I have an important project to finish this weekend, so I’ll be offline much of the weekend.
Here’s some pictures of what I’m up to.
BTW global warming and CO2 reduction did not figure into my decision to do this again (we downsized our original home that I first put solar on) one bit. The economics and out of control regulations that will make electricity prices “necessarily skyrocket” starting this fall were the main impetus.
Details next week, along with instructions how how you can get one easily and put your own sweat equity into it and save a bundle…and have it paid off quickly and fully own it…unlike those lease programs that require 20 year payoffs…and by that time the company may be gone and the panels fading.
You must have grabbed some of those thousands of solar panels Solyndra threw in the dumpster after their $500 million taxpayer-funded bankruptcy.
Perhaps the Left should pass laws requiring flat rooves made of cement to encourage tomato farming.
The local student run coffee house in Hopkins MN “The Depot” got a PV addition a couple summers ago.
It’s been producing a prodigious $900 worth of electricity every year since then.
It took a few notes to people in “low places” to find out that the “Gummit” (per Jimmy Carter’s pronunciation) grant to put it in, plus money from the Depot board, amounted to about $72,000.
Let’s see, the way I figure it…it’s merely a 100 year payback.
Great investment. I’m looking for the GUMMIT to help me out. I think I can make my house COMPLETELY SOLAR AND WIND for a mere $750,000…I’ll do my own contracting.
Max 🙂
I’m going to buy some stock in SC Johnson, makers of Windex.
Anthony, you should might check out glass-cleaning products that have silicones which will prevent road dust from sticking on the panels. Since there is an enormous amount of road dust generated in Cal, you will probably spend a lot of time keeping the panels clean.
Open Thread Weekend?
OK, here’s some science worth sharing:
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2012/07/dnc-scientists-disprove-existence-of-roberts-taxon.html
“I’d make cheap energy expensive so that expensive energy would seem cheap”
That’s what Obama promised, and that’s what his officers are doing.
UP to July 9 householders in Queensland, Australia were able to sign up for subsidised solar power. Contracts have been issued paying these people 48c/unit for intermittent, unreliable power versus the normal rate being 23c/unit until 2028. They have paid various sums but around $15000Au for their solar panels (again with subsidy). The current rate dropped to 8c/unit subsidy.
One person told me that they are advised to use their electrical appliances at NIGHT so that they use ‘cheap’ power!!
None of these people seem to realize that no matter how much power their roofs generate that will never recover the cost of the solar cells.
14 years ago we built a house, intending to install a solar hot water system. The cost then was around $3000. Our builder convinced us that the biggest electrical hot water system would be a better deal at a cost of $500. We sold the house 3 years ago and calculated the cost of all of the power used over the time we had the house. We were still thousands of dollars better off than the cost of that solar hot water system.
Not to pry, Anthony, but will you be sharing details of costs, performance, generated power, reairs, etc. over the next few years? It would be great to have data from a real solar installation for those who may be considering their own system (I’m not…yet).
Better yet, will we have a “Anthony’s Real-Time Solar Gauge” gadget on WUWT? 🙂
“MattB says:
July 21, 2012 at 4:08 pm
…. I have been considering a solar powered attic fan as well.”
Matt, I live in Cleveland, OH and installed a ac powered attic vent fan (the largest one at Home Depot) on our house three years ago so that it would exhaust air from throughout the entire two story house and it continues to work better than I thought it would – and not too costly, either, relative to the A/C that we don’t have to use any longer. I also thought of using a solar powered fan, but quickly discovered that it would not displace nearly the volume of air that a line powered fan would (or as consistently considering not infrequent clouds and lack of sun at dusk and night, etc.!). The displacement of solar fans is pitiful – fogettaboudit. We use our fan alot as it moves and exhausts the humid, warm/hot air very noticeably even on the first floor (through the slightly open pull-down attic ladder door I installed in the second floor ceiling). We still use minimal localized A/C during select periods but the house is incredibly comfortable at much lower cost than without the attic fan. The shingles benefit from the cooler attic here maybe as much or more than panel covered shingles as the non-covered shingles would still be radiated, anyway. Sorry, I don’t have the fan spec’s handy, but you can quickly check up on them – just compare before you buy.
