Slashdot Mirror
Solar Panels For Every Home?
Hugh Pickens writes "David Crane and Robert F.Kennedy Jr. write in the NY Times that with residents of New Jersey and New York living through three major storms in the past 16 months and suffering sustained blackouts, we need to ask whether it is really sensible to power the 21st century by using an antiquated and vulnerable system of copper wires and wooden poles. Some have taken matters into their own hands, purchasing portable gas-powered generators to give themselves varying degrees of grid independence. But these dirty, noisy and expensive devices have no value outside of a power failure and there is a better way to secure grid independence for our homes and businesses: electricity-producing photovoltaic panels installed on houses, warehouses and over parking lots, wired so that they deliver power when the grid fails. 'Solar panels have dropped in price by 80 percent in the past five years and can provide electricity at a cost that is at or below the current retail cost of grid power in 20 states, including many of the Northeast states,' write Crane and Kennedy. 'So why isn't there more of a push for this clean, affordable, safe and inexhaustible source of electricity?' First, the investor-owned utilities that depend on the existing system for their profits have little economic interest in promoting a technology that empowers customers to generate their own power. Second, state regulatory agencies and local governments impose burdensome permitting and siting requirements that unnecessarily raise installation costs. While it can take as little as eight days to license and install a solar system on a house in Germany, in the United States, depending on your state, the average ranges from 120 to 180 days."
The real secret government. It destroys all.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
For my house in NJ, we got a quote for about $30,000 (of which we would pay $10,000 out of pocket) to put solar panels on our roof. We also were being asked to cut down 4 trees in order to get optimal sunlight. After hurricane Sandy, we instead bought a $450 3270 watt generator which is portable, won't be damaged outside, and can be shared with neighbors if need be.
Note also that if you want to make your house off-the-grid (as option) with solar, that requires much more expense. Batteries, inverter switches, etc.
Housing and condo boards will also be total assholes about this. I've had them browbeat me about satellite dishes even after showing evidence that there's a federal law that says they can't tell me how many dishes I'm allowed to have (I had 2). All they care about is that every house looks the same and their devotion to local housing politics pays off in the form of pushing people around.
Lead batteries clean?
Affordable??? (laughing)
Safe? Not sure how solar panels on my roof and a bank of car batteries in my basement is safer than getting my electricity from the grid?
Doesn't solar require a battery bank for night/cloudy days? How well would work after being submerged in salt water for a day?
In most places HOA have severe restriction on solar panels. They are more worried about the neighborhood aesthetic than the environment. However if panel installation are not done right the reflection from the solar panel have cause melting of siding and property damage.
Everything I've read says solar can only provide a fraction of the needed power. Most of the businesses that install them like whole foods use them to power the store during peak times when electricity is the most expensive.
Or to simply provide enough power to lessen their total electric bill
Sure solar panels have gone down in price. I put a 9kW solar array on my roof 2 years ago, using grid-tied microinverters. The catch is that if the grid power goes out, the microinverters shut down so they are not putting juice onto the grid and zapping linesmen. This means the solar panels are not able to do anything during a power outage. If you want the panels to run, then there will be a huge investment in a battery system with a charge controller, load shedding and rather expensive batteries, along with an auto transfer switch to cut you off from the grid... these things easily make the solar panels the cheap item in the system.
1. Sun does not shine during storm days or night.
2. Cost 60k for a full 10kw installation.
3. Add another 40 to 60k for battery storage for the night.
Inexhaustible? Has no one seen The Matrix? When the machines take over, we are going to have to block out the sun. What use are your silly solar panels then?
Popisms.com - Connecting pop culture
Will these houses still have solar panels after the hurricane leaves? For that purpose, putting as many power lines as possible underground seems more effective.
Living on the Gulf Coast, the threat of strong storms has always been one of my reasons for being reluctant to plunk down a large investment on Solar Panels.
How well did existing Solar Panels fair in New York after Sandy?
I like how the summary answers its own question - and gets the answer completely wrong. Sure, government red-tape doesn't help. And I'm sure the utilities aren't falling over themselves to promote this (why would they???)
But the simple, plain fact of the matter is that, unless its being subsidised by the taxpayer, installing solar costs the same as your electricity bill for the next 15-30 years, depending on where you are and how capable your system is. That means your panels are paid off just as they reach the end of their useful life. And if you have batteries, you've likely had to replace them before you've paid them off.
The average person looks at effectively paying their electricity bill for 30 years up-front and says, "No, thanks!"
Slashdot - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, in ISO-8859-1 Has just realised that beta makes this signature redundant
Here we go again. I wonder how many solar panels the Kennedy clan have at their compound?
OK, maybe they use solar panels to keep their wine cellars cool.
I like solar and geothermal energy sources for home based power. I am also a pragmatist that realizes simply legislating that everyone install solar panels for a wide scale would be financially ruinous. I think you could go about this with a hybrid approach that could allow the market to do what it does best while steering people to a greener future.
Start by saying that all new (and remodeled) buildings must includes support for 10% of their anticipated energy needs from a renewable source (let the source be up to the customer) and the switching equipment required for the grid. This will be a small enough amount that it can be met with a minimal number of solar panels or other sources. Importantly this will allow time for electricians, home builders, retailers and the like to start getting to understand renewable energy without being overwhelming. It will also allow for things like the switching equipment for the grid to start getting put in place.
Every four years after this starts you increase the amount of energy required by 10%. The increase is slow enough to give the market time to react and bring products, expertise and the like to bear. This is also slow enough to allow competition to build and for prices to benefit from economies of scale.
By the time the rate increases from 10% to 20% the market will have had time to develop skills, materials and everything else that is needed. This avoids a crisis that would come from simply mandating a significant amount come from renewable energy to begin with when the present market can't possibly meet that demand. This also allows for retrofitting with additional capacity by owners that want to ramp up from 10% to a higher percent.
If they just want to do a grid-tied system, then panels are relatively inexpensive. Since that would be useless if the grid went down, the real issue is that batteries can easily eat up half the cost of a solar installation. We have inexpensive solar panels. What we do not have is inexpensive batteries.
Wouldn't solar panels on houses become potential, sharp edged frisbees? I'm making this question from looking at many local solar power installations where there is some distance between the structure and the solar panel where the wind could get a foothold or they're free standing and could be blown around by the wind.
While some homes would continue to have power, I would think that a large fraction would find that their solar panels have either been damaged or torn away.
I do agree that putting power out on poles is not a great idea, but doesn't it make more sense to bury the lines underground?
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I put 3KW of panels on my parents' barn roof this summer. Their monthly bill has gone down from an average of $163 a month, to an average of $32 a month. On a $7000 investment. That's a 54 month payback - call it 5 years to make the numbers easy. It's grid tied. Doesn't solve the outage problem, but it certainly is a good investment when there's a 5 year return on investment. Still tied to the grill, yep. That way we can sell the surplus on sunny days. So tell me, am I lying, or am I completely delusional? Or maybe, just maybe, you're working from inaccurate or obsolete information?
I thought this was a really cool idea until I talked to someone locally why has a solar install on their house. They mentioned that most current installs use the local grid and syncronize the AC to it. If the local grid goes down, you are down as well. They don't have a battery bank either, rather rely on selling daytime power back to the power company, then doing the reverse at night, buying local power for the house. Unless you install a bunch of more expensive equipment, you are out of power when the local grid goes off as well.
"we need to ask whether it is really sensible to power the 21st century by using an antiquated and vulnerable system of copper wires and wooden poles."
Every time there's a hurricane, people ask the power companies, "should we bury the power lines?" And the companies say, "sure, we'll have to charge you this much more in rates, and it'll take this many years" and the consumers say, "yeah, no, forget it."
There's nothing antiquated about overhead power lines. It's an engineering decision with tradeoffs both ways. Neither technology is clearly superior.
Overhead power lines are an obvious eyesore, and go down pretty regularly in extreme weather. (Although they're pretty resilient, too.) Burying power lines has significant costs even after you've got them buried. They're hard and more expensive to repair, they have a shorter lifespan (which most people don't know), and they're are competing for space with all the other crap we've got buried.
Last time we lost power ("Derecho" storm in late June in Northern VA) we were out for about 80 hours. Our power requirements included air conditioning for that period (it was hot and muggy.)
1. How much storage (batteries) would we need to have 4 days worth of power available to us for a grid failure?
2. How many square feet/meters of solar panels would be required to charge those batteries before the storm?
3. What would be the recovery time once the stored current was exhausted?
And then there's the economic questions:
4. What would the batteries cost (taking into consideration substantial increased demand for rare earths, etc)?
5. What would the solar cells cost (also taking into consideration substantial increased demand for rare earths, etc?
Finally
6. Compare that cost to the installation of a conventional generator, either gas/diesel powered or natural gas/propane powered (and I'll grant you some appropriate 'market trade rate' penalty for the carbon produced by the generator.)
I did some research a couple of years ago and the cost recoup was still somewhere between 10-15 years for installing solar just for the cost of the hardware and not including labor. It's hard to put up that kind of capital outlay just to save around $100 on my monthly electricity bill. I decided I could save a lot more money by applying that same amount of money to my mortgage. I keep hearing about new solar technology that is tons more efficient, but where is all that new tech?
There is a push, at least here in MA, for Solar by the electric utilities. I recently signed up for MassSave, a program funded by the state to help increase thermal and thus power efficiency in homes. Improving insulation is the obvious recommendation they make, but what they also push is solar power. The power company is basically offering to lease your roof for 20 years and put solar panels up there at no cost to you. I didn't go for the option due to the age of my house, so I didn't look at all the details. I think after twenty years, the panels become yours, but until that point, they are owned and maintained by the utility to provide electricity to their grid. Some of my neighbors recently got solar panels through this plan, so I think it is starting to make an impact.
One word: batteries
Ironic that article uses recent storms as an argument for solar, as I imagine a rooftop solar installation would have been quite vunerable to storm damage from wind and falling branches.
one would need some system to be able to remove and safely store said systems so they get no or less damage BUT i think thats doable because otherwise they get damaged it is as another poster said very expensive...think like a retractable roof system ....now thats only needed for severe weather....soo..
where it shutters down the side then something comes around like a metal barrier
oh and this free idea is mine and im not patenting it enjoy cause i like to eat apples not buy them for trillions of dollars.
Looked into solar panels for my little house. Was going to run about $28,000 up front. At that rate it would take about 17 years to pay for itself, and that's assuming that there is absolutely no maintenance, repair, battery replacement, etc. during those 17 years. And, even with that, I don't have $28,000--and a loan would mean interest, which would probably mean it would NEVER pay for itself.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
They are so predictable, the slightest hint of something being difficult they give up and say it can't be done. We'd still be living in caves rubbing two sticks together if it was up to you guys.
So it might be cloudy sometimes. Well maybe there is a way to store electricity when there is a surplus and feed it out again when there is high demand. There are dozens of technologies available to do this from batteries to pumped storage and everything in between (oh yes I know someone will reply to me to say that won't work because conversion losses or whatever so we shouldn't bother).
Also this grid thing might be a good idea, that way if it is sunny in one place but cloudy in another people can share (but oh no it won't completely replace all nuclear coal and gas fired power stations in the whole US so we shouldn't bother).
Do you know how many new houses were built in the last decade housing boom? I don't know either but just consider if even a small PV panel of a couple of square meters was on each one, the cost would be much less through economies of scale and it would make a significant dent in energy demands (but oh no it won't completely replace all nuclear coal and gas fired power stations in the whole US so we shouldn't bother).
And yes most states now have laws that prevent HOAs restricting the use of PV.
While the price has come down, it's still too expensive an option for most folks to consider.
If memory serves me correctly, I would have to spend somewhere in the neighborhood of
$30k to offset the majority of what I utilize from the power company. I have a small house
and use very little power in comparison to my neighbors at that. Probably have to reinforce
the roof to handle the additional weight ( more $$ ) prior to the install as well.
Plus, unless you add in a storage system ( may as well double the price + maint costs ) you
will only be pulling power during the day IFF the weather allows for it. Unless you have a
tracking system to reorient the panels during seasonal changes, your output will vary quite a
bit between summer and winter months.
In short, it's still too damned expensive an option for the majority of folks to seriously consider.
