Switching To Solar Power — Six Months Later 591
ThinSkin writes "Slashdot readers may remember an article regarding ExtremeTech's Loyd Case's experiences with solar power for the home after one month of usage. During that time six months ago, it sure seemed like a great deal, but the tables have turned significantly once winter approached. While it's no surprise solar power generation is expected to dwindle during the winter, Loyd compares solar power data of the last six months to determine if solar power is still worth the time and money."
$400 a month? (Score:5, Interesting)
Who the hell uses that much electric power?
Re:$400 a month? (Score:5, Funny)
You ask how he uses $400 a month in electricity? His tech is EXTREME!
Re:$400 a month? (Score:5, Funny)
Extreme Tech, and they still can't put the article in a single page.
Shh... (Score:5, Informative)
Don't tell anyone, but there's a tab on the first page that's labeled "print". I don't get to wait for ads and pictures to load, but it has the text.
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Page request (Score:3, Funny)
...a separate web server for each page request.
They are so extreme that they provide enough computers to server one page of HTML, then they throw it away.
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I hit $290 for my December energy bill (gas + electricity) In Minnesota. My home is from the 50s and still has the original windows which is probably a big factor. The long stretches of below 0 we've had haven't helped either.
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California residents... Cal is notorious for having very expensive electricity.
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In his case, the math says $0.27 per KWh. The national average for September from the Department of Energy was $0.1194. Looks like location is his problem, although the DoE reports that California's average was $0.1459 per KWh. Are there enough taxes to raise that by 66%?
Lucky me, I live in Idaho. 7 cents per KWh. I whine when the power bill hits $100 in the summer.
Re:$400 a month? (Score:5, Interesting)
What I found interesting was that, while December was bad for solar power, he says:
Basically, his solar power does what it's supposed to more often than not. But then again, we've always known that about solar power, the big problem with solar is the large up-front capital cost of installing it.
(Or other strange things, like my mother just moved into a retirement community and her housing rules say solar panels are not allowed because they're unsightly, but directTV antennas and satellite dishes are just fine. One must have priorities I suppose. Television is obviously more important than renewable energy.)
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The dishes are allowed because federal law says that they have to be:
http://www.fcc.gov/mb/facts/otard.html [fcc.gov]
Given time and lower installation costs, I would imagine that similar legislation will be applied to solar cells.
Re:$400 a month? (Score:5, Interesting)
"but directTV antennas and satellite dishes are just fine"
After a couple of legal battles, there are some federal laws that say that banning antennas and dishes in a housing development is not permitted. Many developments try to do it anyway but you can fight it if you know the right laws.
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Re:$400 a month? (Score:5, Interesting)
Dishes are allowed because someone paid the FCC to enforce the right to install one. If you can come up with a solar panel that generates ad based revenues and is steeped with kickbacks and non-compete contracts, someone will pay the FCC to enforce the right to install those on your moms roof too.
Re:$400 a month? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not just being paid off - external television antennas were part of those laws too.
The whole thing is disgusting to me though. We're not living in any semblance of a free country when your neighbors can tell you what things you can and can't have on your property simply because they don't look pretty.
Re:$400 a month? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you equate 'free' with "allowed to create negative externalities", then yes, we are not living in any semblance of a free country. But your lost externality is a necessary part of preventing all those other externalities that you would hate, such as loud music.
That said, I agree that 'prettiness' is a difficult externality to quantify, and enforcement of non-quantifiable things is perilous.
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We have a free society. That is, society is free to do whatever it wants, including taking away rights from individual members of that society. Our society is free, but individuals within that society are not.
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We're not living in any semblance of a free country when your neighbors can tell you what things you can and can't have on your property simply because they don't look pretty.
You could always put up the solar panels anyway and then publish their fight to get your 'unsightly' solar panels taken down in your blog and on the local news. Sometimes a little public shame can go a long way towards changing people's attitudes and positions. Nobody likes to be the 'bad guy' in a public news story.
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Re:$400 a month? (Score:4, Insightful)
You're right, and I already choose not to live in those areas. However, it's still insane for any property owner to have to submit to such things. That's almost akin to saying that the Chinese don't really have any problems with their freedom because they can simply leave if they want to.
