Bridging and overhang are two different things, though. The support materials problem is a big one. Sounds like maybe those patent issues are being worked out, according to someone else's post though...
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.
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.
Sorry, but the Makerbot and other FDM printers are a dead end. The overhang issue and the fluid dynamics problems limit this specific technology to "bleeding edge", and will never progress past 'cutting edge'. UV hardened resins are where it's at, but predatory patent trolls have locked that up in patent hell for the next few decades. FDM has come a long way in the last 2 years, but, at the end of the day, it's still dropping a noodle onto other noodles, with a very limited choice of materials which have varying qualities of unusability.
I say this as someone with a 1st generation Makerbot, who in a year saw 4 generations of newer product, with no real improvement against the fundamental design flaws of FDM. Bigger tables and improved software don't fix the fact that you just plain can't set a melted noodle on top of empty air.
FDM is the "aluminized paper dot matrix printer using arcs to produce ozone and dark spots" of this generation's printers. It's a necessary step to get to the real answer, but, 5 years from now nobody will take them seriously, if they even remember them.
62 mass shootings in 30 years
61 took place in gunfree zones
an attempted mass shooting tok place this weekend in texas, (ignored by the media) a citizen stopped the crazy with 1 bullet from his legally carried gun.
yeah...guns are the problem...
It's almost like, stay with me here, it's ALMOST like the criminals seek out places where they know they won't have someone shooting back at them. You'd think they'd see that "gun free zone" sign and stop, because, after all, it's posted and all.
Weird.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
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!
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.
I'm familiar with the requirements and installation processes. Maybe I'm oversimplifying it for purposes of this discussion, but, no, it's not a particularly complex install. Like the examples I've given, there's mechanical and electrical requirements and considerations. But, grounding a solar array isn't fundamentally different than grounding a satellite dish. Sure, there's DC wiring if you're not using AC panels, but again, nothing magic there.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
My entire team, who fix operational Unix problems for a fortune-5 company whose name rhymes with "EG", are Asberger's. If they weren't,they wouldn't have survived my job interview. I don't care what DSM-whateverthefark calls it, but, if you can't context switch many times a day and intensely follow the important shiny thing, then you are not cut out to be top-level support for a "fix the broken stuff" team.
Maybe it's a talent rather than a disorder./shrug. Discuss.
It rained during the month I took my average from. It's the only month of data I have to work with. Doesn't change the numbers dramatically, maybe 20% one way or the other at most?
I didn't respond to your carbon footprint comment, not because I agree with you, but because it's trivial to calculate. Using this: http://www.nef.org.uk/greencompany/co2calculator.htm I find that my 459KWh of energy has avoided 241 kg CO2. Over the life of the panels, again based on a limited sample size and warranty length, that's 241*12*20=57,840 kg of CO2.
I don't know how much CO2 is produced in creating a solar panel, do you? Presumably that would be related to energy required to produce it, and be reflected by its price, right? So the numbers don't seem to hold up your claim, based on cost alone. Also, can you help me understand why you feel the scale of my project changes how the CO2 offsets happen? I've got aluminum mounting rails screwed into a roof, with panels clipped onto them, with wires running to the inverter. How does that change with scale? Any installation will have proportionally the same stuff per kilowatt.
As far as array lifetime, my neighbor just moved an array that was 15 years old, and it was only down a couple percent from rated output. And that's with 15 year old material science. I'm not concerned about lifetime, there's no moving parts and the physics is well understood. The "complicated electrical system" is a synchronous inverter, which is about as complicated as your computer's power supply. Also has a 10 year warranty. Other panels come with an inverter right on the panel, and yes, the whole thing has a 20 year warranty. The "complicated electrical system" is a length of wire going into a circuit breaker.
As far as investing in solar by buying stock in some company, instead of having it on my own roof, sorry, but that's not appealing to me at all. Real $100 savings a month, from equipment that I own and control, are a whole lot more attractive. If I want to go off-grid or go with a whole house UPS, I can add a battery bank and do that.
I don't know where you're getting your information about solar energy and small installations, but, it sounds like you've drunk someone's kool-aid, somewhere.
Just curious - do you think electricity costs will stay the same, or go down, over the next 20 years? I'm doing my payback calculations based on it staying the same; as the price of energy goes up, the payback just becomes more and more favorable.