I can get a total system for about 12k. This is a top end system these days (much better than 5 years ago where it was 40k for the same thing). Here is the thing. It only provides about 40% of what I need. I even went thru my house and went to 'lower power' everything. CFLs, better fridge, better AC, better heating, blah blah blah. It would cut my 40-80 dollar power bill in half.
The ROI is not there yet for me. I figure when that system gets to about 3-4k you will see it on everyone's house. As at that point the ROI is in the order of a couple of years. Replacement? no. Good supplement? yeah.
Saying that Solar PV is at the retail cost of grid power is either a lie or a complete delusion
You get that 'sorta' but only when the sun is out. You need to gen 2-3x what you use on peak to make that up. As you need to generate enough to cover for when you are not generating. Look up net-metering. So yes your meter goes backwards during the day. But forwards at night.
This is all fine and good until the power goes out at night. To take for that contingency, its going to get real expensive for home owners buying battery stacks.
This is quite incredible that people continue to tout Solar PV as an economically viable energy when it is completely ineffective most of the time. And when the sun does not shines, one still need the energy from the Local Distribution Company.
Saying that Solar PV is at the retail cost of grid power is either a lie or a complete delusion.
The tech for solar cells that work at night has existed since 2010 (at least). It will take market participation for it to become ubiquitous. Attidues like the above are the exact opposite of what it will take for this tech to catch on.
Links:
http://inhabitat.com/solar-panels-work-at-night/
http://organicconnectmag.com/wp/solar-panels-that-can-work-at-night/
http://www.the9billion.com/2011/02/01/solar-technology-low-cost-solar-cells-that-work-at-night-developed/
http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2010/12/20/New-solar-cells-could-even-work-at-night/UPI-91881292889725/
You'd think that someone posting on a techie website would understand that just because something isn't available for purchase today, does not mean its not possible...
Meanwhile, in an alternate universe...
"Oh my god! All the solar panels got blown away, leaving everyone witout power for weeks!"
"David Crane and Robert F.Kennedy Jr. write in the NY Times that maybe we should consider a centralized generation system with power distribution."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Partly correct.
In "grid parity", the yield of PV is an average value where rainy days are already factored in. So you might calculate with 1000 kWh of energy per year from a panel with 1kW peak output, not 12*365 = 4380 kWh as in a naive calculation where you have optimal yield throughout the year. But even with only the 1000 kWh, prices of PV are getting into the ballpark of grid parity.
What is not included is the cost of bridging nights and rainy days. For that you need plenty of batteries or conventional powerplants running part-time. Which destroys grid parity pretty thoroughly at current prices.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Did your installation get subsidies or tax breaks?
Do your parents pay for being on the grid?
Does your installation pay for being able to put energy on the grid? (It uses the grid).
maybe you are counting govt subsidies against the cost?
7K was the base cost? the out of pocket post-rebate cost?
Not to mention that not all power produced during the day need be used right then - a battery bank (or other, more advanced energy storage technologies) are used to allow night usage of power generated during the day.
"completely ineffective most of the time"? At worst they have less than optimal energy output, even when it's overcast the continue to produce some energy. You're right that they do not solve all the problems with energy production and distribution, but to say they are completely ineffective most of the time is equally inaccurate on the opposite side of the spectrum. The truth is in the middle somewhere, they would provide some benefit in an emergency situation and even more benefit under ideal circumstances.
There's natural gas generators which are extremely clean and efficient. Higher end generators are really quiet. I've never understood why every home isn't built with one these days (other than the power companies oppose them for profit reasons). Add in small windmills (there was link here on slashdot about a new design that is very small and very efficient), suit case size nuclear generators
seriously, what's so terrible about some common sense approaches energy management. Everyone has a "reason" why we can't do this. No one really wants to solve the problems I think.
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
Total Cost of Ownership, equipment maintenance and technical expertise all make this an improbable solution for all but the technically inclined who have the capital, time and space to setup equipment properly. It's not just solar panels - it's batteries, inverters and charge management systems. Panels could be free and the solution would still be lacking. Municipal power is still the best bang for the buck. Which would you rather do? Pay a utility bill once a month or spend your own time on a weekly or monthly basis maintaining your equipment, buying replacement parts, troubleshooting problems with the charger, mitigating lag time between demand and generation when there are weeks of cloudy weather.... I've studied this for years with great interest because I want to be energy independent... but at the end of the day, that's not my greatest cost. Government is.
In the Netherlands there are a few (relatively) simple rules that need to be adhered to. The upside is that there are mandated nationwide through all municipialities.
- on a angled roof the solar panels must fall in the same flat surface and angle of the roof without protruding.
- on a flat roof the solar panels must not be visible from the street, this implies about 2 feet of space around the edges.
Ofcourse there are few exceptions:
- trackers, those need permits, even in the backyard.
- if you want to install panels on the facia of the building you need permits
This gives a lot of freedom and covers the "simple man" home owner. And it also prevents some of the installations seen in Germany which are frankly hideous. They might be giving a bit too much freedom there.
One of the issues raised by the original poster is the (backup) power issue. Pretty much all solar installations are of the Grid-Tie type, this means that they will not operate when the utilities power is cut. There are a few solutions for sale now which couple grid-tie for feed-in with battery backup for backup for increased self consumption.
I will leave it up to decide for the people themselves if the cost associated with Batteries and pricier Inverter are worth the trade off for backup power. However, when faced with a week long power outage it is nice to atleast have a working fridge so that food doesn't spoil.
My own solar installation wakes up every day and generates power I don't have to pay for. It doesn't need any maintenance or cleaning. Sure it doesn't produce as much in the winter as it does in the summer, but it's still power I don't have to do anything for. It also made me accutely aware of my own power consumption, which can be argued is a good thing. The prices for the panels have come down a really long way since 2010. However, the inverters and batteries have not really gotten any cheaper over the course of a few years.
You misunderstand. It is at _retail_ grid parity in some locations. What this means is that if you produce 1 kWh of power at your home, the cost of that energy (i.e. dividing the capital and installation costs of the panels over their expected lifespan) is less than what the ratepayer pays the utility. So for a ratepayer, offsetting their power use can very literally save them money.
What the authors don't really say here is that if everyone puts solar on their rooftops, utility business models / regulatory models will probably have to change. Utilities won't like this, but nor will solar panel owners as it will likely mean that utilities will charge a lot more for power when the sun doesn't shine etc. As solar panel prices drop, this still could be a cheaper model although it probably won't be yet.
The fact that solar panels don't produce energy all the time is a red herring -- no power source always produces power. The grid is a network of varied generators that all back each other up. Some plants can't run when it doesn't rain enough, others can't run because their cost of fuel is too high. The good thing about solar is it typical IS working when we need the most power (i.e. during the day, particularly when it is hot). Coal and nuclear, have the opposite problem of solar -- they can't produce power for just a couple hours economically so they need to turn on for long periods of time. Although the grid and the utilities are used to this, it's almost as constraining as the fact that solar doesn't always produce it's max capacity.
I live in an area of the northeast, where I know that my generating potential and load factor is substantially lower than the "nameplate" rating on any PV equipment I would install. That doesn't mean I couldn't do it, but I know that I would get a substantially greater ROI if I took the same array and installed it, say, on a similar home in New Mexico. There are similar situations (renters that can't or won't make capital investments in property they don't own, people in highrise condos that have power requirements far beyond what the footprint could provide using solar) where installing solar on one's own domicile juts doesn't make sense. I don't plan on moving to New Mexico, but I still want to see the widespread adoption of solar, and put my money where my mouth is.
It would be nice if there was some mechanism, other than semi-formal arrangements among friends (e.g., people I know in California and Nevada), for me to front the tab to get solar installed on their house in return for (contractual) repayment over the years. This is kinda what Elon Musk's SolarCity is doing on a grand scale. They just had an IPO yesterday, but chasing IPOs is a loser's bet in my opinion. The renewables sector more generally has been a terrible investment for years because companies have been losing money left and right - so many big players driving down costs. I'd rather not play the odds of a whole sector, but rather invest in a single project that I have some control over.
Anyone have any suggestions?
The first thing to go in a storm like Sandy would be the solar panels off the roof. Hopefully they wouldn't take the roof with them.
After hurricane Sandy, we instead bought a $450 3270 watt generator which is portable, won't be damaged outside, and can be shared with neighbors if need be.
And will last for a few hours until your supply of fuel runs out. Remember please that the gas station pumps are electric powered so if the power goes out you cannot get more gas than you have on hand. Some stations have generators of their own but many/most do not.
I'm curious how well solar panels would stand up to the winds in a hurricane. Most of the ones I've seen aren't mounted all that securely and could be ripped off their mounts with sufficient wind force. (not to mention damaged by flying debris)
Gas generators also have their gasoline turn acidic or whatever after sitting too long and most people don't know that you have to run them once in a while for that reason. So that's a bad idea.
"wired so that they deliver power when the grid fails"
Or they could run them all the time seeing as how they're sitting there doing nothing. Power plants would need to be more dynamic and able to scale up a down quite a bit based on sunlight but other than that, why buy something en masse that partially solves global warming and then not use it?
$12K raw cost, $7K post-tax incentive cost.
"In the case of my parents' house (southern Germany, pretty high electricity prices of ~0.25 Euros/kWh), I think a small photovoltaic installation might amortize itself within a few years."
So, the solar panels are cost effective because the cost of electricity is high. The next logical question is, why is German electricity so expensive?
In large part, because of Solar power feed-in tariffs which German utilities are required to pay people who generate surplus solar power with their power panels (so, yeah, it's cheaper to buy your own solar power, than buy solar power from someone else's roof or solar farm, and pay a middle man to markup the power and transmit it).
If they had planned to build a few more nuclear plants a decade or two ago, instead of planning to shut down their existing nuclear plants in a few years, they'd likely have cheaper power by now.
But, yes, if cheap power isn't available from the grid, then you may as well generate your own expensive electricity instead of buying someone else's expensive electricity. Grids make sense only when the power the grid can provide you is cheaper than making your own, or you can get it in quantities larger than you can produce with reasonably priced equipment of your own.
Our 3K array produces about 1200 watts of power under full clouds when it's raining. It's produced as much as 3100 watts in full sun. So yeah, it's degraded, but not useless.
Would be to have a decentralized public grid with lots of safety and redundancy. Honestly we have the tech know how to build such a thing.
The only thing stopping its development is an in efficient goverment that cant and wont spend money on such things. But is glad to rape you anally to fight terror.
Communities could do this on their own... you know those evil HOA's could pool their fees to put their subdivision off the grid if they really wanted to. It could be done through other privately owned citizen corps too. Just like the fundraising for childs play charity.
It costs money to make power and large expensive facilities. You can supplement with wind and solar. Those certainly are worth it for the individual, but not for the group. Power generation must always consider the worst case. If the Fimbulwinter strikes for a month, covering everything with snow and wind turbines with ice, society will require power supplied by industrial grade facilities.
People should install solar panels, yet someone must pay to maintain the huge infrastructure and facilities for when all else fails. A possible solution is that when a person with solar panels requires power from the grid, the rates shoot way up to help pay for having that power available instantaneously when they have a problem with their own. This would discourage some people from installing solar panels, it would encourage others to become completely self-sufficient. In the long run this will prove the best solution; in the short run the power infra-structure must be maintained and paid for whether or not people use solar panels.
Solar panels should not be allowed to put power to the grid. It will cost everybody more in the long run, but people will insist on this and so those costs will just get added to the bills. The costs won't be a sudden hit, just slow and incremental. By the time people realize the cost, a loud vocal minority with a vested interest in selling power from their solar cells to the grid will be able to beat off attacks. That may already be the case.
Just wait. They will soon force builders to put it on by regulation. So much money to be made. Carbon taxes are unpopular ? Yes, we can work around it. Just a few more "sky is falling" green scaremongering and the public will beg us to do something.
JAM
I think solar is viable if used in a way that avoids expensive batteries and power conversion equipment, such as powering an air conditioner designed for the purpose. The panels would be pumping out the most juice precisely when it is most needed. If you can't make an obvious use like that cost effective, you may as well just forget about powering the rest of your house with solar.
The same can be said for wind turbines. In certain geographical locations it might be possible to build a power hungry application (think metal refinery and the like) that is designed to run directly off the wind turbines.