Re:$400 a month? (Score:5, Informative)
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oprah
Not very reusable though is she?
Though I assume one could start to use the viewers instead.
Re:$400 a month? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:$400 a month? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Let alone the man did it half assed.
I used to have a solar home. Step 1 is knowing your EXACT load before you start.
Step 2 is to understand the solar rating for your location, then cut it by 1/4 and use that number.
The man did neither. he should have a 35-50% excess for summer and have a 10-20% lacking in winter. Supplement that with a single decent wind generator and your intertie.
Finally your biggest step to solar is you REDUCE YOUR CONSUMPTION. We bought all low energy appliances and got rid of silly
Re:$400 a month? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a half assed install that was doomed from day one, and now he's bitching about it.
Of course, technology marches on, and there will no doubt, with higher efficiency panels available at lower prices in the coming years. Alas, that's the price one pays for being an early adopter. But when I look at my power bill, I still have a nice, warm feeling inside.
... he is?
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:$400 a month? (Score:4, Informative)
He is a PG&E customer in Northern California. That's how he spends $400 a month on electricity.
PG&E = Pricks Grabbing Everything
Re:$400 a month? (Score:5, Funny)
Who the hell uses that much electric power?
His other hobby is recycling aluminum.
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Read the article a little more closely. He isn't a standard run-of-the-mill electricity consumer. He runs benchmarks on hardware from his home requiring multiple pcs running at full bore (I'm inferring the last part based on experience in the load testing arena). Additionally, he DOES live in CA so he probably runs the AC more than someone who lives in MI.
If you look at my power bill, you might say the same thing. I have running at home right now, the following:
- Dell M1710 laptop
- Dual-CPU Opteron workstat
Re:$400 a month? (Score:5, Interesting)
My January bill was $170.00 for Upstate NY That was for electric and Gas, in a building over 100 years old. That is Not in any way energy-star complaint.
Re:$400 a month? (Score:4, Insightful)
do you live in an apartment or a house? the author lives in a house, so that immediately makes their power needs much greater than say a 1 or 2 bedroom apartment. the author also states:
here in Southern California our tiny 2-bedroom apartment easily costs well over $100 a month to keep reasonably cool (80 degrees) during the summer. part of this is probably due to the building's old AC system (it was just upgraded 2 weeks ago, but we haven't really used it yet), but it is also partly due to the side of the building our unit resides on. also, for whatever reason my room is usually about 7~8 degrees hotter than the rest of the apartment, so to get my room down to a tolerable temperature the rest of the apartment needs to be cooled down even more.
heating is cheap compared to cooling, which can use a ton of electricity. and the greater the volume of space you need to cool, the greater your power expenditure. it would be silly to compare the electric bill in an apartment unit in NY to that of a house of California.
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"do the utilities have to sell at a loss?"
Of course not, if they sold art a loss they'd already be out of business. Their executives just don't get to collect multi-million dollar bonuses on top of their 6-figure salaries. It's really a criminal example of the horrors wrought by socialism, just imagine all the money those poor guys didn't get to rape off of consumers because there were laws preventing them from doing so... really quite terrible when you think about it.
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Actually it's usually the opposite - Air conditioning is almost always powered by electricity and AC load can't always be reduced with insulation (e.g. heat-generating devices need their heat removed regardless of external insulation), while heating has numerous options - gas, oil, electric, wood, downstairs neighbors, solar thermal (much cheaper and easier than PV), and upgraded insulation.
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More insulation does help though. Also blocking/covering the windows in summer helps lower the heat input.
If you are lucky enough to be building your house, make sure to get 2X6 (or 2X8) construction in the exterior walls. The extra insulation will pay for itself very quickly in lower heating and cooling bills. I know a new development in MD where this is proving true. There are two houses, same model, same layout, and both having southern exposures. The two houses are 500 feet away from each other so the s
Re:$400 a month? (Score:5, Interesting)
I live in Canada. The weather today is -25c or so. My power bill never exceeds $46/CAD a month when I have a window AC unit going in the summer, and my gas bill never exceeds $70/mo.
