During the congressional debates there was a lot of talk about alternative energy sources. They discussed wind power and roof mounted solar panels. Where I live, the roof is covered with a foot (or more) of snow during most of the winter. Solar panels would be useless.
---MIKE---
Sounds like if you invested $10,000 in panels, you could use the $3 you save per month in electrity, to buy a roof rake. :)
j/k
tom @
Somebody did it locally - we have much less snow - and discussions indicated a payback period of 20+ years. Don't think that counted maintenance or putting the money in the bank and collecting interest. I think it is a stupid idea to install solar panels today but strongly recommend all environmentalists get them to start the ball rolling ;) Frank
There are different types of solar panels. One type converts sunlight to electricity, at whatever efficiency--I think they're up to 15-20% now?
The other type simply captures the sun's heat, w/ much higher efficiency (theoretically near-100%) using stuff like "selective surfaces", which get super-hot in the sun. These, being hot, would not be affected by snow, and could proly provide most of your winter heat--assuming enough sun.
The ideal array would then be some *ratio* of solar electric to solar heat square footage, which would vary with latitude--mostly solar electric in the south, mostly solar heat in the north.
HD is now hawking solar electric panels, $25K-50K installed.
Some friends of mine claim they basically pay nothing for their electricity. This is in NW Washington State. I believe they said they paid about $16,000 for their system. They are careful about their usage it seemed.
Bob
Also, some utilities pay a really good rate for electricity you produce.
Bob
First, we can't run this country (or much of anything) off of sunbeams. There are 745 watts/sq meter of solar energy that falls on the earth's surface. At noon. At the equator. With no clouds. The only way to increase that number is to move the orbit of the earth closer to the sun.
Assuming 50% conversion efficiency, it would take a solar collector the size of the Los Angeles basin (about 1200 sq miles) to provide electricity just for California. Then, too, there is the initial cost and on-going maintenance. Plus Angelinos would be living in the dark.
That said, solar collectors for modest projects - such as water heating - MAY be cost effective. Solar water heaters are cheap and easy to construct. Their only drawback is a 55-gallon drum sitting atop your house.
Industy can't be run on solar, but houses sure can. I think it's more like 900 W at the earths surface. At 50% conversion, for a 30' x 40' house, that's about 250 Amp service!! Yeah, weather dependent, but dats why God invented batteries and, more recently, inverters. :) Clearly will need backup, but the sun provides incredible juice. You can do the math and show that a relatively narrow belt of solar cells around the globe could supply several times the whole world's supply of juice. A strip of solar panels 1 meter wide encircling the equator would provide about 6 million KW. A strip 1 mile wide would yield 10 billion KW. etc. At any given time. More or less.
The average available solar energy in continental USA is more like 300 watts/meter. Given conversion efficiencies the amount of electrical power that can be generated is more like 50watts per square meter at best.
Using batteries and inverters introduce a whole raft of other inefficiencies. Not to mention the environmental problems of building and maintaining banks of batteries. And for those long periods ,in some places where there is little sunshine, backup base load generators have to be kept on line.
All the equations for realistic solar power generation, in many parts of the world just do not work. OTOH in some parts of the world it is a possibility.
Certainly, if every house were roofed with collectors, it would eliminate the need for new generation capability. Grid tied systems eliminate the need for batteries. When it's sunny where you are, the surplus can be sent elsewhere and vise-versa. In hot areas, the time of highest demand is the time of greatest production.
When they figure out how to mass produce cells cheaply, they will get very popular. That's the only thing holding them back. It will happen.
Bob
"Proctologically Violated©®" wrote in message news:fnM5h.1274$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfe12.lga...
My BIL had a set of panels like that 15 years ago. Worked pretty good, then they broke and the company he got them from was out of business. I chose not to question him about it any further, so I don't know why someone else couldn't have fixed them.
Much of the world gets their hot water from solar heaters. Except us of course, cause we're rich.
So I was off by a factor of 10.... or so. :) Still, a lot of energy is available. If the Big Oil lobbyists are ever kicked out of DC, mebbe things will progress faster. Or when Big Oil gets into solar cells.
"Proctologically Violated©®" wrote in message news:GmW5h.112$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfe10.lga...
It doesn't matter whether Big Oil gets into solar cells or whether a law is passed in D.C. or whether the world is run by those in Patik-print dresses. There is no way sufficient solar energy can be captured or stored to make a positive difference in our energy needs. It is a physical impossibility.
Of course being physically impossible won't stop the politicians. Look what happened in Hawaii recently when the state government imposed price controls on gasoline. Governments LOVE to tinker with the general marketplace. (Taxes, quotas, price controls, tariffs, etc. The general marketplace always wins.)
We CAN exist with a high-percentage of our energy needs coming from solar power if we're willing to change our lifestyle, i.e., reduce our consumption dramatically. But that's solving the wrong problem. Somehow, giving up air conditioning, communications, and eating anything from farther away than the next county is just not acceptable - that's the way they live in Darfur.
Remember, it was "BIG OIL" in the personification of John D. Rockefeller that brought the price of Kerosene down from $3.00 per gallon to five cents (in only three years). Of course this put the whale-oil people out of business, but we did have light.
I don't know the life expectancy of panels, but having a house with only $100/month electric bill, it would take me 13 years for 100% payback with a $0 monthly bill. So would I be robing Peter{electric company} to pay Paul {solar panel installer}?
tom @
That is exactly the problem. Until someone figures out how to get the cost down, they make no economic sense. Here in the socialist state of NJ, they put a tax on every electric users bill to raise money to fund solar. So, last time I checked, you can get a medium sytem of about 6KW, which actually costs $50K, for about 20K, because the other poor saps are paying the rest. Then promoters of this crap, like BP, proceed to do some more bogus math to justify it. They claim you can save another $500 a year or so, because the interest to finance it is tax deductible, if secured by a mortgage. But they completely ignore the fact even if the mortgage interest is tax deductible, it only reduces the cost of borrowing the money, which they never factor in.
And after all this, they tell you it will reduce your electric bill by
50%. Big deal. If you had to actually incur the true cost of paying for this, which of course, in the end the citizens as a whole do, it would make no sense at all. If you borrowed $50K at 7% interest, it would cost $3500 a year. And if you had a $300 a month electric bill, which is pretty damn high, it would save you a whopping, $1800 a year. In other words, the system would never pay for itself, without even factoring in how long it would last, what it might cost to repair, etc.And of course we just had a big scandel with the $100Mil that is sitting in a public fund that was raised to support this. Turns out there were no financial controls on it, no control over who could spend the money, or tracking what it went for. And it appears some of it went to pay former employees of the state BPU, who became "consultants" to work on special projects.
rote in
If you're that far north, you want the panels mounted steeper than your roof probably is, anyway. Between that, the fact that they're glass-smooth, and that they're generally warmer than a roof would be, I doubt you'd have all THAT much trouble with snow-built up. But if you don't like that, whats wrong with a roof-mounted windmill?
If you use photovoltaic shingles, instead of special-purpose panels, you get to subtract that cost of re-reroofing from your capital expense.
Than you have to keep the panels clean so they can use what sunlight falls upon them. Many homeowners don't like washing windows so I doubt you will see many on there roofs washing the solar panels. In A Popular Science I read recently there was A wind generator for the home. It cost around 20K installed as I remember. It seems A more viable alternative than solar panels in the generation of electricity and at least you don't have to clean it!
H.R. "Where, exactly, am I going and why am I in this hand basket?"
The numbers from here:
At 750 watts, 40% of the time, at 40% efficiency, you'd get 0.12 killowats per meter. That only requires around 4,000 square kilometers.
I don't see the problem. find a chunk of desert
40 miles square, and go to town...Excellent point: How long DO solar electric panels last??
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