The problem is, solar panel systems designed to tie into the grid are specifically by regulation designed to power down in the event the grid loses power, to avoid the situation where solar is providing power to lines that need work during an outage. It's considered a safety thing. So you have solar installed, cool. Whatever power you don't use you can sell back to the power company. Even more cool. But when the grid goes down, you still go dark, by design.
Typically the systems that provide true independent power aren't connected to the grid at all. Which is still ok, (that's what I have) but you can't sell power back to the grid, you need electrical storage for when the sun isn't available (lots of batteries) and you're limited to what you can generate. (There are hybrid setups where some circuits are solar only and some are grid only, but that is beyond the scope of this article.)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
First of all, there are more problems than those listed above.
Issue 1: "anti-islanding."
So, a power line leading up to your home or business goes down. The lineman finds the break, and then goes to the nearest transformer to open the circuit, interrupting power to the side of the line break so that he may safely approach the break in the line and repair it. EXCEPT...unbeknownst to him, you have solar panels, and the other side of the line is live also. He is survived by a wife and 2.4 kids. This is the scenario that 'anti-islanding' prevents. Unfortunately, it falls within the realm of technology intended to prevent loss of life, and thus is very expensive because it must. always. work. The majority of cost for a solar panel installation is this technology; the cost of the panels themselves does not at all reflect the actual cost of HAVING solar panels installed. This is a large part of the 'hidden tax' that one of the linked articles refers to, and isn't exactly optional.
Issue 2: Phase synchronization .01 Hz is a BAD thing on the power grid) and timing, and match. Otherwise, you'll have nasty strange things go on at home. Remember...when you generate your own power, you become a generation facility. Not as big as a coal-fired plant, but you are a generation entity all the same.
This is less of a problem to the overal grid unless solar and other alternative power sources become more widespread. But it'll nuke your own stuff at home. AC power in your outlets is 60 Hz. But think of it as a wave (which it is). The waves rise and fall not only at the same frequency everywhere on the grid, but in sync as well. Otherwise, you get the kind of situation that takes place when you have waves from one place in a pond, and waves in another place in the pond...and the waves don't overlap perfectly. Instead of an even wave pattern of consistent frequency and amplitude, you get something less orderly. Electronics (and at higher voltages, electrical equipment in substations) don't like that very much. So the systems that generate power from solar panels, etc. must detect the phase frequency (with many, many points of precision...a deviation of
Which leads to the Issue 3: the main reason why Germany (and most countries, really) get these things done so much quicker. Germany is tiny compared to the US, both in terms of grid geography and in terms of grid scale. Overall, their grid is also newer, more modern, and more standardized. All of Germany can be managed by one reliability entity, for example. The US has eight, most of which cover a section of grid that larger than all of what is in Germany. On top of this, add those in Canada, because for all intents and purposes, there is no border between our grid and theirs (as evidenced in 2003, when a fault in Ohio ended up pulling down a lot of Quebec and Ontario along with the US Northeast). Also, control at the local realm is much more decentralized; here, we have PUCs for each community. Those PUCs vary widely in their efficiency and (cough) philosophy about their purpose. Some are quite efficient, some are a total pain in the ass...that's how it goes. In some places, like Washington, DC, getting approval is fairly straightforward because the local PUC is very interested in seeing these technologies tried out and tested. In others, you get pinheads with a power trip (no pun intended) who love playing the goalkeeper. This isn't a problem that exists solely for alternative energies, though...the power companies themselves have the same issue with these kinds of people. A pain in the ass is usually a pain in the ass for everyone, and these solar guys shouldn't take it so personally. It's not about them.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
I don't think you're lying. I just don't think that solar power scales well. It may work great and be cost-efficient for a barn, but powering a house full of power-hungry appliances is a different story. And this is coming from someone who would really love to see more renewable sources of energy used to create a less centralized power grid.
http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/calculators/pvwatts/version1/US/code/pvwattsv1.cgi
Cough...cough....
Where are your folks located, on the sun?
A 3kw system in FLORIDA only provides $500 a year.
Maybe they also adjusted their lifestyle a hair?
The article is making a good point that most responses are missing. Right now, any solar installation requires going through permits, inspections, and utility testing, in order to turn it on. This adds, on average, $2500 per installation, just in overhead. This creates an artificial barrier to entry into the technology.
The panels are UL listed. The inverters are UL listed. The Charge controllers, if you want to be able to run off-grid, are UL listed. The UL listing insures the anti-islanding technology is in place and effective (which is what prevents your panels from frying a lineman trying to fix lines that are supposed to be de-energized). Other than making sure the installation follows local code regulations, there is no reason for this overhead.
In many states, Wisconsin included, the utilities are required to buy excess power back from homeowners who produce a surplus. They are NOT required to make it easy, or convenient. So, WE Energies, for example, has ONE GUY in the whole corner of the state they service, to inspect and approve new solar installations. And he works 4 days a week. It takes weeks at best to get him on-site, after getting your plans reviewed and approved by the utility.
This is silly. If you're using all approved technologies, there's no good reason for the added delay and cost. As far as the installation - if you can mount a satellite dish or garage door opener, you can handle solar panels.
Proof? If you stand outside a solar panel manufacturer in china with your arms out, they will sell you a working 250 watt module for less than $0.80/watt. By the time you get it to the US, you've added $0.40 for shipping/middlemen. Pricing here. We'll round to get to $1.25 a watt for a solar panel. If you do all the work yourself, you'll spend another $1.50/watt buying the hardware needed to mount, install and wire the panels. You'll have to spend another $1 a watt for the permits and a specially certified electrician to do 1 hr of work to connect the last foot of cable. (Rip off alert!) So 40% of the cost of this solar system is caused by regulation that doesn't add much value.
And that's if you do the work yourself so think how much time you've expended in 120-180 days trying to get those permits. Paying someone else to do all the work will take this $3.75/watt installation up to $5.50 to over $7.00 a watt. Getting reasonable permitting and more competition in installation/electricians is what we need to drive the costs down. That means we need the VOLUME of installations to climb to Germany-levels so that we stop letting contractors and towns rip us off and keep us from installing these systems on our homes.
Some calculations to show the impact. A 4 person family home generally would need a 10kw system to cover their whole energy bill (double production when the sun's shining, grid connected at night). We're talking $35k for a DIY system, which could as much as $10k lower if the permitting/contractor racket didn't exist. We're talking $50k-$70k if you let a contractor do the work and laugh all the way to the bank. Most folks only put in a 25-50% system because it's too much capital to expend. $35k for a system at today's mortgage rates put it within 10% of the cost of that grid electricity... with no government subsidies and assuming no increase in grid electricity rates... Add those subsidies and you've got a 3 year NPV.
Full disclosure: I work in the solar power industry building machines that are used at solar panel manufacturers to make cells to be placed into modules.
One more reason to keep an eye on your money.
The residents of Connecticut lived through three major storms in the past 16 months and suffered widespread power outages too. As a matter of fact, with the exception of Sandy, the impact of these storms (Tropical Storm Irene and the october noreaster) was more severe in CT (and Vermont/New Hampshire) than in NY and NJ. Now I understand how the residents of the dust mote in "Horton Hears a Who" felt.
YOP!
Just sayin'
This will work great in New York City, unless the upstairs neighbor puts a rug over your solar panel.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
"when the grid fails" is often not a nice sunny day, you know. :)
So the "wiring" needs to include storage, i.e. batteries. Which means it's probably a good thing that the Department of Energy is starting a big project to research breakthroughs in battery technology...
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
I live in a high-rise apartment so I can't put solar panels up anyway, but I did the math and found that to cover my monthly electricity costs, I need only buy $13000 in stock in my local power utility - assuming the fiscal cliff happens and the dividends will be taxed at 43.5% (Hey look, computer programmers earn enough to be in the top 2%!). A dividend yield of 7%, a chance for capital gains, potential to last far longer than 25 years, etc.
That's why.
They look pretty good when the grid is dead, snow is falling, the indoor temperature is 42F, and the sun barely rises above the horizon for about 6 hours in every 24 and can't be seen anyway through the clouds. Another thing that looks pretty good is the smelly and dangerous liquid that those dirty, noisy, and expensive devices like to drink.
We need to ask whether it is really sensible to power the 21st century by using an antiquated and vulnerable system of copper wires and wooden poles. (...) There is a better way to secure grid independence for our homes and businesses: electricity-producing photovoltaic panels installed on houses, warehouses and over parking lots, wired so that they deliver power when the grid fails.
If a hurricane is over your house, little sunlight is going to reach your panels, and there's a very real possibility that gusts of wind will rip them off of your roof. So this seems like a non-starter, at least for as long as the storm is actually around.
A more practical solution to the "antiquated and vulnerable system of copper wires and wooden poles" is to place those wires underground. It'll make the countryside prettier, too.
People in small living spaces dont have many safe options for storing much generator fuel. So many were in the long gasoline lines after Sandy had hit.
we need to ask whether it is really sensible to power the 21st century by using an antiquated and vulnerable system of copper wires and wooden poles.
I may be mistaken but aren't most of those wires aluminum, or is that only true for the high voltage lines on the metal towers? Yes, copper is a better conductor but its also more expensive.
$12K raw cost, $7K post-tax incentive cost.
Then the costs you're citing aren't the costs that can be counted for wide-scale implementation. If your parents' neighbors are paying $5K of their solar cost, that only works when the solar folks are 1 in 100. If everybody is installing solar and they're all each sharing each others' $5K costs, then they're all paying $7K for the solar and an extra $5K in taxes (for the scenario described by TFS - I know, not terribly likely).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Centralized power doesn't want a grid to begin with, it's a waste of Cu/Al &c., it looks ugly and it's quite vulnerable to storm damage. The infrastructure's fucked same as the economy, by the same crew, so an independent system makes sense to people who don't want to suffer inadequacy.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Solar power?
The panels become the things sticking out of your spleen in a really high wind. The panels are expensive, the batteries are expensive if you're trying to go off-grid, which OUGHT to be everybody's goal, the batteries take up square feet somewhere, and you have to be an electronic tech to fix the thing when some transistor shorts out someplace. You have to keep them free of the snow, clean the pollution off them periodically. Neither the batteries nor the panels last forever, and have to be replaced from time to time. Even the expensive ones aren't going to power the unusual things people do, like arc welding, and I'm really not into giving up _anything_ just for the only unique feature these things have: "Conversation Piece." You're SOL if its overcast a lot, and as a kid in northwestern Ohio I remember seeing the sun go behind clouds in mid-November and not seeing it again 'til about the end of January. I don't think the whole idea will be worth pursuing, ever.
There's no such thing as "clean" fossil fuels. All fossil fuels contribute to CO2 pollution.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
For most home owners the grid-tied solar setup is the default, due to its economics benefit. Basically when the sun is out your electric meter spins backwards and the power company pays you for your production. When the sun goes down it spins the other way and you pay the power company for the nightly electric rates. Since the setup is synchronized on the power companies 60 Hz carrier in order to put power back into the grid your home system inverter is integrally tied to the grid and can not operate without the carrier signal. When the grid goes down your system shuts down production. If you want power you need a very expensive battery bank to store the power and get no benefit from net-metering, as all your power goes towards charging your batteries. So, if you want power during an outage you buy a much more expensive system that needs regular maintenance, and if you want a system that pays for itself then you have no power when the grid goes down. You need to make a choice.
We refitted the house to pass an EnergyStar audit before we put the panels up. No point buying panels before you fix the inherent wastes of power. So, air infiltration, insulation, lighting, furnace, etc first, and then buy panels. No point buying panels to feed inefficient loads, fix that first. So, I don't know what assumptions you were using for your pvwatts calculation, but, at $.25/KWh, and with a carefully planned time-of-use billing schedule, that's the savings they got. Sorry if my real world experience differs from your spreadsheet. I can only report what is working for us. Granted, it's only based on 3 months worth of data, but the months were Sept/Oct/Nov, so they're a pretty good average, insolation and weather-wise.
Sure, I get that. So without the incentives, the payback goes from under 5 years, to about 8. Still not seeing how it's financially impractical. And the government certainly wastes money on things with NO payback, let alone a 5 or 8 year payback.
While it's true that solar panels have dropped they are still expensive and in many states there are few to no incentives offered to help defray the costs. The permitting issues he raises are also valid. If it were easier and there were incentives I'd be happy to spend a pile but as it stands now lack of incentives means few installs in my state and thus even fewer installers.
