs to be comfortable in order to utilize technology that simply isn't cost effective yet, I have no doubt they will be borrowing from the grid in winter.
On the other hand, unlike the northern states, power usage in these places is also reduced. In warm climate areas you stay inside in the summer to avoid the weather rather than the winter.
So this guy is using DC solar panels, converting it to AC with an inverter, and then using it primarily to power...a computer lab, which just convert it back to DC. There must be at least 50% loss in this. AC was designed for transmission lines, which run for miles.
When the distance from source to sink is measured in meters instead, wouldn't it make sense to avoid the inversion step, and just use a voltage stepdown transformer, keeping everything DC? You'd have to install DC power supplies into your computers. Do those even exist? Of course power not going to computers could be run into an inverter to power other household AC things...
I think the switch to local power generation may require the (re)invention of DC infrastructure for within the house.
-- Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
Mod parent up! I am posting from a house with four 80W solar panels on a rainy day and the generator is on. If you want to go solar you need a lot of batteries and a lot of panels.
Of course, we don't have the convenience of mains power at all.
F.Y.I
Current usage is; 1 laptop (80W), 1 low power fridge (120W), 1 one modem (8W). Storage is 4 deep cycle batteries.
2. Are they bolted on? Any locking mechanisms?
3. Is it easy to climb on to the roof?
4. Do you have good access to a road from the home?
5. When are you planning to take a vacation?
6. Does it have any kind of GPS thingie or Wifi thingie attached that will phone home?
Thanks buddy.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The panels the author referenced in the story are guaranteed to resist up to 1" hail falling at 52 MPH. But 1" is considered small in this part of the country - we routinely get tennis ball-sized or even larger chunks during storms, and they're falling a hell of a lot faster than 52 MPH. So some sort of robust shielding material as an add-on would be a necessity if I were to install these. Either that or the first thunderstorm we got would destroy a $50,000 investment.
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.
It's OK, he has Three Dog Night on the iPod.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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.
1. They are somewhat heavy (50 lbs). They are awkwardly large at 5ftx3ft. Two person job if you don't want to risk a rooftop fall.
2. They are typically bolted on. Uninstall time will be in the several minutes per panel range. Be sure you have an electrician with you to avoid death by electric shock.
3. You can see in the pictures he has a typical roof. Bring a ladder. And a crane if you want an easier time lowering the panels.
4. Yes, see the pictures.
5. Don't know about that one. Probably end of December or next summer.
6. Doubtful.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
For some people it's not only about saving money but being a good environmental steward.
He's should've bought like 2 less solar panels and used the money to paint his house some color other than pink.
It sure will. Even in California or here in Florida you have fewer hours of sun in the winter. Since most people on solar are trying to live on far less energy than a human needs to be comfortable in order to utilize technology that simply isn't cost effective yet, I have no doubt they will be borrowing from the grid in winter.
Of course, if you'd RTFA, you'd know that the author mentioned that and figured his overall power bill to go from $4000 to roughly $1000 yearly.
You'd also have known that he states his power usage is higher than your typical family home due to the fact that both he and his wife work from home, he's got two teenage daughters, a pc lab, and pretty hdtv setups around his house. (thus the $4000/yr electric bill in the first place)
If you wanted to be a crotchety bitch, which clearly you did, you would have mentioned that it'll take him roughly 11-15 years to recoup his investment of $40,000 for the equipment and setup. That's what I'd go with.
You'll have that sometimes...
Today it's hard to make solar actually pay for itself. At California's high-tier rates, it is possible, but still takes a lot of work.
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. Compared to that, the panels are losing money each year and will never pay for themselves -- unless grid power goes up a lot.
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.
Most solar installations lose money hand over fist outside of California's high priced tiers. Today, solar comes in about 20 cents/kwh (at more like a 6% interest rate, not the 11.3% rate of the stock market.)
Try this spreadsheet:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pWKShknjJFBt7sOTCJre_SQ&hl=en
To work out the real cost.
It's worse if you consider that at the true cost of the system before rebates -- $48K if I read right, it really loses money.
Now, I'm not saying it's not good to put in solar to be greener, or that the government shouldn't be providing subsidies to make this happen.
I just don't want people to use the wrong math to think they are saving money, when in fact they are spending more (for a purpose.)
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
I prefer that people stick to doing what they do best and thus provide greater wealth to humanity through specialization (as mathematically proven by Ricardo [wikipedia.org]).