I wouldn’t worry too much about electricity going too high (except in CA) since one bad power shortage and the citizens will tar and feather the energy minimalists and demand back cheap, plentiful, dependable traditional coal, oil, gas, nuclear (hopefully modular) with continued work on viably developing newer, longer term sources of power (most promisingly lower level nuclear, fusion (hey,someday!)) that we’ve got a hundred plus years to put together a reasonable energy program without going “CAGW Green” on it. .
Good Luck!
PLM
I had a thermostatically controlled attic fan installed. It was cheap, simple, and made a noticeable difference in the temperature on hot days. (I have no A/C.) I urge everyone to install one.
Another quick-payoff item is an awning–as large and high on the wall as possible, to shade the maximum house-wall exposure. They’re cheap from Sunsetter–but you have to assemble and install them yourself. (You can ask the company for a list of installers now, I think.)
Another cheap item is to add an insulating blanket around your water heater.
The latest thread on CA is interesting. It’s contains a long list of questions that has recently come to light that the UEA prepared Jones for because they might have been asked at the Parliamentary inquiry. They weren’t–and should have been, because they probed the weakness of Jones’s position. Here’s the link.
http://climateaudit.org/2012/07/21/the-questions-that-were-never-asked/
@max Hugoson
I recently grabbed a cup at “The Depot”. There is not a consensus as to the effectiveness of their solar install at the 43rd parallel.
Spending $10/day for electric in a huge, recently SpacePac air conditioned, 100 year old house with 130 total light bulbs and a small plug in hot tub.. $10/day for water too, to keep all the mature (huge) trees and perennials alive during the heat wave and this drought. (But we do have twelve people living here just for a few months, more efficient ah four separate households, no?)
The man who installed the subsidized solar hot water system in 1982, defunct for some 5 years now, said he was now too old to take down the six huge panels from the 30′ high roof. The original system had convection heaters throughout the house, and two large hot water tanks. It would have cost about $8,000 to replace the tanks and maintain the old system. I sold the four Myson heaters on ebay and made some compensation. The bray oil and exchanger were recycled by the original installer.
The shake roof will have to be replaced someday soon, though repairs have been cheap the last ten years. The trees by the driveway have grown too big to get a crane in, what to do?
We do have natural gas and in other seasons it’s quite affordable. Our local geothermal company went broke and is gone,
For us the most efficient thing we could do is get rid of the gas log, line the chimney, rebuild the mantle and burn wood again, since it’s free here. We have the heat on from mid Sept through part of May, frequently. With two stairways the heat might waft upstairs quite nicely, but, oh, the mess! The 1960 Hydro Therm hydronic gas boiler is obsolete too but the contractors stare at it with respect as the double boilers are cast iron, heat both in 7 minutes and is not economical to replace.
It’s been a hard thing to ponder as our house was built for maximum heat gain in 1906 at 39 degrees n latitude at 5000′ elevation in a very dry, sunny climate. People slept in the screened porch if it got hot, and watered the grass in the evening to cool off the whole house. Funny how the walls weren’t originally insulated at all, they had coal forced air heat, state of the art, and knob and tube wiring.
In rural areas reality is what you live with.
A highly social endeavour: you need someone to use what you produce when you don’t need it (at noon) and some different source to supply you with electrical power when you need it but don’t produce it (nights). And the feed-in tariff is politically (=arbitrarily) defined because there is no objective way to price home-made things when entering such a complex market.
Do you participate in the corresponding investment for complementary grid and stand-by capacity?
The subsidies are going away.
Germany is dropping the subsidies. Ontario has dialed them back. The solar (and wind) experiment hasn’t succeeded. Different jurisdictions will take different times to figure that out but my guess is that the subsidies will be gone everywhere in a decade.
