Issues most solar salesman do not tell their customers. Installing a solar system on the roof of a home can cause problems. The panels block the sun which promotes moss and possibly fungus/mold growth on the roof, especially in damp parts of the country like Portland. The faster moss growth increases the amount of work necessary to keep the roof clean, while the panels make it more difficult to clean the roof. A shorter life span of the roof is also very possible. If there is room on your property, installing the solar system on a stand alone frame is the best option, and easiest to work on. A stand alone system will probably cost more than a roof installation to install, however, in the long run may cost less compared to re-roofing a home sooner.
Hypocrite. So we shouldn't subsidize health care costs for people but we should subsidize your Solar panels? That's not being a good Libertarian Denny.
No. I don't think we should subsidize anything. It just points out how much a drain on the economy these tilting at windmill grand schemes are. At this point, I'm glad I wasn't suckered into buying the solar panels. Doing so without the subsidies would cost me 150% the normal electric bill. How about the government refund some of my taxes for not taking the subsidy?
I bought a panel for 1500 that is maintained by the power company in a sort of co-op system..It will reduce my power bill drastically starting next summer when the whole system is completed. It allows me to use the current power grid. I'll buy another for a couple of studios off the grid I have on the property. When I lived on the big island I rented a completely solar powered cabin with propane appliances..worked great for simple conveniences..
I did it..and it doesn't break the bank even if you sell your house..that buyer can hook up to their electric grid and isn't bound to buy the panel I bought. I'm really impressed with our local power service and the people know me and have helped us many, many times over the year..those guys earn their checks and do a great job with wind damage control ...limbed some dangerous trees for us without cost..publish a great periodical that I've learned a lot from. I value the investment and I'm happy to throw them my business
Last fall I added a small solar system to one of my out buildings. It made more sense than running wiring through the property fed from my big solar system. One large panel and one 12 volt battery with a small controller does not cost much, but now I have light inside. I believe there is a bright future for solar energy; there are so many ways it can be used. Not one size fits all, and solar is not for everyone. However, solar is versatile enough to custom design a system to solve many issues and ideas. As long as a person’s needs and wants are realistic. I ran into a remote beach motel in Mexico that operated 100% with solar energy, no grid hookup. Their system was YUGE, both panels and battery capacity size. To make the system work they only turned on the electricity to the rooms a few hours in the morning and again at night for a few hours. The guests where not registered until they understood what was going on and the hours they would have power in the room. There was a very nice quit and tranquil feeling to the place.
A guy who used to fix my vehicles for me is one of those McGiver types...his truck has a built in air compressor, 110 inverter, generator, industrial bank of 6volt train batteries charged by his motor..basically can drive home to his cabin, plug his truck into the house and have 110 electricity all night..as someone mentioned..it's not running a clothes dryer or industrial lathe. gets more bank for his buck at the gas station. Cars should be generators or have that capability in my view and should definitely have built in air compressors
That is how my boat works. When I go anchor somewhere, I am good for about 3 to 4 days before I need to fire up the genset to charge batteries, unless I do something unusual. Good for normal lights, refrigeration and computer use. Howerver, I have 800 pounds of batteries in there which costs me little to haul around, I don't know that I would want to do that all the time in my truck.
So Germany (with climate similar to the NW) can make solar viable but we can't? Germany used LOTS of government involvement to do it. They were able to shut down (last I heard) 8 of their nuclear plants. Sound like the private sector needs help...
Solar is the wave of the future. Tesla is gonna revolutionize that industry: Watch the 18 minute video. https://www.minds.com/blog/view/443508465227272192
The average price of electricity to the customer ($/KWh) in Germany is over 3 times higher than the average price we pay in the USA. The break even point varies by project. But on average, by my “guess”, when the price of electricity doubles in the USA, most solar systems would pay for themselves without subsidies. One of the main reasons we enjoy lower than average electricity prices, especially here in the PNW, is due to the very low cost of hydro-electricity, which we have a lot of compared to other parts of our country and the rest of the world.