The # of kWh/mo he's using would suggest to me he'd be a lot better served putting the time and energy into replacing bulbs with CFLs, turning off computers that don't need to be on, and buying higher efficiency appliances rather than those solar panels. .. or both, of course.
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I think the main problem is that American houses are built to the sort of standards that garden sheds are built to elsewhere in the world. My electric bill is around £37 per month - no heating or air conditioning, and my gas bill for heating and hot water is about £20 per year.
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May parents live in an old (1930s?) farm house that used knob and tube wiring in parts of it. They had a leak in the roof one year and the electric bill skyrocketed because the blown in paper insulation got wet and allowed electricity to transfer through it at high resistance. It's amazing the fuse didn't blow or the house didn't burn down actually. The electric bill went from $130 to about $50 a month. My dad re-wired that part of the house after that. Something he probably should have done earlier.
Re:$400 a month? (Score:4, Funny)
Man, you BOTH must have either HUGE houses, electric heating systems, or stupidly high power taxation in your area.
My last electric bill, with a family of four, 6 PC's and sundry other electronics (server, smoothwall linux firewall running on an old PC, my Desktop, the wife's Desktop + two laptops + networking devices connecting all the above) only amounted to $250.00 in November. I expect December's bill to come out only slightly higher. $400.00 for Electric is INSANE.
I live in the Buffalo NY area, so Solar is out of the question for me (clouds, many trees in the region and, oh yeah, SNOW) so while an article like this is nice for people that live in desert areas, for the rest of us it's basically worthless.
Dang blast it, it's nearly 2010! If Science isn't going to give me a flying car the LEAST it could do is provide me with a "Mr. Fusion" to power my house!
Re:$400 a month? (Score:5, Informative)
The house I currently live in was powered with solar panels here in Southern Ontario before I bought it. The guy who sold it to me took the panels with him. They did just fine at consolidating his hydro to the point where he was paying almost NOTHING to the power company. They're not worthless at all. A large investment that might take longer out here to recoup costs, but definitely not worthless.
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I agree it's not worthless, but people need to understand that the average ROI on a solar panel system is somewhere between 12-15 years. The panels themselves, however, are only rated to last 20 years.
I keep hearing about breakthroughs in solar power that are "just around the corner" that would bring the cost of a home system down from $15k to under $10k, and the ROI down to under 5 years. However, it's been about 5 years since I heard about such things and I'm still waiting.
Meanwhile, I have to wonder wh
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Oh yeah I bought my house, had all kinds of chattels running round the yard. He wanted to take em but I said huh no way, those my chattels now. Hm, we ate real good that first two weeks.
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Then we had a crackhead kick in our door and steal shit so we moved ;)
Why on earth would you purposely have someone do that?
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Re:$400 a month? (Score:4, Insightful)
Depending on the orientation (North, etc) of the windows, replacing inefficient single panes with double panes that have some reflective properties that can lower the solar gain significantly. With the economy in shambles, you can get construction work done at a great discount. Depending on the number of windows you need done, you can get them for about $300-$600 a window.
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I used to try to turn up and down the thermostats manually, but I was never perfect, and it was uncomfortable to wake up and shower with it so cold. Now with the programmable thermostats, it's nice and warm for my morning shower, and then cold all day while I'm at work!
It also helps that
Re:$400 a month? (Score:5, Interesting)
The house is less than 2 years old so it should be decently insulated though the windows are only single paned.
So it's not.
Exactly. I'm amazed to read that some new houses in the US are so badly insulated that they have single paned windows. In Netherland people stopped doing that in the '60s or '70s.
Mind you, my previous house was from 1913, and before it got renovated, it had single paned stained glass windows, with wind blowing through gaps around them. Impossible to heat, so in winter I wore an extra sweater and lived next to the heater.
After it got proper insulation (including ugly windows, unfortunately), I hardly even needed the heater in winter. Good insulation matters a lot.
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Here in the Northeast (Massachusetts) because of high cost of living, most people's houses are very well insulated. I'd be very surprised if you could buy single pane windows in Massachusetts at this point.