You and every banker.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
You forgot to engage the hydropower backup generator.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
Yea, I was shocked at how much energy the family in this article uses. My GF and I average ~370kWh/month, 4,440kWh/year. We live in Mountain View, which is the next small city over from Sunnyvale. The family in this article is using 17,400kWh/year. If he expects a 20% drop in usage when the family becomes 2 people, that's still THREE TIMES what we use. I also have a home server and network.
Working against that, you need to amortize your capital costs and pay for maintenance. Still, in some parts of the country, solar can indeed give you a reasonable mortgage length and IRR
Why must all aquatic villains play the organ?
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.
I think I saw that on the Red Green show. Only instead of a 12VDC to 120VAC inverter, he tried to use a step up transformer. Which might even work if you hooked up a DPDT toggle switch and jiggled it back and forth 60 times per second...
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
isn't civilization, and the fact that you think it is indicates a deeply flawed view of the world.
Guys -- you all seem to be neglecting the recent developments in solar financing.
(Disclaimer -- I do work for SolarCity http://solarcity.com/, a leading installer of residential solar arrays in the SF Bay Area and beyond. I won't make a totally shameless plug here, I'm trying to be fair to the other good and clever solar companies out there. A rising tide lifts all boats!)
By bringing in a 3rd party commercial owner via an Operating Lease or Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) structure, the customer can save money from solar on Day 1.
The 3rd party (an investment fund, or perhaps the solar company themselves) owns the system and claim the full range of available incentives. As opposed to residential owners, commercial owners can take accelerated depreciation on the system, and can take the full 30% federal tax credit (rather than facing a $2k cap), and they also get whatever state/local/utility incentives are available as per usual. The customer has a low (or zero) down-payment, and makes monthly payments over a period of ~15-18 years. The tax investor receives a reasonable return on their investment over time, the installer makes reasonable margins on the installation, and the customers can save money from Day 1. Everybody wins!
So to use the parent submitter's house as an example of what we can do -- For a $300/month average bill in Sunnyvale, CA, we might recommend a 7kW DC system. Assuming the customer had decent credit (720 FICO), we would require no down payment, and then charge monthly lease payments of $181/mo, for 15 years. The monthly payments do go up at 3.5% per year (we could alternatively have 0% escalation, but of course that would require a higher starting payment and so it's harder to show savings right away... there are many possible variations here. Also remember that local PG&E utility rates are increasing at >5% per year on average).
With this 7kW system, they might expect their average monthly bill to go from $300 to $72 per month. Add the $181/month payment, and their new average monthly electricity cost is (181 + 72) = $153/month, for immediate savings of ~$47/mo!!
The installers offering these plans usually offer full service/maintenance for the life of the lease, including replacement of the DC/AC inverter if necessary.
The customer is given the opportunity to purchase the system after years 6/10/15, or if they have to move or sell their house. The panels are warranted by the manufacturers to last 25+ years, so a long-term buy-and-hold strategy is solid. Or, if the customer looks around in 15 years and sees a better/cheaper technology, or just doesn't wish to renew or buy out), they are free to end the lease and we'll remove the panels at our cost.
The customer who understands Net Present Value (NPV) calculations can easily demonstrate that this offers far superior savings compared to either a) doing nothing, or b) purchasing the system for cash.
So before you all roll your eyes about solar being a poor investment with a 12+ year paybacks, please consider such alternative financing approaches.
I put a 3kw system on my roof in February, 2005. (I live in Silicon Valley). My electricity bill has been zero since then -- well, actually, $60/yr in some fee PG&E charges. My total electricity cost for the previous three years (2002-2004) was $6,730. Installation of the solar panels cost a net of $13,369 after rebates. So I've saved 50% of the cost already, and my house is worth more due to the presence of the solar power array. I took advantage of California rebates which were higher then than now, though, so that's a bummer.
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!
I have no TV. No washing machine. Not even a boiler (my hot water is run off from the power plant). I wash my clothes in a laundromat, I get my TV fix on a cheapo laptop and my lights are LED. I think the only appliance I have that draws any real power is the refrigerator... If I could power the lights and refrigerator on solar I'd have no bills. A trip to the laundromat is also more comfortable than doing it myself, imho. A really pretty Pakistani girl does the hard work and as a sideline I get to chat her up. Not many attractive Asian babes in my basement last time I looked.
Solar is NOT a way to save money and every sucker who is drawn in by this idea will be turned off solar for a long time.