Also, this guy is an idiot. The fact is that panels on every single home would NOT prevent power failures unless they all also had battery banks which drive costs through the roof. Grid-tie systems are what most people install, surprise grid-tie relies on those very same copper wires this guy is crying about being fragile. I'd REALLY like to know what he means by "wired so they provide power when the grid fails" because without batteries this simply isn't feasible unless he thinks everyone should seriously upsize whatever solar install they might have planned. If he thinks that everyone should backfeed the power system then he also doesn't understand how dangerous this is. When a generator is hooked to the system in a power failure homes are disconnected from the grid in order to avoid killing power workers and from frying the generator as it tries to power the whole block. Trying to do this with panels alone isn't likely to have a better result. Grid-tie homes lose power just like everyone else, few have arrays and inverters big enough to power the entire home - their meters spin backwards at low loads only. Certainly batteries are an option but they require maintenance, have replacement costs, weigh a ton - sometimes literally, and can triple the cost of an install which is already damned high. If you're in the boonies and the power company wants $30K to string you a wire they make sense otherwise no you stick to relying on a grid connection. Power a few circuits for lights, say via LED, or other small things sure but you're not going to be powering a whole home on just panels without some storage and more complexity. Most systems aren't sized big enough to power everything except at peak power output which is a small portion of the day. Off-grid systems marshall their inputs into batteries to allow for occasional peak usage, he doesn't seem to understand that.
I don't think this guy has really thought through what he wants. He sees solar and thinks it's magic pixie dust, it's not. When the infrastructure breaks this stuff doesn't magically solve the problem. I'm all for more solar and putting it on everyone's roofs is a great idea but it's not going to solve the basic infrastructure fragility issue and might actually make it worse.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Most power companies are willing to pay more for solar power. Not only because it is green, but also because it is generated during the day when power companies have their peak demand. They have to power up their on-demand generators (usually natural gas) that are more expensive to operate, so any solar power they buy generally means they have to generate less of their most expensive power. Then you use power at night when the power companies are over-producing power so rates are at their cheapest. Net metering is actually pretty much a scam because you are giving them power when it is most expensive and getting it back when it is least expensive.
The panels on my roof can deliver up to 5400 watt.
If we for a second ignore that the inverter must shut down when the grid power goes away it is still not a solution. You need a "island configuration" or what ever it is called with batteries and a secondary generator source such as a gas powered one. That means that the price for the installation becomes really expensive, and it will take more than the seven years to break even in investment costs.
The big problem with solar only is that it produces the most power when I am not home and by the time I get home it is 1/2 or 1/3, even 0 depending of the time of year.
And you can't really plan after it. I have tried. Piling up clothes that needs to be washed etc. I start the washing machine, and 10 minutes later a few clouds cut down the output to 1/2 for perhaps the next half hour.
Solar power for homes are not economical most places unless you can use the grid as battery on at least monthly basis. Or yearly if you live in cold areas and plan on using a heat pump in the winter.
I can "store" power generated in the summer for use in the winter so my power bill is zero and my natural gas bill are cut in half because I take a look at the end of the year and look at how much power I have left and run the heat pump instead to use the remaining electricity before I switch to the natural gas heater.
Why stop at solar panels ? They are expensive, don't work at night and even on sunny day in most US they would generate fraction of the energy needed to power the house. I call for progressive politicians to open their mind. We need personal nuclear reactor in every house. This is reliable power source. Works day and night, winter or summer, wind or no wind. Does not need frequent fueling !!! We can even mandate that the waste neutrons to be captured and reused (as an additional benefit) to trans mutate lead into gold. As we all know, Washington - "yes we can" - is fully capable to mandate laws of physics or economics to be modified as needed. This will pay for itself. With the gold produced we can buy extra plutonium to power houses of those who cannot afford personal nuclear reactor for free. Science behind it is as solid as science behind affordable solar panels. Thus we will have unlimited source of energy that pays for itself. Progressive Washington must stop thinking small. Just don't call it nuclear. Come up with some other name. Progressives has unexplained allergy to anything called nuclear.
JAM
The house has been on the grid for 60 years or so, I suppose, so no new cost there. Wisconsin is a "net-metering" state, where the utility pays retail for the surplus power fed back to the grid. (which, they then sell at a profit to people who subscribe to buy "green energy" from them). Depending on the installation, you either have 2 meters as they do, or you can have 1 meter that runs either forwards or backwards depending on the sun and the load.
Last month's bill, their "on peak" cost was $1. Off peak was $20, and there was about $12 worth of facilities and surcharges. By using the electricity when it's cheap, on loads that can be delayed (water heater, battery bank charger if you go that way), you can change the cost dramatically.
Is it the case that if solar power were sufficiently scaled and genuinely used worldwide, that it would impact global climate, since if so much energy is being captured and converted into electricity, there must be less of it to do things like provide heat for the planet? If not, why not?
There's natural gas generators which are extremely clean and efficient. Higher end generators are really quiet.
They are not extremely clean (compared to wind or solar) and they are less efficient than the power you get from the grid. Personally I've never seen a home generator I'd describe as quiet though some are quieter than others and maybe they've come out with something I'm not aware of.
I've never understood why every home isn't built with one these days (other than the power companies oppose them for profit reasons).
Economics. They are expensive, see only occasional use, and are less efficient than grid power. I'm a big supporter of the concept of distributed power but the economics of it are still iffy. The paybacks tend to be measured in years (and for a backup generator you'll never recoup the cost) and the up front costs are high. Many people can't really justify the thousands of dollars it would cost to install such systems. I looked into the cost of a windmill sufficient to power my house and the cost was in the tens of thousands of dollars. A natural gas generator would cost me $5,000 minimum and might get used once or twice a year for a few hours.
The panels are on the barn because that's the tallest, clearest roof I had to work with. They feed the panels on "our" side of the meters. The barn itself rarely has any loads running.
So, I use a device called an eGauge (egauge.net) to analyze my load and production. The highest power draw I've ever seen from my house, is 10KW, and that's when the water heater, central air, washer, dryer, and well pump are all running. During the day when nobody is home and it's just parasitic loads and refrigerators, it's almost always under 500 watts.
Even 1000 watts per house, would supply a surplus during the day for most houses most of the time. If we didn't have to jump through the extra hoops to do this, I could install a 1000 watt array in 2 hours and for a total cost of $3K or so. But with the extra overhead, it's closer to 5 or 6K, and not worth doing. It's the "$2.5K worth of paperwork to get started" that creates an artificial barrier to access, which needs to go.
Panels keep dropping. They're around $1.25 a watt retail now, down from 4 times that a few years ago. We're at the point where the rails you mount the panels to, are almost as expensive as the panels themselves. So that cost can only go down so far. Getting rid of this unnecessary $2500 surcharge, would go a long way to saving people money every month. It's working well for my folks, next summer we're going to double the size of the array, and they'll get a check back most months (probably all but july/august, for central air reasons).
The microinverters will not turn on unless the grid power is there. If the grid power goes, it has to come back for 5 minutes before the microinverters come back on.
Everyone who has this type of microinverter lames the lack of any "zombie apocalypse" capability but as far as I can tell it's actually a difficult problem to sell.
AC power systems have problems with power factor (reactive power) and harmonic distortion and the problem of where to put the power if you are generating more power than is being used (something is going to burn it up as heat). If the grid is up, all these problems go away, the grid is powerful enough to hammer our the harmonic distortions. And if you have equipment which is far out of phase (lagging/leading, poor power factor) it will provide current at the right time in the AC cycle and absorb it at the right time in the AC cycle in order to correct for power factor problems. And finally if you have extra power you just shove it into the grid and don't worry about who is going to burn it off.
Take away the grid and all that goes away, the microinverters would have to be far more capable in order to power your house when the sun is up with no grid.
There are other inverter systems which will stay up when the grid goes down like "Sunny Island". But they require you rewire everything that stays up to not be connected directly to the grid, but instead through the Sunny Island. And then the current capacity is small, you need a 63kg inverter for every 4500W of devices (3 circuits in your house), it can pass through a bit more current, like about 6000W. And as far as I can tell you still need to put on at least some batteries if it is to operate off-grid, as it says it uses the batteries for power factor correction.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
So after the next Sandy, a large part of the debris will be broken solar panels, and the people who lost power this time will be in the same situation.
corporations also pay taxes (or at least are supposed to). so the 5k in tax kick backs is spread over much more than just the number of residents in residential homes - but to be fair i have no idea what the ratios look like. also your statement supposes that the tax incentives are coming out of the taxes gathered from the population, but they could just be loans (debt) or paid for by other entities like current energy providers that have to offset their carbon footprint.
I really am looking into doing exactly this. I live in a rural area, and have a propane tank, but nothing works without power (I guess the gas range, if I have a match to start it) . No well, no septic pump, no propane furnace or water heater (Since the electric exhaust fan has to turn on before it will ignite) etc.
I would love to setup a 3Kw grid tie system, and then, be able to do a physical disconnect, and power my own stuff. Being relatively rural, a large blizzard or tornado or other incident would mean a long wait to get back up, since i'm so far out of town.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
I also want to note a corollary: Transportation, at least where I live, follows a similar pricing pattern; Public transit prices reflect a close relation to the price of vehicle+insurance+fuel, with the capital-upfront to punitive-incentive ratio calibrated to extract every available dollar. Id est it costs as much to ride the bus as drive a car, but you pay for it one ride at a time and get bonus features/bugs at no extra charge. The economy seems to depend on giving the least value per dollar in the Communication, Transportation, Food, and Energy fields;
Middlemen for the loss!
-hoboroadie
And if some crisis, like say a monster autumn storm, does billions of dollars of damage to infrastructure...
Then you should bury that infrastructure underground in a city like everyone else does and then it will not blow down nor will it flood if you design it sensibly. Trying to mitigate storm damage caused by sticking infrastructure on the top of wooden poles by sticking even more infrastructure on top of poles and roofs is stupid.
I am from NJ too and was surprised that you didn't mention that it can be cloudy for weeks or even months at a time there. The sun is also very low in the sky during the winter. I am not totally discrediting solar but you will need a generator if you want to be protected from an outage.
love is just extroverted narcissism
see here - http://www.landartgenerator.org/blagi/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/AreaRequired1000.jpg
the link is to a map that shows how many sq kilometers in solar panels are needed to power the entire world.
And, don't forget, reducing our dependency on fossil based energy sources to some degree. To me, that factor alone makes some level of subsidy for solar, wind, and water power worth it.
It costs money to make power and large expensive facilities. You can supplement with wind and solar. Those certainly are worth it for the individual, but not for the group.
[citation needed]
Power generation must always consider the worst case. If the Fimbulwinter strikes for a month, covering everything with snow and wind turbines with ice, society will require power supplied by industrial grade facilities.
Solar panels are dark. They absorb sunlight well, and because they're mounted at an angle, self-clear snowfall well. The blocking and bypass diodes built into them optimize the output so the panels still output a high percentage of their rated power even if partially covered by snow.
People should install solar panels, yet someone must pay to maintain the huge infrastructure and facilities for when all else fails. A possible solution is that when a person with solar panels requires power from the grid, the rates shoot way up to help pay for having that power available instantaneously when they have a problem with their own.
So what I think you're saying here, help me if I missed your point, is that if I _stop_ using my solar panels, I should pay more for the power I buy from the utility? What about if I just turn my extra lights off and save energy that way? Should I also be penalized? How would the utility be able to tell?
This would discourage some people from installing solar panels, it would encourage others to become completely self-sufficient. In the long run this will prove the best solution; in the short run the power infra-structure must be maintained and paid for whether or not people use solar panels.
So your contention is that it's BAD for people to be able to supply some of their own power? You are aware, right, that the peak usage period for electricity coincides with when it's sunny? Seems to me, providing power on-peak, helps to use the capacity of the energy grid more efficiently.
Solar panels should not be allowed to put power to the grid. It will cost everybody more in the long run, but people will insist on this and so those costs will just get added to the bills. The costs won't be a sudden hit, just slow and incremental. By the time people realize the cost, a loud vocal minority with a vested interest in selling power from their solar cells to the grid will be able to beat off attacks. That may already be the case.