Viable? Says who? Germany generates 6% of its energy from solar, after massive investment. To make up for there being no energy at night from this source, they're building coal power plants. LOL https://www.quora.com/Should-other-nations-follow-Germanys-lead-on-promoting-solar-power-1 Solar power itself is a good thing, but Germany's pro-renewables policy has been a disaster. It has the absurd distinction of completing the trifecta of bad energy policy: Bad for consumers Bad for producers Bad for the environment (yes, really; I'll explain) Pretty much the only people who benefit are affluent home-owners and solar panel installation companies. A rising tide of opposition and resentment is growing among the German press and public. I was shocked to find out how useless, costly, and counter-productive their world-renowned energy policy has turned out. This is a serious problem for Germany, but an even greater problem for the rest of the world which hopes to follow in their footsteps. The first grand experiment in renewable energy is a catastrophe! The vast scale of the failure has only started to become clear over the past year or so. So I can forgive renewables advocates for not realizing it yet -- but it's time for the green movement to do a 180 on this. Some awful statistics before I get into the details: Germany is widely considered the global leader in solar power, with over a third of the world's nameplate (peak) solar power capacity. [1] Germany has over twice as much solar capacity per capita as sunny, subsidy-rich, high-energy-cost California. (That doesn't sound bad, but keep going.) Germany's residential electricity cost is about $0.34/kWh, one of the highest rates in the world. About $0.07/kWh goes directly to subsidizing renewables, which is actually higher than the wholesale electricity price in Europe. (This means they could simply buy zero-carbon power from France and Denmark for less than they spend to subsidize their own.) More than 300,000 households per year are seeing their electricity shut off because they cannot afford the bills. Many people are blaming high residential prices on business exemptions, but eliminating them would save households less than 1 euro per month on average. Billing rates are predicted by the government to rise another 40% by 2020. [2] Germany's utilities and taxpayers are losing vast sums of money due to excessive feed-in tariffs and grid management problems. The environment minister says the cost will be one trillion euros (~$1.35 trillion) over the next two decades if the program is not radically scaled back. This doesn't even include the hundreds of billions it has already cost to date. [3] Siemens, a major supplier of renewable energy equipment, estimated in 2011 that the direct lifetime cost ofEnergiewende through 2050 will be $4.5 trillion, which means it will cost about 2.5% of Germany's GDP for 50 years straight. [4] That doesn't include economic damage from high energy prices, which is difficult to quantify but appears to be significant. Here's the truly dismaying part: the latest numbers show Germany's carbon output and global warming impact is actually increasing[5] despite flat economic output and declining population, because of ill-planned "renewables first" market mechanisms. This regime is paradoxically forcing the growth of dirty coal power. Photovoltaic solar has a fundamental flaw for large-scale generation in the absence of electricity storage -- it only works for about 5-10 hours a day. Electricity must be produced at the exact same time it's used. [29] The more daytime summer solar capacity Germany builds, the more coal power they need for nights and winters as cleaner power sources are forced offline. [6] This happens because excessive daytime solar power production makes base-load nuclear plants impossible to operate, and makes load-following natural gas plants uneconomical to run. Large-scale PV solar power is unmanageable without equally-large-scale grid storage, but even pumped-storage hydroelectricity facilities are being driven out of business by the severe grid fluctuations. They can't run steadily enough to operate at a profit. [2,7] Coal is the only non-subsidized power source that doesn't hemorrhage money now. [8] The result is that utilities must choose between coal, blackouts, or bankruptcy. Which means much more pollution. So it sucks on pretty much every possible level.
Did you really mean to talk Solar and Tesla at the same time? Geez, I can't get enough solar panels on a 60 foot boat to run the simple electronics. How the hell are you going to get enough on a Tesla? Oh! You are going to power it from solar at home, Great! The city of Bandon put in a(one) solar powered charging station for the electric cars, for a mere $120,000 of tax payer money. What a fucking waste, criminal even. Hardly ever a car there using the thing. It takes hours to charge a car when the sun shines. That was two day last month.
One of the advantages we have in the PNW to compensate for the rapid fluctuations of both solar and now wind produced energy is hydro-electric. The dams can reduce or increase the amount of water passing through the turbines. In minutes the dams can keep up with the supply and demand. On hot summer days, you can see the Columbia River rapidly rise and then fall as consumers turn on and off their AC. HOWEVER, there is now a brand new MAJOR PROBLEM no one is publicly talking about. This problem is created when solar and wind energy enters the grid. The grid system now in place that moves electricity around the PNW was never built to handle the rapid fluctuations of electricity generated at different sources. The short answer is, the more solar and wind energy that enters the grid system, the sooner the entire grid system will need to be replaced. That is going to cost a bunch of $$$$$$$$.
I don't know if replaced is the right view of what is needed. It seems to me that the grid surely will need to be restructured and up graded to support taking power in from the outlying capillary system back to central routing rather than expecting power to flow in one direction. At any give time power will need to flow from any region to another. Yeah on second thought, that is replacement of everything but the wires.
I do not have any details on what would need to be replaced in a grid system; electricity is a very weak subject for me. Appreciate any help you can give on the subject. One of my neighbors works for Bonneville. He is an electrical engineer and travels around the PNW working on the transfer stations (not sure that is the correct term). I listened to him along with several other electrical engineers discussing the problem. Large energy farms like the wind generating farms along the Columbia River and into E WA & OR are causing havoc to the grid system. The larger the farm, the bigger the problems they create. They made it sound like adding large solar farms or more large wind farms would push the system over the edge. It was not a matter of if, just when the grid would need to be replaced. The more off-grid sources that are added, the sooner it will happen.
Pardon my ignorance, but why shouldn't people get paid for energy they send back to the grid? Is this just simple lobbying from energy companies pushing these laws through?
From my understanding, it's not that they're not getting paid at all, it's that the utility companies want to pay back wholesale prices, rather than retail prices per kwh.
Very true. Not only is it a switching problem, it's also a voltage regulator issue. They can vary the power generated by dams and fuel burning power plants to hold a steady voltage. But as they add power sources without central control over the power coming in, they can only control the overall power (voltage) by controlling the exiting sources which are not that all that rapid in control. Sort of like the variable voltage regulator I have in my boat. As the Batteries built up the charge taken from the generator, the voltage rises so the regulator cuts back the excitement current supplied to the alternator(s) to keep the voltage within the limits. Once it begins to consistently exceed the maximum voltage it begins to lope in surges. I need to replace that regulator with a faster acting one so the power to the batteries can slow down in a smooth progress, holding and even voltage and slowly reduce the amperage. The present regulator is just too slow to control the amount of power the large alternator can produce. I imagine, todays grid would have the same issues, not enough control points and not sufficiently responsive.