Depends on the future cost of utility-supplied electricity though, doesn't it? Buying solar panels for your roof is like buying a futures contract on electricity: in return for your money, you are (more or less) guaranteed a certain amount of electricity for a certain amount of time at a certain price. Whether or not you 'save money' depends on what the alternative price will be over that period. If you thought that electric rates were going to go up significantly in the near future, then solar panels might be a nice hedge against that.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The problem with solar is the efficiency of conversion verses the the cost of production and maintenance.
While I think solar will eventually be the energy production method of choice it is still a poor choice for mass production. You have to take in the cost of making the panels/collectors, the cost to maintain an the waste generated during production of the panels and disposal once the panels reach the end of their lives.
Right now I think wind energy is the far better choice for mass production and while many find it distasteful and have an outright unreasoning dislike and fear of nuclear energy it is still the best option for backbone energy production when power plants are placed by recycling breeder reactors.
so i saved a few hundred dollars a year but had to spend 38K ????? what the hell is the point. PV can't ever replace base load power sources.
What you say is PV "can't ever" replace baseload power, but what you mean is this solar installation, installed at this cost level, won't replace baseload power.
Solar panel manufacturing is doubling roughly every 18 months. Prices are going to drop.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Try considering the opportunity cost! $36,000 in "initial investment" could also get you 4% a year in a 5-year CD with no risk... that's $120/mo! You can probably get double that if you take on a little risk in the stock market. If you're only saving about $100/mo then your "break-even" point suddenly runs all the way out to, what, twenty-thirty years?
And if you have any debt to pay down with more than a 9.2% interest rate, you'd probably want to do that first... and if you can pick up any decent tax advantage via 401(k) contributions or IRAs or ESAs or HSAs or other things like that, those probably are a better deal too.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
.. people [/] could really benefit from having to be more involved in the production and usage of the energy they consume.
Every time I read that it becomes more profound.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
This is not necessarily the case...
Say for example your in the market for a new home. You plan on spending $250K to $350k. You find a great house for $300K. --> 30 yr mortgage @ 5% is ~ $1610 per month. (bankrate.com/mortgage calc...) Now say you find decide to have a full solar array installed as part of the cost of your new home. Let's say your a real geek and decide to get the mother of all solar arrays for $50k. Your home now costs $350K --> 30 yr mortgage @ 5% is ~ $1880 per month. The difference is $270 per month. Loyd Case's March bill is $348.26 and his June bill is $11.34; that's a difference of ~$337. Your solarage may vary :-) Now you begin to see the real cost-as-a-percentage -of-your-home. Which is probably closer to zero even before consideration any grants/rebates/etc. from the government. (which is composed of oil zealots, by the way)
Since you have the MOASA you'll probably pay 0. You may decide to sell it the excess to your neighbors if possible. That's probably too much trouble. You being the uber geek that you are will probably decide to use those excess Kwh's to power you garage electrolyzer whereby producing your own hydrogen gas which powers you fuel cell car. And since you have finally achieved the uber uber geekdom that you have always aspired to you can live happily ever after.
enufsaid.
There's a reason that they exclude energy from the consumer price index -- it's because energy prices are extremely volatile.
No, it actually has quite a bit of stability.. in its skyrocketing trend.
It skyrocketed during the gulf war in 1990, and pretty much stayed at that price afterward, and it continues to skyrocket today.
The reason it's excluded from the CPI is to allow politicians to claim the economy is just fine when people are pawning off their furniture to get to work each week.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Personally, I prefer to be a well-rounded individual, with a broad and ever-expanding skillset. Too much specialization can be deadly, from a business standpoint. Just ask your local Haberdasher.
You seem to believe the marketers who are telling you that driving a $60,000 vehicle or drinking a $5 cup of coffee is improving your life.
It isn't.
The things you consider civilization are the most worthless parts of it. Clean water is going to be worth much more in one hundred years than your rusted SUV. Clean air will be worth more than your house that was built out of cheap wood and sheetrock, which will likely be demolished sixty years after it was built. The ability to grow food will be worth more than the electronics that will end up in the rubbish pile.
Because of our lifestyle decisions, we are now unable to meet the needs of our own infrastructure. Maybe you like living at the end of the leash held by the world's oil companies and nationalized dictatorships, but I think it's incredibly short sighted.
You see, there was a time in this country when sacrifice and conservatism were noble. When we pulled together to get out of the Great Depression, and pulled together to retool our economy for WWII, and pulled together to provide right for all of our citizens in the 60s and 70s. The "gloom-and-doomers" are the people who see problems and deal with them rather than sticking their heads in the sand.