So you want to penalize people who invest their own money to eventually payback their investment, who are producing energy to supplement the existing infrastructure, and whose power is produced more cleanly than burning hydrocarbons? Can you help me understand your motivations and where you're coming from? Because it's puzzling that you'd want to discourage that sort of thing.
1. The global climate change that brought hurricane Sandy to New York and New Jersey will someday put those same homes underwater. I doubt it would be feasible to relocate the populations of NYC and coastal NJ, so it is time to start building things to protect those areas from being submerged......before the solar panels.
2. This may be a moot point given #1. A centralized power grid has the most benefits. The grid needs to use alternative fuel sources and more importantly the investment needs to be made to put powerlines underground. Very old countries with very old infrastructures in Europe did it. The US can too. Especially with sudden strong storms like El Derechios becoming more common. It is the only way to keep service more reliable and make post-storm repairs fewer.
So we're going to have to decide what is "greener" for the planet: solar panels on every roof, or having trees everywhere.
Here in Raleigh, North Carolina, the community has put a very high value on trees. We are known as "The City of Oaks". The trees are so tall and so thick in my neighborhood that even if I cut down all of the trees in my yard, I couldn't have a productive garden because of the canopy of trees in the properties around me (including the protected greenway space behind me).
Photovoltaics just wouldn't be an option for most mature neighborhoods here without extensive defoliation of the trees. How green would that be?
So do we want trees shading our roofs, or do we want to open up the sky and let the sun in?
Imagine a bunch of solar panels in a hurricane like the one hitting NYC.
The industry standards are too low currently and needs to be revamped to support mass scale installations--which are going to escalate cost 10x.
So you would be getting, what, 20c/kWh. Times 7.5 times 24*30 minus $100 = $240 per month.
Investing $10,000 for that system if instead invested in a long term tracker at about 5% less tax: $350 minus the $100 you'd have to pay again for power without the solar panel: $250.
And 10 grand is rather a lot for such a small installation.
There is a simple and smart -way to start this.
Require all new buildings below 4 stories to have enough on-site Alternative Energy to match 98% of their HVAC (and require both heat and AC).
Start it in 2 years with 50% HVAC and then increase it by 25% the next year, followed by the 23% the following. With such an approach, MOST new buildings will simply insulate better, put in smaller number of well-insulated windows, and put on a small amount of solar panels. The smarter homes will even install geo-thermal heat pump so that a very small amount of Solar Panels are required.
Then in 5 years time, require that any building below 4 stories upon selling, must have enough on-site AE to handle 50% of the HVAC. Then again, bump it up.
The above approach will allow new homes to be designed quickly to drop their energy usage, while in 5 years time, the buildings that are sold will simply require new owners to deal with it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You would have to cover Connecticut in solar panels to provide enfough power to run NYC ant that would only work durring peak operation and if the sun is actually shining...Natural gas or thorium enrgy is the ticket
They have inverters now that are combo grid-tie inverter/stand-alone inverter/battery charger. They charge your batteries (from solar, wind, hydro or grid), feed excess power into the grid and automatically disconnect and run off the batteries when the grid goes down.
The Outback GTFX and GVFX series inverter/chargers, for example.
They're reasonably priced, but not cheap.
It took about one month from calling a company to getting them in.
They're tied into the grid, and don't work if there's a power failure.
However, it got our electric bill down to zero, and that includes keeping two electric cars charged.
I'm not sure if the value is there yet; we got them more because we're nerds. But there's something nice about eliminating a bill. Now we have no electric bill, nor a bill for gas for our car.
You might want to look into the "Outback Power Flexpower" series. It has the charge controller to manage the battery bank, the MPPT inverter to optimize and invert the DC from the panels, instrumentation so you can manage and measure what it's doing, and of course the transfer switches and other anti-islanding components. They're about $3K. From there, it's just a matter of adding your panels and battery bank, both of which you can scale however you want to meet your needs. So, you program it to run the house off the panels during the day but use batteries to augment, and buy power if you have to. At night, it runs everything off of the grid and tops the batteries back up. Cost savings are dramatically better with this if your utility offers a "time of use" billing arrangement where you pay more for on-peak electricity (and they pay more for on-peak production).
I figure enough batteries to run my critical loads for 2 days without sun, is a good design goal. From there, the rest is all about investment vs. cost savings payback. But the Outback looks like a nice all-in-one solution.
This makes sense for the first 3000 watts. After that, I think something like the AC panels from Helios (250W each, with a networked microinverter on each) would be a good upgrade path from there. Instead of buying a new inverter every 3000 watts (with a big up front cost for that jump), then you can buy the 250W panels as you go, and scale as the money allows. Having individual panel inverters is also helpful if you have a partially shaded array; each panel makes the most of what it individually gets. Lather/Rinse/Repeat until you get to 20KW or whatever the upper limit of what your utility allows for a home power generation limit.
Your installation cost for a residential system is extremely cheap ! On average in the USA a 3kW system would be a $17000 investment [1]. Also your annual savings are quite incredible: with the average household cost of electricity in the USA at 11.72c per kWh [2], it would mean that your system produced around 13413 kWh [12x(163-32)/0.1172] over a year ! For a 3kW system this would mean that your magic installation as a capacity factor of 51% !!!! [13413/ (3 x 24 x 365)].
So yes, I don't know if you're delusional but you have been most likely lying by forgetting to speak about the subsidies you received for the installation and feed-in tarif. Oh and if you want to prove your case, please state your location and the supplier of your system...
What is far more annoying than your convenient omission of subsidies is all the idiots solar fanboys moderating you informative when they have absolutely no clue about the real cost of Solar PV energy....
[1] http://www.irena.org/DocumentDownloads/Publications/RE_Technologies_Cost_Analysis-SOLAR_PV.pdf
[2] http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_5_03
http://www.transparency.org
a 2kW kettle takes, say, 10 minutes to boil water for 20 cups. That is 120 cups an hour, near 3000 cups a day.
Tell me, is your liver OK?
Solar panels might be a good idea or a horrible idea, depending on your situation. If you live in Oregon or Washington (for example), they're a horrible idea. They need something that those two states lack severely... direct sunlight. Where I live, however, is technically a desert, and we have far more sunlight than we want. Here, they make sense.
Also something that annoys me is that they won't provide power during an outage (can't have it feeding power into city lines which are being worked on by techs). If you do want power during an outage, you need your entire house on a battery/inverter system, which gets quickly gets expensive if you want to run multiple major appliances with it (e.g. a/c, oven, dryer). Just know that adding solar panels doesn't "take you off the grid".
Hey, /. folks know so much about everything, but so little about solar power...
it is funny how usually the
1- wind. Most panels and fixing systems are made for wind ~130 mph. This means most will withstand the hurricanes just fine. Experience in Japan backs this up.
2- cost. the HW of a system costs today from 1,300 - 2,200 $/kW, depending on what you buy and the size. Labour should be 500 $/kWp; the rest is red tape or financing costs. In the US you get around the year from 1,200 to 2,000 kWh/kWp, if your roof is not terribly shadowed, depending on where you are.
Maybe you can now calculate yourself if it is cheap enough for you. And if cutting red tape would help.
Fact is, in the US, with so much frack gas around, there is no technical or economical reason why solar should not be in nearly every house- of course there is the reason of the power companies that hate losing market share. If they own the Government as they do now, you see how the benefit of a few is damaging the well being of the most...
People say, net metering is unfair because if everyone would use it, the cost of power for everybody would be higher. If you have nuclear or old coal systems, it is partly true. However, with the increased use of gas, that you can run up-and-down easily, and modern coal plants, that argument is moot.
About the use of solar as back-up, actually it just needs different programming of the system and laws that accept it. There is no real technical problem. Of course it will work better with batteries in between, but no real need, if you just need power during the day.
Just to finish: in Europe, in Spain (less sun than the US), some places already use solar without even net metering. Just to save electricity cost when production and use are at the same time. *giving away the surplus*. And it pays back!
You have lots of sunshine to power your roof.
I guess a good thing about any distributed power generation is though if a roof gets ripped off that house is probably not being used and need the power on its roof anyways. The panels do sit a few inches off of the roof for a solar installations I've saw (including my own roof). They are mounted pretty secure but I'm not sure how well they would hold up in a true tropical storm. They are also covered in glass which could easily get damaged by blowing debris
Also it takes about 1.5 years of use for a solar panel to payback the energy needed to make it so moving everyone over quickly is impossible as we already have brownouts in a lot of places and pulling 1.5 years worth of power for a significant percentage of people to install would be hard (1.5 years doesn't even count battery/capacitive/thermal storage needed to spread the energy through the day) and since China leads the industry the power would likely being drawn from coal fired plants run in a country with a history of polluting.
Every little bit helps but ultimately I think the solution is people shouldn't live 100km from work and live in spaces where they have 600+ sqft per person in livable space. People live the way they want and then look for a quick fix on how they can make it sustainable rather than using sustainability as a criteria for how they chose to live.
1) Solar PV is only price competitive with electricity from the grid when the government (ie taxpayers and other utility customers) subsidize 60% of the cost, and in high-cost areas.
2) While I can't speak to the whole country, and I'm sure there are localities that are abusive(*), I can assure you that in Colorado the permitting process is quick and easy and not expensive--it's basically no different than any other building permit.
Now, I'm all for continuing to work on PV, including the necessary step of getting them more widely into production and real-world use. If we don't do that, we'll never get to the point where they're really competitive. If we don't do things like this, we'll have no chance at a somewaht smooth transition into a post-oil economy instead of a sudden global crisis. But I think that spreading lies about the current cost/efficiency is more harmful than helpful. (Not entirely unhelpful...)
(*) So when Colorado first put in its large subsidies for PV, some municipalities decided that it wasn't "fair" that homeowners were getting so much money from the state, and jacked up permit fees hugely in order to capture a significant portion of the subsidy into their general funds. The state legislature put a stop to this practice quickly with a new law, but it nicely illustrates both that permitting does vary greatly locally, and that when money starts being diverted to "good" causes by government intervention, weird shit can happen.
Did you say 25 cents per kilowatt-hour? That is some seriously expensive electricity rates. Why is it so high there? Florida is about half that last I checked.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Calling someone 'lazy/incompetent' is rather easy to do when you have 33 years more alternative energy experience than they do. It would be like me saying you are lazy/incompetent because I, as a decent heavy equipment mechanic, have a 16 year old generator that has burned through $5000 in fuel and you cant make one last 1/10th of that time.
Let me try to address some of your points. First, while it is true that solar panels are dark and absorb sunlight and they are angled to help snow slide off, that only works if it is a nice, dry, powdery snow. For those people that live in areas that get ice storms and heavy, sticky snow there are times that the snow won't just slide off. So while the GP is correct, I am not sure how many people it affects and for how long.
The next point is the concern over what will happen to the utilities. The problem with solar is that it is not reliable. Imagine this scenario. You have a city that, during peak consumption, requires 1000MW of generation to meet demand. Now, the inhabitants of that city want to be able to use their 1000MW peak no matter what the weather is like. (Aside: It can be argued that in the summer if it is cloudy then people will need less AC to cool their house and therefore demand will drop. However, in the winter, if it is cloudy then the demand for heating will increase. End Aside) Now, imagine that this city goes green and 50% of their peak power is produced by solar. Now, during peak hours the city only needs 500MW of production.
The big question now is, what happens on cloudy days? If the residents don't have their own grid storage system, then they will rely on the utility to provide the full 1000MW. Thus the utility has to have the capacity to provide 1000MW of power, even though on sunny days it can only sell 500MW. This is expensive for the utility. Now lets take this analogy one step further. Imagine that the city is really into solar panels and they install 110% peak capacity. Now, during peak time the city is selling back to the utility company 100MW of power. The problem is, the utility has to buy it, but it doesn't need it. In addition, the utility still has to have the full 1000MW generation capacity for the days when the sun isn't shining.
This is one of the big concern about large scale adoption of solar. If people decide to go fully solar then I think that they should have to go completely off the grid. The cost associated with the utility having such a large flux in demand would be astounding. For the few poor souls that didn't have solar panes for whatever reason, their electric bill would skyrocket as the utilities attempted to recover their operating costs.
New Jersey and New York aren't really known for their sunny weather -- particularly during hurricane events. Good luck with emergency power that depends on the vary thing you're trying to hedge against -- the weather.