The real killer of alternate energy will be shale gas. Expensive oil led to huge alternate energy research in the 1970s. All that work evaporated when oil became cheap again. The same thing will happen now. Shale gas can even be used as a transportation fuel:
Those who invest in a bit of energy autonomy will probably find it to have been a wise choice in the future.
IIIRC, Anthony has an electric powered vehicle, so I’d guess he is counting of storage rather than grid tied. Maybe both, should be interesting to see the details.
Until I saw the photos of what you were up to, I thought you must have been working on a major scoop such as :-
“Has the publisher of the world’s most popular site on the science and politics of climate change sold his soul to the devil?
For years, the appropriately named Anthony Watts has campaigned tirelessly against the corruption that stems from big business such as solar and wind funding and promoting climate change alarmism. Now it seems, Mr Watts is getting his own little chunk of Paola, but what is worse, he is going to tell his disciples, who have looked to him for inspiration and guidance, how to get their bit of this dirt money also. It seems that when it comes to the crunch, the great American principle of looking after number one trumps even the most cherished of principles.”
Or as we say in England, “I’m all right Jack.” I criticise my own rich friends for capitalising on the outrageous feed in tariffs just for personal greed and at the expense of those less well off in society who are forced by our corrupt governments to pay for it in their electricity bills. I hope I am wrong in my assessment and that you have not become a lackey to the solar PV industry and the government machine which promotes such selfishness in the obtuse reasoning and justification of saving the planet.
I remember seeing an interview with an African bush doctor. His surgery had a solar panel and he had a choice between running a refrigerator to keep injection drugs viable or a strip light to aid patient examinations. Tough choice and crap solar panels. A friend has recently had his thermal roof panels, which worked well and kept his hot water to at least 30C, replaced with photovoltaic. I await his report but since he has been quiet on the subject I conclude that the new panels are not working as advertised.
If you live in a colder climate, I’d say a gas powered combined heat and power unit is your best bet for short term energy independence. Run off either mains gas or a gas storage tank.
BTW, here in Perth, pretty much every vehicle that does more than 30,000 Ks per annum, except big trucks (and we have the biggest truck trailer combinations in the world, locally called road trains) run on LPG or NG.
Can’t remember where I found this link. Might even have been from WUWT.
Many above commenters questions are answered. Bird poo reminded me. 🙂
http://www.csudh.edu/oliver/smt310-handouts/solarpan/solarpan.htm
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7d0eyQ2wh1rbxfido1_1280.jpg
Looks like you have got your work cut out for you this weekend,best of luck with it.
Thought I would pass this on, since it is an open thread.
We are currently in Spain, our house faces East-West (West at the back) I have a small weather station with an external temperature sensor at the top of the rear facing window, so it is always in the shade. The back of the house has a high white wall and terracota tile paving. At this time of the year the sun is almost overhead at noon (we are 36.5 degrees North, 4.8 degrees West. It is 1:00pm and the outside temperature is 27 celsius, I can comfortably walk around in bare feet, as the sun moves towards the West, it is impossible to walk on the tiles in bare feet and the temperature soars by 10 degrees, purely due to the heat stored in the tiles.
I would imagine that tarmac/ashphalt that is black would make the temperature even higher. My point is that thermometers will give false readings at airports and city centres which is where the majority of readings are taken from.
He’s got that installed too. I’ve seen a couple of his threads on it–the most recent almost a year ago, iirc.
James McCauley says July 21, 2012 at 9:54 pm
“I installed a ac powered attic vent fan”
James, That’s all very nice except for the neighbours, who will be getting free heat from your attic over the fence whether they want it or not.
One has to keep property rights in mind when doing these things.
That’s why I’d never do what Anthony is doing, if indeed he is taking advantage of state subsidies to make his panel system affordable. Show me a subsidy system and I’ll show you some official who is gaming the system, either financially or ideologically, by taking other peoples’ property rights.
Despite my doubts that solar (and wind) can scale, I would love to get off of “the grid” and be at least partly energy self-sufficient. And I wouldn’t like to be required to sell whatever electricity I generate back into the grid. Interesting times…