Yes, I own a car, which gets only 30mpg. But I live four miles from where I work, and I bike there four out of five days every week. I recycle what I can even though it costs me money. I try to spend my money with companies that are good stewards of the environment, so if I have children, I can look them in the eye and tell them that I have saved some real wealth for them: the right to clean water, clear air, and a food supply that doesn't give them cancer.
Maybe you live far away from your job and mass transit isn't an option. Perhaps you do need to use an eight cylinder engine everywhere you go. But if you're going to ignore the very real problems our society is facing, you need to realize that you are that shithead who shows up to party but never buys any booze and never helps clean up. You are a douche bag, and everyone knows it and hates you. If you can live with that, then good for you.
eBay or Craigslist. They don't come up real often.
....Also it is observed that home-made panels tend to suffer more reliability problems, but then again, they can be made so that they are easier to open and repair. If you have a commercially-made panel that suffers an internal failure and is out of warranty, it can be quite difficult to repair it to be useful at all because of the way these panels are manufactured. The panel is a few layers of plastic laminated to a piece of glass (and cells and wiring stuck in there somewhere) and there's no way to separate the thing non-destructively.
And the only places you see them on Craigslist very much is where home-solar installs are common,,, which means California & the desert states.
Also another option is to look for B-grade panels--these are either cosmetic blemish or non-UL panels. The potential problem there is that these panels may not qualify for gov't rebates (assuming you are going to do a qualifying system). Even though they are new, they may lack the usual warranty as well. http://www.sunelec.com/ has some at the moment, look in the yellow panel that has the title "World's lowest price $2.98/watt". A grade-A 180W panel would cost around $800, where the non-UL panels they have are priced at $550.
It is also an option to build your own by buying cells and connecting and building an enclosure for them, but this has consequences too. The cost of cells to build a 180W panel is around $300 on eBay right now, but DIY panels will not qualify for any rebate programs. Most people who try to seal their home-made enclosures end up with moisture or mildew problems, so the most-dependable way seems to be to use non-wood materials and to provide small venting on the top and bottom while preventing rain from entering through the top.
Humidity seems to be the arch-enemy of all photovoltaic panels.... The humidity itself kills the panels (both home-made and commercial) and the humidity comes from clouds , so if you get a lot of rain you won't get much from solar power anyway, and maybe should consider hydro instead.
~
I almost want to agree with you but for the whole expression of, "Jack of all trades and master of none." I would rather have a broad educational background that supports a variety of trades but be considered an expert in my specific field of study, business, or employment. I see what you're saying, I think, but I really *do* want to have a specialty even if that specialty is a generic field of knowledge.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Yup, and the voting public seem to fall for it every single time. Either by not caring, or by caring yet not having the attention span to remember about it when they are in the polling booth.
Some have an even shorter attention and or memory span than that. It was government meddling that caused the health care problems to begin with. During WWII the US government passed price and wage control laws. Employers weren't allowed to offer employees more by law. However government saw how this harmed businesses so the let employers offer fringe benefits such as health insurance to their employees, and gave them tax breaks for doing it. Those tax breaks are still on the books so there is no free market in health care and insurance. If government gave those same tax breaks to people who bought their own insurance then you could have a freer market. If they wanted they could join a health care coop. Or buy private insurance. They'd be able to open a health savings account which they could then use to pay normal medical expenses while buying catastrophic coverage to pay catastrophic expenses like cancer.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
There was a big campaign to oust him over the Iraq War, but alas, he got voted back in after that. Even after lying about it. Howard has also broken various international laws (this may be a good read for you, one aspect of the racist campaign he ran "fear the foreign people" basically, whilst breaking international law by preventing a recuse vessel from using the nearest port The Tampa Affair).
Howard was undone by making the majority of working Australian's jobs turn from secure to insecure.
Previously a full time permanent job was all but bullet proof short of you underperforming or a company going bust. He changed that to be that companies can fire people without giving a reason and don't have to pay them redundancy payments either when they do it! That was the nail in his coffin. Not sure if the debarcle got much media attention internationally though.
His stance that global warming was 'nonsense' didn't really help him much either. He was also refusing to sign the Kyoto agreement in a time when the average Australia was becoming environmentally conscious and learning all about what damage the support systems to our lifestyles are doing to our planet.
Two Parts Swash, One Part Buckle
No outlay.