Oh slashdot you know what I say.... Hook the shit up. Fuck the cocksucking oath breaking scumbag motherfucker cockroaches!
FIND OUT WHO THEY ARE TRACK THEM DOWN AND SHOOT THEM DEAD IF THEY FUCK WITH YOUR SHIT!
New Jersey, Colorado, PUC's, HOA's all you cocksucking agencies and rotten fucking parasites and shit, eat a fucking golden turd. Fuck you!
You should be mowed down with bullets for being the fucking domestic TERRORISTS YOU ARE!
You want a civil war? fuck with shit that makes people survive! Keep fucking with people's shit.
Go ahead, Take away my earth air water fire or ether bitch, see if I don't make your day, these are GOD GIVEN RIGHTS, the constitution just explain it to dense hard heads like you.
DSM 5
fuck you
I have a constitution in my brain, it wasn't updated/upgraded with your filthy unconstitutional shit, out on the street, you pull that shit and I meet you, your a dead domestic terrorist cock sucker! HOWEVER, no fears for you, if you do the right thing, AND OBEY YOUR OATHS!
It's wake up time, you fuckers
SolarCity is under investigation for pricing shenanigans. Basically they overstate the installed cost of the system in order to cash in on larger direct subsidies and tax incentives. They all do it to some degree, because all that paperwork has to be filed WAY ahead of time and only an estimated job cost is available, but some do it worse than others...
Now overall they probably do good work... just a bit sleazy on the finances when it comes to public funds.
=Smidge=
And to help pay for their own Zimmermans to keep things quiet and 'riff-raff' free.
Now if I could just find someone like you who's levelheaded and knowledgeable about this in my area willing to design and install a system without cleaning out my account. No State incentives here but I've got a tin roof South facing with zero shading begging to be covered in the damn things. :-(
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
...and should have been started years or perhaps decades ago. Despite the extra costs initially, the savings in the long-term would be enormous: Move All Utility Delivery Systems Underground. Cable/fiber media, telephone, electricity, etc. Get rid of wooden and metal poles and towers. Aside from the obvious benefits to infrastructure, there are the health and aesthetic benefits as well. Solar heat and electric systems would fare just as poorly in hurricane-force winds.
The way my state works is one of two ways. This is by law BTW.
They will buy it at up to 8 cents per for the first 5k plus a 4 cent tax incentive from the city/county/state. Or you can 'net meter' and whatever you go over you do not get a rebate on. To buy from the grid is about 9.2 cents per. The tax incentive will probably go away in the future as the cost of solar comes down. Plus there is a 4 dollar per month 'interconnect fee'.
http://www.dsireusa.org/incentives/incentive.cfm?Incentive_Code=NC05F&re=0&ee=0
http://www.dsireusa.org/incentives/incentive.cfm?Incentive_Code=NC05R&re=0&ee=0
Trust me they have it figured out in this state to make sure net meter is the easiest and probably best option. My state level officials are well paid off, uh I mean they have well funded campaign contributions (both D and R). They are doing everything to make sure you do not want to bother with it. Then if you do the ROI is on the order of 10-15 years if your lucky. Then even if you choose net meter the 'start date' is June 22. Almost exactly the worst possible spot to do it from the customer perspective for the first year. Also you are not able to do both. So you can not even keep an eye on it and buy and sell when you are over...
Oh and they mail you a check no direct deposit.
ROI at the current rate is 8-9 years as the max you can 'get money out of' is 5k which go for about 7-8k plus another 2-3k install.
So without the incentives, the payback goes from under 5 years, to about 8. Still not seeing how it's financially impractical.
Something like 40% of American households live paycheck-to-paycheck. The next bracket up has a small cushion but not enough to provide outlay for 8 years worth of electric bills. Then there is the class that's underwater in their mortgages.
Yes, upper middle class and the wealthy can afford to do solar installs, and they might be able to accept the non-ROI on it (vs. a simultaneous investment). But TFS was advocating this as a solution for populations hard hit by storms, which means "almost everybody".
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Writers haven't a clue. Below are two points out of many to consider.
Solar without Battery backup:
-> No power when lines are down.
-> Repairs take much longer as the line tech need to shutoff each house with solar prior to work.
-> The more houses connected this way the more spikes on the grid (non sunny days, nights)
---> To avoid spikes electric co's have been known to throttle power back to the lines (google: electric co's requiring windmill throttling)
Solar WITH battery backup:
-> Needs to be properly ventilated as the batteries give off toxic fumes.
-> Shouldn't be in a basement due to the first point as well as flooding considerations.
-> What to do with more toxic waste.
www.moonnext.com
Fair point on the corporations, but don't we need people to have a place to go to work too?
current energy providers that have to offset their carbon footprint.
Who pass their costs directly on to ratepayers. That's just an extra level of indirection.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If you want folks to do something make it easier that doing something else....
Some small regulatory changes that would make a world of difference....
Require utilities to support net-metering - where you can sell your excess back to them. Arbitrage the rate by 0.5% in the utility's favor so they can still make some money, but not so much that it's not worth it to you. Basically, they make money by doing nothing. However, the system only works well if you can buy and sell the electricity you are producing - it also adds redundancy in case your personal system goes down.
Get rid of all subsidies to traditional electrical generation (Coal, Nuke, NaGas, Hydro) - make it a disincentive to purchase power in that manner.
Support Govt. backed home-owner loans modeled on the student loan program. 10 years up to 30% of the value of your house. Since the loan is tied to the equity of your house the loan becomes transferable with your house. Yes, there's a mechanics lean when you go to sell. But the banks look at it and go - Oh, it's the Gov't Solar Loan... system still works? OK and sign off on it.
Loans are only available for panels and equipment produced in the US. Doesn't matter who owns the company (US private co., Chinese, or the Sioux Nation) - panels made here are the only ones qualified. And yes, the panels have to meet some NIST and UL standard.
Finally - this is the safety thing... yes, you need a permit to put them up. And yes, you need to have the system inspected when finished - but get rid of the red tape around doing it. It shouldn't be much harder than inspection of furnace, hot water heater or storm shutters.
What Gov't agency gets the job of doing this? Dept. of Energy, of course.
FredInIT
Something like 40% of American households live paycheck-to-paycheck. The next bracket up has a small cushion but not enough to provide outlay for 8 years worth of electric bills. Then there is the class that's underwater in their mortgages.
There are now several companies that at eating this up front cost for you and doing free installs of solar. No, not everywhere, but in more and more places. What the homeowners get out of it is maintained solar panels and a *lower* power bill.
http://www.verengosolar.com/
http://www.solarcity.com/ (who went public yesterday http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2012/12/13/solarcity-ipo/1766375/)
To name a couple...
This from the post is key "wired so that they deliver power when the grid fails."
Without this the cells are useless in a power failure. Typically the cells are wired to feed power to the grid. In a power failure they must be fully disconnected from the grid or you could kill a power line worker.
So many people with solar cells were out of luck after the storm.
This seems like a good article on which to talk about something I've recently been reading about: Michael Reynolds and his Earthships.
So this guy, for almost 45 years now, has been building homes out of recycled materials (tires, cans, and bottles mostly). They're designed to as close to "carbon zero" in their energy requirements as possible. They collect their own water from the roof and store it in cisterns rather than needing public water infrastructure or pulling from an aquifer. They are heated and cooled passively by the sun, both in the dead of winter and the height of summer. That of course cuts out the bulk of any energy requirements, since heating and cooling require more electricity than anything else in a typical home. Earthships also treat their own waste water on-site using a greenhouse full of plants. So every piece of public infrastructure that a typical home would require is all taken care of on-site. Water, power and sewer.
Even with drastically lowered power requirements compared to a conventional house, the complete solar power system to run an Earthship costs $25-30,000. That's a few solar panels, a few heavy duty batteries, inverters, charge controller, etc. Now triple or quadruple that setup for a conventional home, unless you just want enough for emergency power, in which case you might as well just have a 7kw-10kw generator installed. What many people are doing is just installing solar panels tied to the power grid to decrease their electric bill. That kind of installation pays for itself within a few years, but of course does absolutely nothing to give you power in emergencies since your local inverter shuts down when the grid shuts down and you have no battery bank to store the power even for overnight usage.
In short, Earthships clearly demonstrate that true grid-independent solar power is still extremely expensive, at least in the initial setup cost. Solar installation should not be talked about in terms of absolute cost but in terms of how much stress it will remove from the public infrastructure and how it will help decrease the country's dependence on centralized energy production. That's not to mention how many millions of people won't have to lose power, water and sewer every time there's an outage. That's really the major benefit to putting in a complete solar power system: partial or complete independence from the grid. Not saving money. If even 10% of homes were Earthship style homes, the impact on the public of major infrastructure outages would be lessened quite a bit. Decentralizing weak points of infrastructure should always be seen as a good thing.
Anyone who's interested in sustainable and/or off-grid housing should visit the Earthship website (earthship.com) or view some of the videos on YouTube. Look for "Garbage Warrior" and "Earthship seminar". Michael Reynolds has been demonstrating for decades now that it is possible to build sustainable homes that don't require any infrastructure for about the same overall price as a conventional home. But you definitely need to think a little bit outside the box.
Your installation cost for a residential system is extremely cheap !
Not especially. $4/watt installed is pretty much the going rate this quarter, in Wisconsin.
On average in the USA a 3kW system would be a $17000 investment [1]. Also your annual savings are quite incredible: with the average household cost of electricity in the USA at 11.72c per kWh [2],
I've already stated twice that the on-peak rate with WE Energies on a tier-2 time of use is $.25/KWh, and that the utility buys the power back at retail (and resells it at a premium to people who subscribe to green power). Your adversarial attitude is both misplaced, and puzzling. I have no reason to make this shit up, feel free to go look up WE Energies billing rates.
it would mean that your system produced around 13413 kWh [12x(163-32)/0.1172] over a year ! For a 3kW system this would mean that your magic installation as a capacity factor of 51% !!!! [13413/ (3 x 24 x 365)].
If your math wasn't based on an assumption based on the wrong cost per KWh. Lose the attitude, sparky, you're boring me, I'm trying to share facts, and you're just spouting insults.
So yes, I don't know if you're delusional but you have been most likely lying by forgetting to speak about the subsidies you received for the installation and feed-in tarif.
WTF is a "feed-in tarif"? The raw cost of the install (the bill from the electrician) was $12,000. This is for (10) 300W Helios 9T6 panels, a Fronius 3000W synchronous inverter, meter, pedastal, associated wiring, and installation. Tax rebate plus "Focus on Energy" subsidy brought the out of pocket expense down to $7,000. I don't know how much more specific I can be.
Oh and if you want to prove your case, please state your location and the supplier of your system...
What is far more annoying than your convenient omission of subsidies is all the idiots solar fanboys moderating you informative when they have absolutely no clue about the real cost of Solar PV energy....
[1] http://www.irena.org/DocumentDownloads/Publications/RE_Technologies_Cost_Analysis-SOLAR_PV.pdf [2] http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_5_03
So yeah, I can't speak to whatever idiot fanboi whatever this or that you complain about, but your use of emotionally charged namecalling in the face of simply stated facts that I have direct personal experience with, makes me not all that interested in trying to convince you of _anything_. So here you go - yeah, you're right man, it's all an illusion. Installed systems at $4/watt are impossible, and, there's no way it'll ever payback the investment. Burn more coal! Woo!
how are these PV going to light my house, power my well pump, and spin my furnace fan at nighttime? huh? huh? I'd need a separate outhouse filled with batteries!
Which is part of my point. If this artificial $2500 barrier to entry surcharge were removed by streamlining the regulations (like maybe, "if it's UL approved, you can self-install as long as you pass code inspection"), then people could buy as big or small of a system as they wanted without this huge upfront hit.
Let me try to address some of your points. First, while it is true that solar panels are dark and absorb sunlight and they are angled to help snow slide off, that only works if it is a nice, dry, powdery snow. For those people that live in areas that get ice storms and heavy, sticky snow there are times that the snow won't just slide off. So while the GP is correct, I am not sure how many people it affects and for how long.
Snow-clearing is an area that has been given a great deal of engineering attention. Textured front surfaces of glass, to provide a golf-ball like effect, carefully beveled faceplates, that sort of thing. I'm not sure what kind of snow you're experienced with, but wet snow around here is slippier than dry snow. Snowdrifts could be a problem, I suppose if you mount your panels right on the ground, but I don't know of anyone who does that.
The next point is the concern over what will happen to the utilities. The problem with solar is that it is not reliable. Imagine this scenario. You have a city that, during peak consumption, requires 1000MW of generation to meet demand. Now, the inhabitants of that city want to be able to use their 1000MW peak no matter what the weather is like. (Aside: It can be argued that in the summer if it is cloudy then people will need less AC to cool their house and therefore demand will drop. However, in the winter, if it is cloudy then the demand for heating will increase. End Aside) Now, imagine that this city goes green and 50% of their peak power is produced by solar. Now, during peak hours the city only needs 500MW of production. The big question now is, what happens on cloudy days? If the residents don't have their own grid storage system, then they will rely on the utility to provide the full 1000MW. Thus the utility has to have the capacity to provide 1000MW of power, even though on sunny days it can only sell 500MW. This is expensive for the utility.
Sure, but no more expensive as the infrastructure that they'd need if there was no solar on their network. They have to design for the peak; sometimes, they'll need to supply that with no help.
Now lets take this analogy one step further. Imagine that the city is really into solar panels and they install 110% peak capacity. Now, during peak time the city is selling back to the utility company 100MW of power. The problem is, the utility has to buy it, but it doesn't need it. In addition, the utility still has to have the full 1000MW generation capacity for the days when the sun isn't shining.
Well, that's not how a grid works - it would just go out beyond that utility's area. I'm also not too worried about 110%, or even 50% of our capacity being supplied by Solar - we use an IMMENSE amount of electricity in this country. A kilowatt or three on every house roof would save people money and delay power plant upgrades and new installations, improve the whole carbon thing, and maybe even give people who spring for batteries some emergency backup power.
This is one of the big concern about large scale adoption of solar. If people decide to go fully solar then I think that they should have to go completely off the grid. The cost associated with the utility having such a large flux in demand would be astounding. For the few poor souls that didn't have solar panes for whatever reason, their electric bill would skyrocket as the utilities attempted to recover their operating costs.
The utility companies have those operating costs TODAY. They have to build for peak usage today. They have to balance their outputs to demand today. I'm not seeing where this makes anything worse - seems to me it makes things significantly better.
Time-of-use billing. You pay a LOT more during the on-peak hours (during the day during the week) than off-peak. Like, a 6:1 ratio last time I checked. So evening/weekend power is cheaper than flat billing, on-peak is more expensive than flat billing. Might only be an option in rural areas.
The post didn't say "and now an example from the federal level" it merely gave an example of the general concept.
It is not hard to find other examples; we have a long history of creative scams, organized crime, ignorance and incompetence which inspired regulations to minimize their damage. The EPA and environmental laws comes to mind immediately... having grown up in a city which used those to sue the military for contaminating the ground water (we still lost our ground water, but at least a city water system would be built.) The regulations need not be perfect, they only need to be better than the problem they solve -- unfortunately, in a culture where people can't remember longer than 1 year and are unable to THINK on their own, they appear to be unable to see the benefits of regulation.... or at least they can't elect officials that do.
I think it should be a law that all new homes are required to be built with solar panel installs. I mean adding $15k to a mortgage is not that much....
Its a dirty work I know, but it is possible to build a reliable grid. It just requires actually investing in the grid, something we stopped doing in the 70's. Now instead of overbuilding the grid, or using the best transmission technologies we scrape 10% off for the stock holders, or the local government to spend on other things.
I am constantly reminded of the photos I saw after hurricane Ike when power was off in huston for a few days. It was a picture of the high voltage lines from one of the private companies (having issues) in the same easement with a public utility from louisiana. The private companies lines were on large sets of wooden polls arranged in a H formation, right next to it were some more high voltage polls but they were the modern single stick aluminum ones set in concrete owned by the public utility. The wooden ones were all leaning over and touching the ground while the aluminum ones were standing there straight and pristine.
This would be a good solution in places like AZ, NM, NV, TX, FL and the south in general. Bad one for the states mentioned - the tristate area. How would that work in the snow?
On a different note, why don't they do a pilot program in the Death Valley, CA, and have a grid attached to it to major nearby cities, such as Vegas, and see how that works? If it can light up the Strip, it's good to go.
If you want to make your lawyer a happy camper and don't need your life savings/kid's college fund/etc. sure, you can do battle with a HOA. A few years ago there was a guy who lived in a neighborhood a few miles from me who ran an adult voyeur "dorm" out of their house and when the neighbors figured it out, the HOA sued him. He ultimately ended up moving to another house in a non-HOA neighborhood.
I've also had my own problems with the HOA in my neighborhood due to differing opinions on lawn care and I can tell you they'll simply keep adding fees on top of fees and then late fees and lawyer letter fees if you don't pay them. If you keep ignoring them, they can even ask the court to foreclose on your house so they can get the money they're owed (including legal costs).
HOAs are certainly not "toothless". Read the agreement you signed with them when you bought your house. They're basically free to make your life miserable if they want to. I'd personally never buy in a neighborhood with an HOA again.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
> WTF is a "feed-in tarif"?
In Europe that's a guaranteed purchase price by the utilities for home producers of "green" energy. You can also call that a subsidy. Now If you really believe that when WE Energy buy your PV electricity at $.25 per kWh they will be able to recoup these costs by selling it at a premium, this is were you enter the delusional category.
FYI WE Energy do have an offer at 100% renewable energy[1]: with a rate of $.14 (0.12611+0.01388 [2]) ! So basically all their customers are subsiding the purchase price of PVs, and the taxpayers subsidizing your installation. And you have the balls to tell me that I'm the one working from inaccurate or obsolete information ...
Also, if you did this installation recently, double-check your contract I am not sure that this scam will go for long, even in Germany the government is starting to see the stupidity of all this and is reducing the feed-in tariff.
[1] http://www.we-energies.com/business/wisconsin_service_rates/eft_smbus.htm
[2] http://www.we-energies.com/business/elec/std_rateplan.htm
http://www.transparency.org
Snow clearing has been given a great deal of attention, the phenomenon that we face is freezing rain. When that mixes with snow, it doesn't come off. I really don't think that this is much of an issue for most people and will probably only affect certain regions for a few days out of the year.
The point isn't that utility companies need to have any more infrastructure, the point is that the utility companies need the SAME amount of infrastructure. As solar use increases the utilities have the same infrastructure to support but they are selling less electricity. In an ideal world for a utility company the demand curve is flat across all time. The idea with the development of a smart grid is to try and level out the demand curve, turn on major appliances when the demand on the grid is low. The addition of heavy solar generation does just the opposite, it adds more noise to the demand curve. This additional noise does not oscillate as predictably as current demand curves. The oscillation is a lot slower, over the period of weeks instead of a day. But it comes with sunny days reducing demand and cloudy days increasing demand. On sunny days, the utilities infrastructure sits idle, but they have to have it for the cloudy days.
In the perfect world yes, additional power generation goes out beyond the local area. However, what if an entire region has heavy solar usage and the entire region is having sunny days? You can keep looking further and further out, but comes a point where there just isn't the system to transfer that kind of load and the losses are just too large.
Yes, utility companies have to build for peak usage today, but adding heavy solar usage exacerbates the difference between peak demand, average demand, and minimum demand. The larger those differences are, and the more unpredictable the demand curve is, the more electricity is going to cost.
Show me one house with a solar panel installation that is not broken and still functions after a hurricane or earthquake and we'll talk.
Wait, that's just food for the "toldyaso" people.
Show me over 50% success and we'll talk.
So you're OK with them charging $.25/hWh, but not with them paying it? Did you catch the point about time of use billing? You seem to have ignored that repeatedly. Anyway, I don't care for your attitude. Feel free to be all superior and stuff; I'll be over here building arrays with a 5 to 8 year payback. Assuming panel prices stay this high, and energy costs stay this low.
The solar lease places sound great! They even advertise in my state, however when you call them they don't service my area. Want to bet it's lack of Govt. incentives making it too expensive for them just as it does me? I'd make the capital outlay myself but it's too damned expensive right now.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Hmmmm - Dec 14 - my guess is that here in Blossom Valley the
days have been cloudy about 80% of the time since mid Sept.
If there were to be a storm, which is pretty much a sure thing in
the long run, and if that storm knocked out the grid for say a week;
A wood stove at $2,000.00 installed would be MUCH more usefull.
The temperature has hovered around freezing for quite a while. That
gets very uncomfortable, especially for us oldies. The PV systems
are not a good bet everywhere and fall flat on their face in winter or
at night. That guy in Phoenix is correct about needing a sunny place.
Futher, how sunny was it during the days after The Storm? Get a grip!
... Want to bet it's lack of Govt. incentives making it too expensive for them just as it does me? I'd make the capital outlay myself but it's too damned expensive right now.
I don't think I'd put it that way. If you were a business and there were incentives to install in some places and not in others, where would you install first?
It's not that solar won't pay for itself - it will. It's a matter of when. And if you're a business, you aim for the highest return first. These companies also have crews that do the installs, so they probably tend to line up as many installs in a given region as possible before moving on to another one.
I get calls all the time (so much for Do Not Call) from companies that want to put solar panels on my roof at their expense and charge me for the power that I would use, at lower rates than the local electric utility charges. But I live 2 miles from the beach and don't have air conditioning, so I interrupt their sales pitch and point out that my monthly electric bill is only around $30, much less than their minimum of $100 or more. They go away immediately.
Having installed 100s of solar PV projects in California I offer the following advice:
- The delays come when you ask for government money or incentives.
As incentives are stacked: (City, State/Utility, Federal) and each one takes COMPLETE documentation from the prior the more cash you try to get back the more you load in overhead and time.
- The power to add costs lies in your own hands. If you do a cost-benefit sanity check on what will it take/cost you if you have 3 months, 6 months or even a couple of years of hassle and compare to the benefit of just proceeding it is eye opening.
- There is no real reason, other than getting $$ from government incentives to go through the procedures they require. Industry standards such as UL1741 handle the safety question and automatically turn off the solar generation when the grid goes out. This is done to asure that an electrical worker does not face some live power when she/he does not expect it PROVIDED the grid is operating as your inverter quipment will shutdown from low voltage if the grid is actually out.
THIS MEANS with a modest amoutn of planning and a survey of your breaker sizes you can actually wire up your solar array to PLUG IN to an outlet, no breakers, no electric permits, no delays. You can see plenty of examples from Chinese Grid Tie Inverter makers of exactly this sort of application. Really works just fine..... Done it.
- Want emergency power during an outage? Simple rules ot follow:
1) Turn OFF your main breaker. This isolates your internal wiring from the grid.
2) Turn off everything in the house that draws power.
3) Have a modest battery with a pure sinewave inverter that provides a reference 120V/60Hz signal. The output goes to a wall plug. You are pushing power INTO the outlet instead of drawing but this is a mental issue not a physical/electrical one. (Fry's and Alibaba.com are your friend here) Thsi does not have to be big, the unit is for a reference signal NOT to push actual power.
4) Plug in the solar array output from it's grid tie output. It will see the reference signal from the battery backed PSW inverter an activate within a few seconds. You now have power.
5) Start turning on household loads but KEEP YOU LOADS LOWER THAN BEING GENERATED FROM THE SOLAR or you will drain the battery and lose your reference signal. DON'T RUN AT NIGHT UNLESS YOU HAVE A LOT OF BATTERY.
6) You now have power from the solar when the su is out to charge up batteries and run basic appliances (like your fridge or a heater) several hours a day.
7) When the grid power is restored reverse the procedure by disconnecting the PSW inverter and turning ON your main breaker IN THAT ORDER. Your solar will continue to operate and feed power in daily.
8) Keep your PSW and it's battery charged for when you need it.
Note that no where in any of the above have you dealt with the utility for permission, have had to fill out a form nor endangered anyone's safety. Yes, you've given up the incentives but that's how they snag you.
Independence is yours but you have to equip yourself.
I've seen it done really well for $8,000. On a big house.
People who want to run big TV sets and regular appliances are out of luck, though.
