Regarding this article, I think I’ve found a simple reason for this failure, and the reason will shock and surprise you.
In the article, a news report by TV station WFTS is cited:
WFTS News in Tampa obtained copies of the courthouse’s electricity bills and confirmed the savings are no more than about $2,000 per month. WFTS also confirmed the panels are reducing electricity bills by only 15 to 18 percent, instead of the promised 40 percent.
You can watch the news report here.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, I’ve got one of those. First, look closely at the picture in the news story above…now look at this picture and note the arrow.
I think the government dufuses and the solar company missed the shading from the nearby tall building (the Hillsborough County Center Building), seen in the photo above which you can inspect yourself at Bing Maps here: http://binged.it/1tqPjnf
It looks like a little over half of the panels would be in the shade during the afternoon based on my comparison to the article photo, a larger version which exists here:
Source: http://www.naco.org/newsroom/countynews/Current%20Issue/10-18-10/Pages/OldMainCourthousesolarphotovoltaicproject.aspx
That afternoon shade will kill solar panel efficiency big time. The problem will be greater in the winter, at low sun angles, further reducing the efficiency of solar panels which appear to be placed flat on the roof, rather than tilted for maximum efficiency. In fact if you watch the WFTS i-team video, you’ll see that the panels are in fact laid directly on the roof surface. Here is a screen cap showing workers placing flexible panels flat on the roof:
The effect of array tilt angle on solar PV energy output may be up to 20% compared to that of flat installations, depending on latitude. Typical rooftop arrays with tilt look like this:
![Piscataway-Conackamack[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/piscataway-conackamack1.jpg?quality=83)
You can read more about tilt angles and panel efficiency here.
But the tilt issue is small compared to the shading issue by the tall building to the Southwest. using Google Earth’s timeline feature, I found an image from Dec 26, 2012 that shows the peak shading near the winter solstice, it also shows the solar panels in place. Clearly, the shadow will cover a significant portion of the solar panels on the roof for a period of time.
The next thing that needs to be done is a public records request to get the hourly solar power system output data over the past couple of years, it should be an easy matter then to note when the output drops significantly, and to line that up with sun angles and times.
On a daily basis, you can watch the real-time output page here:
Source: http://www.hillscty419piercepv.com/
Below the big dial gauge, if you choose “select gauge” and the “Interval 2-hour Avgs.” you’ll get a bar graph plot of solar output by hour, though there is no facility for getting anything but today’s data. From my observations, it seems that at this time of year, we get a bigger drop-off in production in the late afternoon than we should, which should be almost symmetrical with the buildup in the morning towards peak insolation. The afternoon production seems to have a larger gap.
It will be interesting to see what the public records request for the hourly solar power output data brings.
Full disclosure: I have a solar power system on my own home.
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It’s Floriduh – what’s not to understand?
Is that really necessary? So, you must come from a place where you’re so damn smart you can just pass judgement on millions of people.
http://www.clrsearch.com/Miami-Demographics/FL/Education-Level-and-Enrollment-Statistics?compare=Seattle%2C+WA
Would you like to tell that to the scientists, engineers and technicians at NASA Spaceflight or Boeing or Lockheed Martin or SpaceX or how about the ladies and gentlemen of the 45th Space Wing at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station? How about all those dummies at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory or the UF Veterinary College in Gainesville? Would you like to go up against the folks doing research at all those air and military bases that you can’t get near without getting arrested?
Now let us knop where you live so that we can pick the lower class, lower income areas run into the ground by Democrats and liberal Republicans to see how they stack up against Miami/Dade… ’cause you don’t want to go up against my hick rural neighbors… whose offices are on the Space Coast.
That would be know not knop… I type fast when I’m annoyed.
And, some people actually believe paving the roads with solar panels would pay off. No shade problem there, among many other…/sarc
Have installed solar panels for remote stock tanks and they work well and are economical considering the alternatives. We average 270 days of sunshine. Looked into it for irrigation and the costs are prohibitive due to the high wattage requriements of the pumps on that particular job and the resultant solar array required. And this was compared to a system costing $50,000 per year for power from the utility company supplying the area! Until someone comes up with better more economical systems, solar is strictly a special situation solution.
If Obama gets his way, no coal fired plants. We will all be in that special situation.
Better to stoke up your wood stove if you have one, if you have wood available, if you have a generator for everything else, if you can get fuel for the generator. That’s my plan. The way I see it, the sooner people start freezing in the dark the sooner we will be rid of the imbeciles running things in DC.
Seems like a hell of a price for the installation. I guess those putting in bids have to allow for a few backhanders to secure the contract.
Looking at the flexible nature of the panels it is probably thin-film which has about half the conversion efficiency of poly- or mono-crystalline.
Maybe someone in the administration just ordered “solar” and got delivered thin-film instead of crystal silicon.
Tilt would not make much difference here. You still only have the cosine of the flat area available. You could economise a bit of silicon but you won’t get any more power out of the same surface area. Worse you will end up shading in winter and could get less.
One thing that does not look good is mounting flat on what looks like black rubber mats. Those unventilated panels will be getting damned hot. Likely 80-100 deg C !!
Efficiency gets quite a hit with temperature. 4-5% per 10 deg C.
The installer will have economised by not having anything more complicated that dropping a few mats but that could be a bit hit on the production.
Two words: Government. Boondoggle.
Synonymous.
We have to remember that the whole purpose of subsidies was to encourage development of cost-competitive solar energy systems. The sun-to-power was supposed to become equal to coal/oil power, at which point the socially desired choice could be made easily and without additional cost to society. I say “we”, but by that I mean all of us, including the eco-greens.