The fact that this question is even being asked shows how poorly people understand the practicalities of solar power. Cover something with PV cells and you've got power. Problem solved, right?
There are two problems here. First, small-scale solar power generation is just not very efficient. If you spend a lot of money and cover your roof with PV cells, not only will you not make back your cost, you probably won't even prevent enough greenhouse gas emissions to offset those emited by manufacturing and installation
Really? That's odd, because, I went live with a 3KW solar array a month ago. In that month, I've produced 459KWh. This gets sold to the electric company at retail, which is $.25/KWh during the week and $.12KWh on weekends. So, (5/7*459*.25)+(2/7*459*.12)= $81.96+$15.74=$97.70 per month. The array cost me $4.00/watt, installed, so, $12,000. There is a 30% federal tax rebate, which brings my cost down to $8400. Plus a $1400 state "focus on energy" grant, which brings my cost to $7000. So, assuming this is a good average month (being around equinox, it's a fair assumption), it'll take me ~72 months to pay for the array. IF electricity costs don't go up, of course. So, given all that, if electricity stays the same price, the array pays for itself in a shade under 6 years.
The panels have a 20 year warranty. I'm not seeing how this equals "you will not make back your cost", can you help me understand my error in math here?
So if there were no such things as clouds.
If there was no such thing as night.
If there was no dropoff on photoelectric cells due to the cold of the upper atmosphere.
Actually, PV efficiency goes _up_ at lower temperatures, because the internal resistance in the cells go down. When designing an array, it's important to calculate the output at the lowest record temps for the area, so you don't over-voltage or over-current your inverter and wiring.
If energy delivery was 100% efficient.
Then a solar plane would only be half short on power to ever fly.
E
Monocrystalline PV cells are around 17% efficient at turning photons into electricity, up from %14 a decade ago. There's just not that much further to go with this technology. The thin film cells show promise at getting double that or so, but, you're still dealing with power density of about 100 Watts per square foot of direct sunlight, at exactly perpendicular to the sun. There's lots of applications for solar energy, but, transportation that runs on what it can catch while it's moving, isn't one of them.
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Bridging and overhang are two different things, though. The support materials problem is a big one. Sounds like maybe those patent issues are being worked out, according to someone else's post though...
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.
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.
Sorry, but the Makerbot and other FDM printers are a dead end. The overhang issue and the fluid dynamics problems limit this specific technology to "bleeding edge", and will never progress past 'cutting edge'. UV hardened resins are where it's at, but predatory patent trolls have locked that up in patent hell for the next few decades. FDM has come a long way in the last 2 years, but, at the end of the day, it's still dropping a noodle onto other noodles, with a very limited choice of materials which have varying qualities of unusability. I say this as someone with a 1st generation Makerbot, who in a year saw 4 generations of newer product, with no real improvement against the fundamental design flaws of FDM. Bigger tables and improved software don't fix the fact that you just plain can't set a melted noodle on top of empty air. FDM is the "aluminized paper dot matrix printer using arcs to produce ozone and dark spots" of this generation's printers. It's a necessary step to get to the real answer, but, 5 years from now nobody will take them seriously, if they even remember them.
62 mass shootings in 30 years 61 took place in gunfree zones an attempted mass shooting tok place this weekend in texas, (ignored by the media) a citizen stopped the crazy with 1 bullet from his legally carried gun. yeah...guns are the problem...
It's almost like, stay with me here, it's ALMOST like the criminals seek out places where they know they won't have someone shooting back at them. You'd think they'd see that "gun free zone" sign and stop, because, after all, it's posted and all. Weird.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I'm familiar with the requirements and installation processes. Maybe I'm oversimplifying it for purposes of this discussion, but, no, it's not a particularly complex install. Like the examples I've given, there's mechanical and electrical requirements and considerations. But, grounding a solar array isn't fundamentally different than grounding a satellite dish. Sure, there's DC wiring if you're not using AC panels, but again, nothing magic there.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
$12K raw cost, $7K post-tax incentive cost.
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?
My entire team, who fix operational Unix problems for a fortune-5 company whose name rhymes with "EG", are Asberger's. If they weren't,they wouldn't have survived my job interview. I don't care what DSM-whateverthefark calls it, but, if you can't context switch many times a day and intensely follow the important shiny thing, then you are not cut out to be top-level support for a "fix the broken stuff" team. Maybe it's a talent rather than a disorder. /shrug. Discuss.