This is just the level of ignorance politicians want you to have. Its how the income tax works so well. The people have been guided into thinking about their "take home pay". Never about what they make, in fact if you ask most people what they make you usually get take home.
Oh it costs ya a lot. If you bother to read any of the papers available about health care systems across the world it would open your eyes. This is another of those fantasy pitches where if its repeated enough times people will start to accept it. The problem is the biggest implementers of universal health care are stepping back because the costs are obscene and they are finding that when something is free or nearly free in appearance people tend to abuse it.
ZERO OUTLAY... damn, next your going to believe that the roads are free too.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Yes, we're being killed by drought, more than 70% of the country is in severe drought, only the east coast cities are okay, and it's creeping in on the edges there even.
But you know what? That's just the biggest drought ever recorded. That's not climate change!
Currently there's more than a battle over water - it could be called a war. It's got all the pieces of a brewing civil war:
- Guns (People having armed standoffs over water supplies)
- State vs State Hatred (Queensland is hoarding off the flood planes daming off trillions of kilolitres which would normally flood down into NSW irrigating millions of hectres of farmland)
- Explosives (Several water control weirs have been dynamited & blown up to restore waterflow to rivers)
- Violence (confrontations & bust ups with contractors as they build water control weirs)
- Guerilla Warfare (Dynamiting of facilities at night)
- Hoarding (See QLD v NSW point above)
All beause we allow companies to buy water rights.
Here's a common situation: Joe blow owns 100 Hectares and has a well to the undergroun aquaifer. Bank5 owns 100 Hectares nearby - Bank5 can drill umteen number of wells and pump out all the underground water it likes seening as it has the money to drill numerous wells, but Joe doesn't have thousands to drill well after well and is left with no water. Joe then buys water rights for 5,000 litres from the local river. However Bank4 has paid for 400,000 litres from the river & has installed a water control weir to obtain it. Downstream there's no water left for Joe. Joe doesn't get a refund & his cows are now starving as he has no grain to because irrigation has failed & no water for them to drink.
It's sad, yet according to the government it's okay. Our largest river system, the Murray-Darling runs through three states and is a complete shitfight of a politcal mess - no one wants to give an inch.
Sydney nearly ran out of water last year because of a lack of rainfall, our largest damn was down to 37% despite their being Level 3 (quite harsh) water restrictions in place across the state & in the city. We were saved by rain, another quarter like it had been and lord knows what would have happened. I can't even image what would happen to a metropolis of several million with no water.
Two Parts Swash, One Part Buckle
No, energy payback is *much* shorter than that (See this DoE paper for example). And as the article states guaranteed energy production is 90% after 10 years and 80% after 20.
Australia is running out of water due to incompetence. I have on my desk the Victorian Desalination Project IfEoI which appears to be written so that only one company can provide a solution. They keep talking 3.1 billion dollars yet the plant is only 4 times larger than the Tampa FL plant that cost $150 million. They also want to take the desalinated water and pump it very far uphill and far away to be stored yet the plant size will be able to meet the daily demands of the city which is all much closer to sea level. It cost $.035/kl to pump water up 100 meters based on current prices and assuming 100% efficient pumps. I have spoken to 3 companies that could provide a solution yet not one of them will be submitting to the local governments paper game since they are convinced they can't win. A billion dollar project is going to cost the average Victorian family about 1000 not including costs dealing with interest.
Why would that ever be a problem? They could just drink Brawndo, The Thirst Mutilator. It's got electrolytes, It's got what plants crave.
http://www.brawndo.com/
It's better that chickens don't make great pets, because they're tasty, and it's hard to eat a pet.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
I'd imagine he'll make back anything he put into the solar panels the moment he sells his house. Having no hydro bills would be a massive selling point for a lot of people, he'll probably get better than market for his house because of it.
It's been a long time.
I would actually not recommend solar panels like the OP used, but rather look into solar-thermal generators.
Solar panels are only 15-18% efficient, and stationary ones only achieve peak output at high noon, so you need to cover most of your roof with them.
There are solar-thermal plans with a collector less than 6' in diameter (looks like a satellite dish) that follows the sun for peak output whenever the sun is out. They're more like 60% efficient, replacing 12x the area in solar panels. One 6' generator should put out 1500W, enough to power the typical household, and more can be added to power electric cars for example.
If everyone had one for their home and replaced their cars with electric cars and matching generators, greenhouse gas emissions would drop by 73%. If they were ever to be mass produced, the retail price should settle under $1000, even lower if they were subsidized. That is the most realistic solution to global warming I've seen.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines