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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.
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.
http://www.transparency.org
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.
America is no longer the greatest country in the world any more America is no longer the greatest country in the world any more
The fact of the matter is that the lobbyists for large corporations run this country now and we are no longer a country of laws but a country of exceptions. If you are rich you are the exception and you are allowed to do anything you possibly can to protect your profit streams no matter how much it hurts the American people. I remember a time when it would have been a point of national pride if we were the largest producer of solar power but now we treat this amazing technology like some kind of redheaded step child leper
Its time to wake up America we need to open up our eyes and realize that fossil fuels are limited global warming is real and that if we don’t start to do something about it we are going to have a much changed world which will not be the fantastic place it is to live in
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
And to help pay for their own Zimmermans to keep things quiet and 'riff-raff' free.
...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.
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
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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
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
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?
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).