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Here in Ireland, double glazing is used as standard now. However, in Dublin at least, there are no rules on insulation, so despite fitting double glaze windows, the crazy builders/developers are allowed to build single-wall buildings with a simple damp-seal and plasterboard on the interior. No attic insulation either. Also our builders/plumbers haven't a clue about properly designing a heating system, and work on an ad-hoc basis of randomly sticking in a few radiators around the place in an ineffectual mann
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An article based around a single one-year competition on a year that had lower than average rainfall does not a weather trend make. While Buffalo is certainly no London England, we do get our share of cloudy days. Average rainfall in Buffalo NY is between 38 and 40.50 inches. 2007 had around 30 inches. A drier than normal year, although not the driest. 2008 was much wetter, right near 40 inches, with many more cloudy days than 2007.
Notably, nobody here on /. seems to have thought about SNOW or TREES. B
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You could, conceivably, install a snow-melt system on the panels. You'd need 0.02 kWh per square foot or panel to melt an inch of solid ice, obviously less for an inch of snow since it's less dense.
300 watts to clear a 3'x5' panel covered in one inch of solid ice in one hour. That's not too bad. It's only slightly more than what the panel itself should produce once it's clear, so if it takes 0.3 kWh to clear the panel in an hour and it can spend the next four hours generating, you still come out ahead.
The t
Re:$400 a month? (Score:4, Interesting)
1. At that latitude, the angle you mount your panels for operation would be steep enough for most snow to slide off. Also the dark color of the panels means that the snow will melt off there first. Although the snow may eventually build up at the base and block the rest from sliding off.
2. Amount of Sun. It's all about the solar insolation measurement. The feds have been logging this data for 30+ years and averaged the amount of annual sunlight in several areas in each state.
http://www.solar4power.com/solar-power-insolation-window.html [solar4power.com]
The above link is a good chart for this. The average for cities in New York is about 3.5, which equates to right around 3.5 kWh daily output for each installed 1,000 watts of generation capacity. That isn't the best, but it still is plenty. Germany has the largest number of installed PV arrays, and they are just as, is not more cloudy than New York.
I operate a 10 kw solar PV array in perpetually cloudly Seattle. We're going to see a payback of right around 10 years. Solar works just fine for us, although we do expect greatly reduced output in the winter months. The longer days during the summer, due to the high latitude, helps make up for some of that though.
http://www.jbdg.com/solar.html [jbdg.com] My array.
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http://geekpi.com/?p=142 [geekpi.com]
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Annual maintenance costs for us have just been an hour or two of squeegeeing every 6 months. Other than that, it just hums along next to silently every day. The furnaces at the building requ
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Install them at a higher angle - so as to produce most of the energy in the winter, and not in the summer. This should solve the snow problem quickly
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Get a shovel head attached to a swimming pool skimmer pole, that way the ice sheet can slice your head off clean when it slides off your collectors!
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Luckily for me I live in opposite land of wherever you live, because where I live natural gas is much cheaper than electricity, and gas dryers take half as long as electric dryers to get the clothes dry.
Of course, the drawback to living in opposite lan
Re:$400 a month? (Score:4, Informative)
He spends so much because he pays a premium to buy electricity from renewable resources.
And the house is his home office, so he doesn't have an employer paying for energy used during the day.
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Al Gore?
He spends 20 times [snopes.com] the national average for one of his houses.
From your own link: "factors (such as the climate in the area where the home is located and its size) make the Gore home's energy usage comparable to that of other homes in the same area. "
And he makes an effort to get power from "green" sources.
But a good right wing libertarian think tank can make him sound like a hypocrite, that'll discredit him!
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OK, so it's comparable--to other 10,000-square-foot houses. Even with office space, why do two people need a house that big? Gore's huge on telling everybody else to downsize, to conserve--while it's great that he's buying some electricity from "green" sources, wouldn't having a smaller house be setting a better example?
Or are tiny houses just for us peasants?
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are tiny houses just for us peasants?
Why is it so many conservatives go on "Gore vs. the peasants" raps online but when they go into the voting booth they consistently choose the party that screws the peasants?
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Please don't conflate "conservative" with "neoconservative". I am the former; "conservatives = Republicans" is the latter.
I wrote in "None of the Above" on my Presidential ballot because I couldn't in good conscience vote for either Presidential candidate, voted Republican for my senator (because her Democrat challenger proved very incompetent in the House), and voted for a Democrat for the House of Representatives because her Republican challenger is a moron.