One thing I don't understand is why people want to invert DC power to run AC appliances when you can just buy devices which run on DC electrics to begin with. Running an inverter to power a laptop for instance is really counter intuitive, since laptops run on DC anyway. You lose huge amounts of power efficiency, somewhere in the neighborhood of 40-50% through inversion. Plus, no more wall-warts!
This basically means you can nearly double your efficiency just by tuning your house to run DC only devices.
The house was lit by small DC halogen spot lights. No need to flood whole rooms; just the stuff you need to see needs to be directly lit. (Toilet, sink). It's a different way of thinking, but it works and you get used to it. I lived there for a while.
Sure renewable energy adds to the fluctuations in the demand for fossil fuels. And if we expect to keep the power grid operating in the current mode the integration of wind and solar beyond 20% or so starts to add infrastructure costs. At the moment in the US, we are nowhere near these barriers and Germany is doing ok at much higher renewable penetration. Solar power mostly decreases peak generation requirements since they occur on hot sunny days. The current grid model is basically 'take whatever you want whenever you want and the utility companies will find a way to get it to you'. The smart grid can do a lot to change that system so that the load follows the power available. Maybe we have to invest more in grid energy storage. But you seem to be only identifying costs of solar power without providing any other suggestions.. should we keep powering our economy as it currently is with coal and natural gas just because it is easy to maintain grid stability? Are you a global warming denier who thinks we can do whatever we want and the ecosystem will magically make it all work out? In short, there will be some extra infrastructure costs if we hope to protect the environment for future generations. The costs are not that large, and in the long run you can be quite certain that renewable power is going to be cheaper than any other options...(If you object to that, it is a hint that your view of the future is pretty short sighted. It is guaranteed that renewable power becomes cheaper at some point. The only question worth debating whether that is now, 20 years from now, 100 years from now or 500 years from now). So how and when should we go about making the hard and somewhat expensive work of making the transition to renewable power? Some people seem to assume we should leave it to our grandchildren to figure out in a world that is a few decrees C warming than it is today. I recommend we start solving problems rather than rejecting things out of hand if they have a small cost involved.
I completely agree with you. My comments were focused on addressing the problems of wide adoption of solar generation by people who are still connected to the grid and expect the grid to provide whatever they cannot.
As far as solutions go, I believe that we are going to need a wide variety of energy sources. I am not a global warming denier and I think that wee need to pursue any clean source that we can. Renewables are great, but I think that we can only expected limited contribution from them, economically. I think that storage needs to be included as part of renewable systems to help level out demand usage. If I were to build a home I would include a solar thermal system for heating. I would also set up a DC system in my home, powered by PV with a storage system, to run LED lights and electronics.
I am a strong supporter of nuclear power and would love to see more deployment of nuclear to offset much of our coal burning. I think that we do need to spend the money to upgrade our infrastructure, but even with the possible upgrades I still don't see how it would be possible to power the US with just renewables. As we upgrade the infrastructure I think we need to make room for electric vehicles. I know electric vehicles aren't for everybody but I believe that it is possible to have electric vehicles in the near future that will be able to offset 50% of our vehicles on the road (excluding semis).
That's wonderful, thanks. It would be great if they can develop a business model that allows everybody to participate!
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
In my area (southern california), solar panels are barely economically worthwhile (that is, the cost of the panels and installation, after rebates, with the added interest on the loan, etc., works out to just a bit more than what you pay for the metered service..), and that's with a grid tie system which is useless in a disaster.. you need that battery bank, which requires maintenance and is bulky, and expensive.
However, buying and operating a 10-25 kVA generator that runs off natural gas is actually cheaper than the top 2 tiers for electricity (which are >$0.25/kWh), so it's economically worthwhile to run the generator as a "peaker" when your monthly consumption hits 200% over baseline (baseline is roughly 2/3 of expected minimum usage for average household). And, then, when disaster strikes, you can switch over to propane, which is easy to store (doesn't grow stuff like diesel, or turn into gum like gasoline) and fairly inexpensive (cheaper than gasoline, because there's no road taxes). Some generators run off either with no changes, others will require swapping an orifice in the carburetor.
And, natural gas is very cheap and likely to stay so for 20 years at least..
Sad, but this is a case where sustainable doesn't pay. Save the solar for enormous plants in the desert where you can get economies of scale and better thermodynamic efficiency by running really hot so that whole (Th-Tc)/Th thing is as close to 1 as you can get it.
Contrary to what was implied from summary your standard grid tie solar setup is not going to do you any good at all when grid power goes out. Amazingly TFA says nothing at all about cost of energy storage.
Grid tie solar provides no redundancy, does not scale and destabilizes the grid as built out in its current form. It can only ever hope to throttle back peekers.
What we really need is the very same thing holding back electric cars and all manner of portable gadgetry...high density energy storage that does not suck ass.
Electrical people solved this issue with a freedom and markets solution...
It's called "UL" (Underwriters' Labs) which is a non-government entity we all recognize as an unbiased, independent safety authority. Businesses pay UL to test their products and UL certifies them; most Americans will not buy electrical products that are not UL certified. No government and no bureaucrats are involved and the costs are not charged to the taxpayers, but rather (as a pass-through cost) to the consumers of the certified goods. Political contributions and special interest groups have no influence. Oh, and UL does unannounced spot checks on manufacturers' compliance.
There is no reason why gas stations could not similarly get certified by a similar service. The only role for government there then would be the same as with UL rated electrical products: the general enforcement of basic, clearly-written and consistently enforced fraud laws
I concur with this - On a completely overcast day I produce about half of the power I normally do on a completely cloudless day. I was quite stunned at how much I produce 'without any sun' - far from 'useless'
Ah, a 6:1 ratio really helps since the generated power is almost all sold at the high price point and you buy most power at the low price point. I've looked at TOU in Los Angeles, but it isn't even 2:1.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Bow, arrow, string, twine, rope & 20' of wire is enough to wreck a power line. 2 minutes training is enough to get darkness for a million people. We need local power generators, not regional. Power lines can not be secured from weather or jihadists.
We need solar on our roofs & ability, without utility company, to keep foods cold & beds warm.
What many people who do not have solar panels (and some who do) do not understand is that many solar panel systems that are designed to let you feed power back into the grid will not power your home on even the sunniest day without the grid. These types of system must precisely lock their AC-output waveform to the AC cycle of the grid and so their electronics are designed to require the presence of that AC grid power (to sync to it). When the mains are down, these inverters shut down. Period. No power during a blackout even with thousands of dollars of solar panels right there on your roof. They do not fall-back to an internal time source in-part because they have to maintain 60Hz to your home if they provide any power (in order to not damage your stuff) and yet they must be in perfect sync with the grid minutes, hours, or even days later when the grid is back up... any switch to a local time source would result in clock drift and a phase mismatch later when the grid was re-energized
http://www.dmsolar.com/solar-module-1141.html
... it'd be nice to see an agency, like the FCC did with antennas, step in and say "This is our jurisdiction, not yours."
Unfortunately, that can work both ways. On one hand it might make some technology accessible over local bureaucratic objections, everywhere in the country. On the other, it might make it INACCESSIBLE anywhere in the country. You can't fix it in your local area or move to another to escape the prohibition or draconian red tape.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
$17K for a 3 Kilowatt system? Those are very old prices. Here's a 5.75 Kilowatt system advertised at only $9300
http://www.dmsolar.com/spbuy5grwien.html
That's fine and dandy for when building NEW cities...
London, Paris etc. predate the US and yet use buried cables.
...and yet somehow, despite these issues, European cities tend to bury their cables and then rarely suffer from power cuts. It might be more expensive but it is clearly not too expensive and it might be considerably cheaper than the installation and maintenance costs of solar cells on every building. As for ground shifts and animals this is clearly an extremely rare occurrence: I experienced more (and longer) power cuts in one year in the US that I had in 21 years in the UK and 10 years in Canada combined. So even if the cost to fix per incident might be higher the vastly reduced number of incidents means it is far from clear which way is the least expensive to maintain.
The problem is that the U.S. has displaced Caveat Emptor with Caveat Vendor. We put everything on the seller now days. That is too much as well. The sweet spot is some more Caveat Everydamnone with some enforcement all around. The Emptor is _not_ supposed to get a completely free ride in a rational society.
Sure, someone should be keeping the vendors in check. But the buyer is _supposed_ to beware as well.
Complaining after the fact is just lazy bullshit.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Nissan Leaf's have been used in Japan to provide backup power, why not hybrids (assuming moved to driveway and not run just in the garage.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/92314-nissan-leaf-can-power-your-house-for-a-day-or-two
www.lowenergydevelopments.com.au/index.php?route=product/product&path=59_77&product_id=314
$200usd $0.90/watt
My Transformation Website
Kindle Books http://www.catprog.org/rev
Interactive CYOA http://www.catprog.org/st
Community produced power is a national effort by citizens to help address the need to reduce carbon production. One of the examples, the University Park Solar Project in Columbia, Maryland (http://bit.ly/w8zBA5), is discussed in the last five minutes of the Jan 6, 2012 Marketplace Money episode: http://bit.ly/wSZ5n2. Makes you wonder how much power could be produced if the roof of every church in the United States was covered with solar cells while bumping up the church treasuries and returning a percentage of investment to parishioners who fund the ventures.
The problem with the grid parity link is this,
To satisfy your personal peak power, your going to have to reduce it via smart home appliances or by selling power back to the grid or storing it, or some combination of the three. The first and third cost money (the third, at least 10 cents per kilowatt), and the second you get less than half the money for sending power into the grid than you buy it for. (No way a residential investment that produces more than you can immediately use or store and use later will have parity)
Now if the grid goes out and you don't have storage, how to you run your heat pump at night when you actually need it the most?
Forth the power rating are for ideal conditions, and actual power decreases linearly with time after 25 years you've lost between 17 and 28 % of the efficiency. Oh did you climb up on the roof and wash your panels every week? If not knock some more off.
The point being even under idea conditions solar barely makes sense as to run at a wattage equal to your base load, much less a backup. an entire house, unless it is earthship-esque with minimal total demand for electricity, in which case, WTF are you doing on the grid anyways?
163-32=$131 per month in savings
If you count in cost of capital, say, 5% per year, it's not 5 years to break even that you mentioned; it's actually 6 years to break even on your investment.
Cost of capital = $7000*1.05^6=$9381
Savings = $131 * 6 * 12 = $9432
But that's only possible because other people are taxed to pay for your savings. Based on the $12,000 cost before-tax-incentive you mention in another post:
Cost of capital = $12,000*1.05^20=$31839
Savings = $131 * 20 * 12 = $31440
Then the gap widens again - compound interest.
That's right, you NEVER break even if you count real cost.
Yet, in out of pocket expenses, payback is still 5 years. If energy costs don't go up. Or 6 if you do your interest trick. Whatever. Everything after 6 years is free money. If you can't see that far ahead, eh, whatever man. If you weren't posting as an AC, I'd take more effort to respond.
Yeah, I didn't set the ratio, I just designed our system based on the cost:benefit ratio of working within the rules in the most cost effective way possible. To be honest, I think I'm content with my parents having the 3KW array, and installing just the battery bank and charge controller here. I have a source of free batteries (long story, not relevant, datacenter grade stuff). Given that resource (a ton of batteries per year, give or take), a charge controller and whole-house UPS are very attractive. I just need $3K to get it going. Maybe even a 3 year payback if I run the numbers. Time to bite the bullet and buy the charge controller and wire up my batteries; adding more panels (I've got two 250W's now) can wait. But back to my original point, if I wanted to do this with permits, that $3K cost turns into about $6K. To do it without permits, I have to invest in additional transfer switches and other things to make sure my batteries don't (GASP!) supply green power to my neighbors without the local utility making sure I've got the right cable bend radius on my power feed and all that.
You ask "So why isn't there more of a push for this clean, affordable, safe and inexhaustible source of electricity?"
The answer is, because it still costs a fortune to buy and have installed. That's why. And companies that offer to install them "for free" and want an on-going monthly payment for reducing the cost of your electricity have deals that provide themselves almost all of the benefit and leave the risk to the home owners.
Perhaps the idiots in government that want to spend billions on their union friends should install collectors on roofs and either come up with reasonable terms for repayment from realized savings, or even give them away to play one of their global-warming / carbon credit cards in a way that really helps the people?
For $10 billion in Keynesian spending, they can install 1 million systems (at $10K average each).