Solar Cost

I noticed a message back on 2002 and have seen various comments regarding the subject of solar cost so I felt the urge to post a response.

Until now solar cost has indeed been an issue. Solar residential systems have not been a very cost effective method of fuel but if like me you've been out pricing things lately you will know that prices on pre made solar power kits are coming down almost daily. Technological advances along with more manufacturers getting into the marketplace are driving costs down while boosting efficiency of these kits at the same time. Even Ikea are getting into the fray! However, generating solar power at home couldn't be simpler. To generate the electricity all you really have to do is put up the solar panels in an appropriate location within your house and wire them up. Virtually all the stuff you need to build your own system you can buy at the local hardware store and over time it can pay for itself many times over thereby saving you a bundle so with a little knowledge and the use of a good solar how guide you can have your own solar system up and running in no time. Helping you get off the grid and possibly even sell your excess power back to the utility company for credits! There are a lot of misconceptions about solar power some interesting ones here

formatting link
One is - It's cloudy, so solar hot water systems won't work Truth- For example, Seattle in the USA receives a Good rating from FindSolar.com meaning that enough solar energy is available on a typical day to provide for most solar hot water needs. Seattle has about 30% more sun per year than Germany- the current world leader in solar installations. Another - It's too cold in the winter for solar hot water. Truth- Even in sub zero temperatures, solar hot water collectors can reach temperatures greater than the cold water introduced to your domestic water system, meaning there is less energy needed to heat it to the desired level and you are saving money.

Reply to
Rich
Loading thread data ...

If anyone might be in any doubt, that is spam from

snipped-for-privacy@thedreammarketeer.com Origin : 79.153.164.117

snipped-for-privacy@thedreammarketeer.com Origin : 79.153.164.117

snipped-for-privacy@thedreammarketeer.com Origin : 79.153.164.117

snipped-for-privacy@thedreammarketeer.com Origin : 79.153.164.117

Reply to
Harry Bloomfield

I think most of us know that, but solar power is a very interesting subject. I bought a few large panels from ebay and stuck them on a shed roof which is south facing. I wired the panels through a regulator to two large car batteries from a diesel car and they connect to an invertor. My lights and some power outlets are connected to the invertor through a circuit I built. When the battery level is above 11v the invertor is switched in and the mains switched out. If the invertor stops working or the voltage drops then verything goes back to mains. I use fluorescent lighting and energy savers everywhere! The low current power outlets will also run my laptop and a DAB radio for quite some time. The switching is so fast it's not noticable. Obviously I couldn't run a TV for long and a 10KW shower is out of the question, but this saves me a fortune in electric costs. I can even use this system to charge a laptop and many other devices.

Give it a try, altering the output from your consumer unit is not too difficult. I was going to try a wind turbine but they are next to useless! If you like DIY you can make one from a car alternator bought from the local scrap yard.

Experiment and try things out.

Reply to
Ian

Tis utter bollocks as well.

Reply to
EricP

What did it cost you, and how much power do you reckon you get?

Andy

Reply to
Andy Champ

There are roughly 8000 hours in a year. The sun is up for 4000. However it's only really sunny for (maybe?) 25% of the time - so we get 1000 hours of sunshine per year. Now, even if your panels are south-facing, the sunshine won't always be when the sun is due south, so reckon on average the sun is at 45 degrees to the panel. That means the incident light on a panel is sin(45) = 0.71 of the maximum intensity. Next step, estimate the best-case sun's intensity in the UK. I'd guess maybe 600 Watts/sq. metre, so for an ebay panel of 1470*680 mm (about

1 sq. metre) that comes out to 600W * 0.71 = an average power _onto_ the panel of ~ 420 Watts. Assume an efficiency of 20% to convert the sunlight to electricity comes out at 85Watts (these panels are rated as 110Watts). Last calculations. 85Watts for 1000 hours per year is 85kW Hr. which at 12p per kWHr means you generate about £10 worth of electricity from 1 panel in a year. The panels are up for grabs at £375. Add all the other stuff (regulators batteries, invertors) - say double that for the whole system. That means that to generate £10 worth of electricity per year, you have to spend £750. As near as I can work out, our electricity usage is about 4,000 kWhr per year[1], so we'd need about 50sq. metres of panels, which is nearly twice the total area of the roof, to satisfy just our electricity needs. [1] doesn't include heating or water heating, which is gas.

Personally, I don't see how it's possible to come anywhere close to being cost-effective. Even in a skin-sizzling desert, with 1000 Watt/sq. metre of sunlight, for 4000 hours a year, you'd have to have these units running for 11 years just to recoup the cost of the equipment - let alone pay the interest on the money invested. Maybe when the cost of the total system is down to about £100, or electricity jumps to £1 per kWhr it might just start to be a viable alternative.

Reply to
pete

energy savers?

If it does then you're the first person to make it pay. Tell us how you achieved that

NT

Reply to
meow2222

They do not however save energy if fitted everywhere. They only save energy if fitted where they are turned on for very long periods of time. Turning these type of lamps on and off reduces their life considerably and they are really that green to make nor very green to dispose of.

Even with equipment installed which produces masses of energy there is the problem of storing the energy produced. Batteries do not last for ever, decent capacity costs lots of money and they will need replacement.

Even the commercial windmill builders, the electricity producers cannot make them pay without lots of subsidy and massaged output figures, what chance has a tiny domestic windmill installed in a back yard of working?

Reply to
Harry Bloomfield

Any savings in paying for electricity will be negated by the costs of replacing the batteries.

Reply to
Dave Plowman (News)

Fossil fuels are merely a store of solar energy in chemical form. Taking 10-100million years to process, fossil fuels would therefore seem, on the face of it, to be an even less cost effective concept than photovoltaics.

#Paul

Reply to
kinslerp

I was working with a Dane a couple of weeks ago. Apparently, the Danish government have withdrawn their windmill subsidy, as it's just not working. Although you can look at the power output and claim it was equivalent to 20% of the Danish demand, they can't switch off any power stations to match this because of the unreliability of the wind supply, so they end up with an unsalable electricity surpless in high winds, because no one is interested in buying an electricity supply that blows with the wind. Removal of this subsidy is not popular in Denmark, not because of the green issues, but because export of windmills is a significant industry and with the home government admitting they can't make it work, this expected to hit exports hard too. Apparently the large backout which hit much of Europe (last year?) (although not the UK) has been blamed in part on too high a proportion of Europe's supply now relaying on unstable generation, and since then a number of other European countries have also cancelled their windmill subsidies.

I think that if there's to be any hope of getting windmills to work, we have to work out how to store energy more efficiently than we can today (around 60% at best). It may be that we're using windmills in the wrong way by trying to directly generate electricity from them, and they might do better to directly pump water to the top of a two resoviour system, and then generate electricity by hydro when it's actually required.

None whatsoever.

Reply to
Andrew Gabriel

Thats my take also. Solar works well enough in southerly climes where it can totally REPLACE a conventional boiler of similar capital cost, and do the 'hot water' and is good where there isn't a reliable electricity supply. My sister lives in Greece, and that's the way it works for her.

She gets, essentially free hot water. And a little bit of background heating in the autumn, and needs a little stove burning wood if it gets ultra chilly .

Up here its completely cost ineffective if any other source of energy is available.

A typical installation probably saves £50-£100 a year.

The real need is for deep winter nheat..thats where we burn fuel domestically. When te days are very shiort, very overcast, and generally bloody cold.

There is only one form of solar heating that really works, and that is a ground source heatpump where the excess of energy in summer, can be tapped over the winter.

But that is neither free, nor inexpensive. It does seem to be cost effective though.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

My thoughts have gone in the same direction - pumped storage. But, while I have not done anything like calculate the figures, my gut feel is that the size of the reservoir required would be unachievable. (Mental picture of Dinorwic multiplied many times over.) After all, we can have many days of strong wind but low demand followed by several days of low wind and high demand. Unless the storage is capable of lasting for at least a few days, I can't see it helping much overall.

Also, if such huge volumes are involved, where can we flood as it is released? The sea seems attractive - but we would probably not wish to use saline in the high reservoir. So we would need to source fresh water to go back up.

And further, the enviromental effects of swishing such large volumes back and forth could have their own repercussions.

(I did think of everyone having their own pumped storage system with a tank atop a pole. But when I work things out it was amazing how much water/height was required for anything much more than a new-style Nokia SMPS.)

Reply to
Rod

That thought was the first one to enter my mind when you mentioned working out how to store the energy. But I don't think you could have the direct pump method but you could still feed the grid with their power and have pumped storage stations take it from the grid. The grid being a big buffer/accounting system rather than the same physical electrons leaving a windmill traveling across the grid and driving the turbine of a pumped storage system.

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

Precisely.

The cost..the cost..we can store energy as potential energy by constructing ENORMOUS lakes and dams at HUGE cost and HUGE initial energy outlays... and do pumped storage. We could electrolyse water to hydrogen at extreme cost..we could synthesise carbon fuels at extreme costs.

Or we could cover the world with high power cables to abeverage out the worlds windpower at extreme cost.

Or we could build much cheaper nuclear power stations, and justget on with more important stuff.

It may be that we're

Cost and efficiency.

The fact of the matter is it takes far more 'stuff' per unit megawatt for a *reliable* wind system than it does per megawatt for a medium to large nuclear power station. It also takes lot less people to maintain it.

The wind industry works by perpetuation the twin myths that wind turbines can *reliably produce all the time* at least 30% of their rated power, and that there is no cost beyond the construction of the windmill itself, to be added on.

The reality is that often they produce not nearly enough, and often more than can be used, and the transmission lines, backup power stations or storage that they need to average it all out, is probably more than the cost of the windmills.

They keep the crows away.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Rich saying something like:

Spamming wanker. Come back when you have a clue.

Reply to
Grimly Curmudgeon

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "Ian" saying something like:

Post some pics.

Reply to
Grimly Curmudgeon

On Sat, 25 Oct 2008 09:56:46 +0100 someone who may be Harry Bloomfield wrote this:-

What is/are the scheme(s) this "lots of subsidy" comes from called? Where does the money come from? Do tell us, so we may assess the veracity of your assertion.

I suggest we all know about the ROC scheme, which averages IIRC £10 on the annual bill of every electricity customer at the moment and therefore not be called "lots of" by any stretch of the imagination.

Therefore there must be other scheme(s) providing this subsidy. Please let us know what they are.

Reply to
David Hansen

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "Dave Plowman (News)" saying something like:

It's a useable system for a cabin in the woods and only if everything there is v.low consumption. I could live like that full-time, but I wouldn't really want to and as you say, you'd have to put a substantial portion of the equivalent of your elecy bill aside to replace the battery bank every few years.

Reply to
Grimly Curmudgeon

You are in danger of talking sense, rather than Hansen style ecobollox. Be careful

Actually, the one storage system that is very cheap and will store a lot is a bloody great mass of something in an insulated area. Heat bank as it were. However the problem is its a bloody useless way to generate electricity or make fuel out of.

And if you make it very hot, so it is useful, then it gets expensive, and loses heat much faster..

Perhaps we should use the earths core. Build lots of windmills to add heat to it, and then when the sun sets, cool it down again.

Sounds no more fantastic than most ecobollox.

Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.