I dislike Gore for his hypocrisy, not because of
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The objections of the world are just that. They are in shacks, eating raw organic foods (if any at all).
The US's energy consumption per capita is through the roof. There is an idea that there has to be curve of diminishing returns where your energy use to work and sleep in a house tops out.
I don't know what Mr. Gore is running to produce a bill like that. It is obscene, even for an American.
Re:$400 a month? (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's the whole "hypocrisy" argument that annoys me, nothing more. He tells others to conserve, but while some of his properties use "green", his grid usage is still an order of magnitude more than, say, mine.
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Re:$400 a month? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yea, yea, powering a 10,000 square foot house that functions as the home and office of a guy worth in excess of 100,000,000 dollars...How dare he use a ton of electricity!
Seriously.
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What does his net value have to do with how much resources he consumes as an individual human being? I guess I missed his documentary "Why Americans Should Conserve--Unless, of Course, They're Rich."
I'm a Democrat, but even I know a blowhard hypocrite when I see one. Just because he would have made a better President than Bush (joining an illustrious group there that includes several species of closely-related primates) doesn't mean he still isn't a scumbag politician.
Re:$400 a month? (Score:5, Insightful)
His point is that you should try to live carbon-neutral, not that you should live like a caveman. He pays a premium for his power so that a portion of it has to come from renewable resources, and he puts money in to carbon offset funds. That's more than I do, and my bill is 1/10th of his.
We aren't complaining about Bill Gates's house (Score:3, Insightful)
How dare he use a ton of electricity!
Notice that we aren't complaining about the energy usage of Bill Gates's house. That's because Bill hasn't made quite the campaign on carbon control and global warming. While flying around to summits in his private plane.
You could argue that his energy bills should be lower, after all, he's gone much of the time.
Basically, Al Gore is rich enough to actually reduce his footprint; but didn't until people made an issue of it. Even then, I remember reading that after energy saving renovations his electricity
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Can't we all agree that at the very least if he's going to fly around the country and world lecturing people about cutting their carbon foot print he should at least fly commercial and not take his giant carbon foot print private plane?
Re:$400 a month? (Score:5, Insightful)
He does fly by regular carrier. He does not own a private jet.
That's not to say that he never, under any circumstances, flies in a private plane. When he does he buys carbon offsets -- not ideal of course, but the best you can do under the circumstances.
One of the Achilles' heels of conservative ideology is the inability to distinguish between practicality and expediency. It's always more expedient to travel by private plane. It's sometimes practical.
Cindy McCain got a lot of heat by saying that private plane was the only way to get around Arizona. The liberal reaction was the same kind of BS you're spouting here. Of course, she didn't literally mean you couldn't get from Phoenix to Flagstaff without flying, but as public figures the McCains do have to do a great deal of travel over a rather large state. As a Senator, John McCain spends most of his time in Washington, and if flying in a private plane means he gets to see more constituents, it's a sensible and pragmatic choice because it maximizes his productivity.
It's like the difference between driving a one ton pickup truck because you're a rancher and need to get feed out to your cattle through the snow, and driving the same kind of truck as a commuter vehicle. Environmentalists don't think it is morally wrong for a rancher to drive an F320. They don't think it's morally wrong for a cement truck to have a 400 horsepower engine and get 6MPG. Individuals commuting in a vehicle that got 6MPG would be a different thing.
As an environmentalist, I'm not even against sports cars. I'm just against sports cars as commuter vehicles. If you enjoy driving your Ferrari Enzo on the track at 8MPG, that's fine by me. But maybe you might want to look at an Audi A5 as your regular commuting vehicle.
Re:$400 a month? (Score:5, Insightful)
Clearly, Al Gore should be living in a small, average house, or perhaps an apartment if that more matches the average person, just so he can be close to the national average of electricity use regardless of his actual net worth or funds.
Oh wait, that's stupid.
If he's gonna promote agreements like the Kyoto Accord then yes, he should. If he expects the wealthy countries to be more like the average why shouldn't wealthy individuals?
It's not stupid, it's hypocritical.