It rained during the month I took my average from. It's the only month of data I have to work with. Doesn't change the numbers dramatically, maybe 20% one way or the other at most?
I didn't respond to your carbon footprint comment, not because I agree with you, but because it's trivial to calculate. Using this: http://www.nef.org.uk/greencompany/co2calculator.htm I find that my 459KWh of energy has avoided 241 kg CO2. Over the life of the panels, again based on a limited sample size and warranty length, that's 241*12*20=57,840 kg of CO2.
I don't know how much CO2 is produced in creating a solar panel, do you? Presumably that would be related to energy required to produce it, and be reflected by its price, right? So the numbers don't seem to hold up your claim, based on cost alone. Also, can you help me understand why you feel the scale of my project changes how the CO2 offsets happen? I've got aluminum mounting rails screwed into a roof, with panels clipped onto them, with wires running to the inverter. How does that change with scale? Any installation will have proportionally the same stuff per kilowatt.
As far as array lifetime, my neighbor just moved an array that was 15 years old, and it was only down a couple percent from rated output. And that's with 15 year old material science. I'm not concerned about lifetime, there's no moving parts and the physics is well understood. The "complicated electrical system" is a synchronous inverter, which is about as complicated as your computer's power supply. Also has a 10 year warranty. Other panels come with an inverter right on the panel, and yes, the whole thing has a 20 year warranty. The "complicated electrical system" is a length of wire going into a circuit breaker.
As far as investing in solar by buying stock in some company, instead of having it on my own roof, sorry, but that's not appealing to me at all. Real $100 savings a month, from equipment that I own and control, are a whole lot more attractive. If I want to go off-grid or go with a whole house UPS, I can add a battery bank and do that.
I don't know where you're getting your information about solar energy and small installations, but, it sounds like you've drunk someone's kool-aid, somewhere. Just curious - do you think electricity costs will stay the same, or go down, over the next 20 years? I'm doing my payback calculations based on it staying the same; as the price of energy goes up, the payback just becomes more and more favorable.
The fact that this question is even being asked shows how poorly people understand the practicalities of solar power. Cover something with PV cells and you've got power. Problem solved, right?
There are two problems here. First, small-scale solar power generation is just not very efficient. If you spend a lot of money and cover your roof with PV cells, not only will you not make back your cost, you probably won't even prevent enough greenhouse gas emissions to offset those emited by manufacturing and installation
Really? That's odd, because, I went live with a 3KW solar array a month ago. In that month, I've produced 459KWh. This gets sold to the electric company at retail, which is $.25/KWh during the week and $.12KWh on weekends. So, (5/7*459*.25)+(2/7*459*.12)= $81.96+$15.74=$97.70 per month. The array cost me $4.00/watt, installed, so, $12,000. There is a 30% federal tax rebate, which brings my cost down to $8400. Plus a $1400 state "focus on energy" grant, which brings my cost to $7000. So, assuming this is a good average month (being around equinox, it's a fair assumption), it'll take me ~72 months to pay for the array. IF electricity costs don't go up, of course. So, given all that, if electricity stays the same price, the array pays for itself in a shade under 6 years. The panels have a 20 year warranty. I'm not seeing how this equals "you will not make back your cost", can you help me understand my error in math here?
So if there were no such things as clouds. If there was no such thing as night. If there was no dropoff on photoelectric cells due to the cold of the upper atmosphere.
Actually, PV efficiency goes _up_ at lower temperatures, because the internal resistance in the cells go down. When designing an array, it's important to calculate the output at the lowest record temps for the area, so you don't over-voltage or over-current your inverter and wiring.
If energy delivery was 100% efficient. Then a solar plane would only be half short on power to ever fly.
E
Monocrystalline PV cells are around 17% efficient at turning photons into electricity, up from %14 a decade ago. There's just not that much further to go with this technology. The thin film cells show promise at getting double that or so, but, you're still dealing with power density of about 100 Watts per square foot of direct sunlight, at exactly perpendicular to the sun. There's lots of applications for solar energy, but, transportation that runs on what it can catch while it's moving, isn't one of them.