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That's right folks, you heard it here on /. If you don't renounce all your worldly possessions and spend the rest of your life helping the poor of Calcutta, you can't take a moral stand on ANYTHING! That would be hypocrisy!!! (If you're a simple-minded, black-and-white thinker.)
Re:Don't be stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
Al Gore's carbon footprint should be measured against people with similar incomes, not against the average Joe.
No, it shouldn't. If Al Gore insists on promoting things like the Kyoto Accord that measure country's carbon footprints independently of income, then he should expect the same on an individual basis. Anything less is total hypocrisy.
The author is missing something... (Score:4, Insightful)
There's an important step that this guy missed: cutting consumption. I have a roughly 3000 square foot house, and the most I've used since August '07 is 700kWh in a month... and that was a month when I had visitors for basically the whole month, so we used a lot more power. My average is around 500.
Now... we don't know how big this guy's house is, or how many people live there. But really... 1,635kWh? That seems pretty excessive for any reasonable house. Maybe if he's got a bunch of servers on all the time, and has electric heat, and lives in a cold climate, but it still seems high.
Insightful (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know about the position in the US, but in Europe there is a market in energy efficient ap
Re:Insightful (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes the panels will drop in cost, but you are forgetting that Electric bills are going to go UP in price over the same time. 10 years from now, he can generate the same amount of power, and save more money than he does today.
Of course, those that wait will have a MUCH quicker payback, since their equipment goes down in cost, and rates go up. But then again, you probably don't own a computer, do you? Cause there is always one that is faster/cheaper coming in another few months. Sometimes you just gotta jump in.
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Agreed. The batteries are a massive recurring expense that pretty much makes the investment impossible to break even.
Additionally there is so much research going into batteries and super capacitors, that I'd be hesitant to invest in a big battery infrastructure without a clear and pressing need.
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Solar Panels provide the most power at a time when we pay peak rates for electricity. This means if you feed power back into the grid during the middle of the day the power company should pay you a higher rate(.14 per kwh).
Most people are out of the house during these hours and household consumption is relatively low(.10 per kwh).
So if his power is priced based on time of day, and he doesnt use a lot of peak power, he could use a smaller solar power installation(4kwh) and power his house daily using mostly
ROI? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why didn't this follow up article include a Return on Investment number? It would be nice if he would have included the cost of the install and compare it to the difference in his electric bills. I'm curious to see how long it will take the install to pay for itself.
Re:ROI? (Score:5, Funny)
Why didn't this follow up article include a Return on Investment number?
For the same reason that you NEVER EVER add up your receipts when you are restoring a car. It is sure to make you cry.
ROI is about 12.5 years (Score:4, Interesting)
I went back to his original article (the instalation). He said the estimate is that his anual utility bill will drop from 4400 a year to 1100 a year.
So I made a few assumptions.
#1-his power use will not increase. Not really likely but a future increase shouldn't change the ROI on his current investment.
#2-Utilities will just keep pace with inflation (assumed 2%)...power costs will stay porportinally expensive in the future. This is probably not ture as power prices tend to increase slightly faster than inflation. So this assumption will tend to increase the ROI.
#3-I assume he is financing it through his mortgage at about 5%
Therefore when I calculate out to 25 years I find that he would spend about $141,000 in power over the 25 years without slar. With Solar he would spend $35,233.
The Payoff date comes at about 12.5 years.
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And it increases the sale value of the house...therefore the payback is 12.5 years or until they sell the house, whatever is sooner.
fixed angle panels are sub-optimum (Score:5, Interesting)
Who ever installed the panels mounted them directly flat on the roof. That is bad.
They need to be angled for the best sun during the time the power need is greatest. Ideally they would be adjustable semi-annually/quarterly/monthly for the best angle. And if fixed would be biased toward the point of worst number of sun days and power need.
Doing a suboptimal installation and not accounting for sun angle is not a good installation and should be perform at a fraction of potential output.
A sun-tracking system is better (Score:5, Informative)
But if you put the same money in the market (Score:3, Informative)
A lot of it would be gone.
You can count on the returns for solar.
You can pretty much count on electric rates rising in the future.
No single solution (Score:3, Interesting)
But all of those will not be enough. We also need to supplant that with natural gas and nuclear energy. We also need to find ways to recycle spent nuclear fuel and convert it to useful energy...put it this way if that spent fuel is SO radioactive (meaning having lots of energy) then we could harnass it - we just don't know how (i think).
Until we get warp power - a blended solution will be needed - but it can work.
$400 a month, our eletric bill is closer to $2000 (Score:3, Interesting)
And that's in the winter. It's a lot more in the summer because of AC. Granted our building faces south and in the winter time gets a lot of solar time when the sun is out.
Granted we're a business and we run several servers in house 24x7 for development, testing, and backup and about 25 PC's.
We put up as much solar as we could given our amount of roof space last October. We've seen our electric bill go down to around $700 - $900 per month. It's basically cut our bill in half. Now we had the cash on hand to invest in the technology, plus there were some tax write offs that made it advantageous to do so before December of 2008.
But we viewed it as a wise investment that freed up over $1000 a month in cash flow. That's about a $1000 per month we can spend on additional development. It doesn't sound like much, but it was enough to offer 2 paid internships this spring semester at the local university.
Will the investment still take 5 - 7 years to pay for itself? In raw dollars, yes. But there are intangibles as far as I'm concerned. We've found two really good interns for this spring semester. Just over winter break they were able to take a piece of one project and get it to a working beta. It was the final piece of the puzzle to finishing that product that is now on the market and we've already got 20 installs lined up totaling about 1/3rd the cost of the solar panels.
Granted, we knew what our limits were. We did it not to be green and save money. The cash was either going to be given out as dividends (we are employee owned) and taxed or retained as earnings and taxed.
It Will Pay Off in 9 Years (Score:5, Informative)
That article has a lot of consumption and billing numbers for each of utility and homegrown power, but it's hard to get exact performance comparisons because the numbers don't exactly measure the same things. There is no exact start and end date, just month names, and approximate mentions of offsets into them, not lining up generation and billing dates in either the solar generation half-year or the time before drawing from only the utility. And practically no data on income from overgenerating, selling back to utility or grid.
But there is enough data to make rough comparisons. They say [extremetech.com] their January/utility bill was $446, but their December bills are the highest (all of which extra usage was billed in the highest rate, 300% of the base rate). So let's say their average bill used to be $450:mo, or $5600 annually. However, they said [extremetech.com] up front that their annual bill is about $4400. We'll take the average of $5400. Now their July-December/solar bill is $389.39. Even if we call that $400, and so their annual/solar bill is $800, they're saving $4600 a year. They paid [extremetech.com] about $55,000 before rebates, about $37,000 after all rebates. Their utility bill savings pays off their installation investment in $37,000 / $4600 = 8.04 years. Pessimistically, they should be paid off in 9 years.
These systems have a minimum lifetime of 30 years (if you don't invest in an upgrade during that time). Even if energy rates stay the same in those 30 years (probably not, probably higher), that $4600 for 21 more years is $96,600, or 2.6x the installation cost. Total return is $133,600 on $37,000 investment, so 3600% Return on Investment over 30 years. If you invested that money in a compound interest account (either savings or some investment with an average annual return reinvested), you'd have to get 15.43% annual compound interest to turn $37K into $136K in 30 years. Conversely, if you took out a 30 year mortgage on your home at today's average rate of 5.63%, you'd net 9.8% benefit. Which means that it's worth mortgaging (part of) your home to invest in these, with a fraction of your old utility bills paid as mortgage interest, and getting $78K more ("profit", really utilities savings) after 30 years, with no out of pocket.
That could be even better than they say. Their reasons [extremetech.com] for failing to maximize their roof generating area don't seem compelling: "it would get a little crowded up there". Other than access to the panels for cleaning, who cares how crowded it is? It looks like they could double their area. Which would give them closer to zero Winter bills, but overkill in Summer that exceeds what's left (if any) during Winter, which exceeds their "zero annual bill" maximum for reselling overgeneration to the utility at retail rates. So probably about 1.5x the area would give them Summer overgeneration that would equal their Winter utility draw, netting zero bills. It's got to cost less than 1.5x to install just more area, because labor and shared components (especially the inverter that sells power back to the utility) are a substantial cost that doesn't increase at all at that rate. Say it costs 1.2x, or $44,400, but they save the full $5400 annually. That's still about the same time in payback (about 2% longer), but 3.7x the return. And the "green feeling" is complete.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Total return is $133,600 on $37,000 investment, so 3600% Return on Investment over 30 years.
I assume this was a typo for 360%. Of course, calculating total return like that is a pretty horrible way to measure whether a long-term investment is worth it. A better way is this method:
If you invested that money in a compound interest account (either savings or some investment with an average annual return reinvested), you'd have to get 15.43% annual compound interest to turn $37K into $136K in 30 years.
But you messed it up somehow... by a LOT. The actual number is slightly under 4.4%. You can verify it like so: since you gain 4.4% compounded each year, calculate $37k * (1.044) * (1.044) ..., 30 times, for a total of $37k * (1.044^30), which is about $134k.
Still, 4.4% isn't bad. Good luck earning that on rolling CDs, eve
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You're right about the future value / interest calculation. I mistakenly used the paydown for a $37K 30 year mortgage to cost $136K in interest. The proper calculation [moneychimp.com] shows that $37K would earn about $136K over 30 years at only 4.43% annual compound interest. Which is a little lower than the low mortgage rates today, so financing it with a mortgage is a net loss, but not a big one, with no (annual) cash flow impact. Better than leaving that equity in the home not working for you.
But the real investment of
Solar Water Heating Even Better (Score:3, Informative)
Solar PV is a good replacement for utility electricity, as this article demonstrates.
Solar heating of water is supposed to be even more economical. The equipment is cheaper (basically a black pipe looped across area), and captures a lot more than 20% of the sun's power in the heated water. The only problem is that the extra power not consumed by using the hot water (washing or heating the building's air) is lost, dissipated through the system, or discharged when it exceeds even the water tank's heat storage capacity. But the tank can be made very large, and its heat can be converted to electricity (inefficiently, but better than losing it). You don't get to send unlimited surplus power back to a "bottomless reservoir" like the surplus PV electric to the utility, but some large tank should be sufficient to store all the extra heat. And perhaps store some extra PV power beyond what the electric utility will stop taking when the net annual utility consumption reaches zero. Elevating the water stores energy at close to 90% efficiency (the multiplied efficiencies of the elevating electric pump and the electric turbine in the downpipe).
It seems that there's a compelling case for installing both, and using a large tank as storage that increases the total efficiency substantially beyond the basic operating parameters. Which sounds like it's even better than the 3-4x+ 30 year ROI from just the PV demonstrated in the article.
Whatever happened to solar shingles? (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember reading about solar shingles a few years ago, how it was supposed to be the next wave of solar power for the home, the price was lower for installation, etc. I did read that they were a bit less efficient, but you were able to cover a much larger area of your roof for the price, thereby more than offsetting the disadvantages.
Fast forward to today, everywhere I look people are still installing solar panels and I haven't seen a single new article, blog or discussion about solar shingles. Was the technology flawed?
I'd love some feedback on this, because there's a possibility I might build a home in the foreseeable future, and I'm definitely intending on going solar for both electricity and water, maybe even a heat pump. Proper insulation is a given, energy efficiency appliances, passive solar design. I'd love to shoot the works on this project.
Re:A waste of time (Score:4, Informative)
Because this is a follow up article. The first article includes the Roi figures along with the fact that California Rebated half the cost of the system ($36,000.00 dollars), which explains his up front costs of $36,000.00. Not bad for the size system he had installed and yes I've read the first article and understood the reasoning for the selected installation method, which was to reduce peak Energy Usage during Peak Summer Cost. That's right, his goal was to cut the summer cost of energy during the most expensive part of the year from PG&E (his uutility company).
Note that PG&E has a variable Rate cycle that has the greatest impact during the summer cooling period. This is why he wanted to reduce his summer electric costs, which the system did quite successfully.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
All the ones I have seen installed around here are either on sun tracking stands or building side mounted at a fairly steep angle
to keep the snow off of them.
Re:Do you get credited for extra power? (Score:5, Funny)
I thought that only happened in Soviet Russia.