The situation is that cost-competitive solar energy technologies have not developed. The costs have gone down for the panels by (I understand) outsourcing their manufacture to China where labour, energy and associated (regulatory?) costs are lower than in the United States or Europe. Labour costs, not technological improvement, dropped costs. Big difference.
The eco-green have, again, changed the goalposts. The subsidy issue is now socio-political-ideological: coal/oil/nuclear energy is not just carbon-rich, it is BAD. So paying extra for good renewable energy is desirable. We pay more for recycling for this reason, though we do save some money and difficulties with landfilling or dumping at sea.
Cost competitiveness is what we were sold renewables on, but really it was a non-issue. The Birkenstocked eco-green has enough excess cash that energy costs aren’t as important as the feeling that they are morally upstanding and “saving the planet”. Morally upstanding and saving the planet are good things, BTW, but we should be calling a spade a spade when we do something, not what is going on in the eco-green movement.
Here are a couple of free programs for sun and shadow calculations.
http://www.suncalc.net
http://www.findmyshadow.com
“I think the government dufuses and the solar company missed the shading from the nearby tall building…”
————
They prolly knew – they just didn’t care. They were getting paid to put up a solar array – so what if it was inefficient.
The outcome doesn’t matter, they were on a holy mission. Now they are holy too and will most likely get lots more such govt jobs.
Florida might be a bit different from other places. AC demand creates very high electric use in the summer months, winter heating load is almost nonexistent. Also May through September, most days see heavy cumulus or cumulonimbus cloud buildup, generally sometime after 13:00. Mornings are generally clear.
Ironically the first image shown above appears to have been taken from the Hillsborough County Center Building that is the source of the problem.
I think they may have a problem with their monitoring system.
Over the last hour it was averaging about 120 kW and then it just “lost” 14kWh on the counter !
I’ve yet to see an solar panel EMITTING sunlight so I guess there must a screw up somewhere in the real-time monitoring system
If they are not even counting the watts correctly I’m not surprised the output is lower than expected. I’ll keep an eye on it and see whether it happens again.
At least this project appears to provide some data so its efficiency can be determined. Did you ever notice that all those stadium projects and similar projects advertise in advance what the project will generate, but never report generating data after installation.
yep, today’s production total has been ramping up and down and just got back to 425 kWh where it was at 12:48 ( half an hour ago ).
Looks like someone is stealing power from the courthouse !
There’s also the little matter of a roof covered in electrical equipment if you’re a fire fighter on it. Water you’re pumping and electric generating equipment that can’t be turned off in an emergency, like a fire, are just too lethal.
Get the people out and let it burn down.
Pointman
Hey this is getting good. In the last 5 mins it’s just produced 90 kWh !!!
Whoever’s been syphoning off the power knows they’ve been rumbled and they’ve just put it all back. It must be a WUWT reader 😉
It appears the taxpayers are truly left holding the bag. Shades of Solyndra on a county political scale. EcoSolar filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy on 12/07/2011. The case was Florida Middle Bankruptcy Court Docket 8: 11-bk-22419. Safest haven given the gap between contract performance and results.
From article:
Ah Come On Now! They hid in plain sight their announcement it’s all a big scam right in that ugly address name!
And the only thing I’m finding on that “site” is a Flash object in a frame, source is http://www.dmssvr.com/dmsmon/mon/hillsboroughch__1834/. Why not just use that address? Obviously they were clearly hinting it’s all a scam.
Oh great, the “monitoring” is a sham. Their clock shows my system time, the minutes tick over simultaneously. That does not match the minute tick on my cell phone, an accurate time standard.
It’s showing the “System Output” tachometer needle moving, the odometers increment at not quite a second intervals. But Network Traffic shows only a brief pulse every minute. It’s just faked-up window dressing, not reality.
419 indeed. “The forces of General Big Oil make us seek refugee with UN US help. You send us 1.2 mil USD we send you 60 big 1’s every annual for life. This backed by Obama, he give us your email to contact.”
What’s the significance of 419?
419
“Their clock shows my system time” Thier clock shows EDT (whateverthatis), I’m on BST – 7hrs
later. I would guess your cellphone is free-running until you make a call.
I just set my system clock three minutes ahead for a test, the “monitor” clock jumped three minutes. It’s showing my system’s time.
My cell phone is continuously pinging towers to check signal strength, that’s when it can get the time signal. My cell phone is not going to “free run” more than a half minute difference between an 11:29 AM Eastern Daylight Time robo-call and about 1:30 PM EDT when I had checked it.
The “monitor” clock is bogus and not tied to the actual monitoring system.
My appologies, Kadaka – I just moved Florida into the mid-atlantic!
Just did a similar check ( see below ) the flash gadget is deriving time from the PC clock not the server.
Most of the massive solar projects even solar farms fail to produce the stated design capacity. Clouds, grid requirements, and age all tend to reduce total output and utilization. Solar technology is just not economically and reliable feasible with our current PV and mirror furnace designs.
Just ask how much tax credits, depreciation deductions, and then add in some very high rates paid by utilities which again raise our electricity bills – if all the subsidies at every level were included in the cost per KWH it would exceed $ .50 per KWH try that on your total use and see $ 400 to $ 800 per month bills.
Now this does not even include the useful life of solar which is between 20 and 30 years whereas Nuclear, Gas turbine can last 50 + years providing 24/7/365 base load power – this capacity is required as solar and wind are not always available.
I took a look at the Hillsborough County Courthouse locale via Google Earth It is around noon in the overhead view. That building to the southwest is around 26 stories tall and casts a looooooong shadow. I’d guess it blanks out about a third of the collectors in the PM hours. I will further guess that they installed the solar panels flat to make them less vulnerable to hurricane force winds.
@A-Watts
I’d be interested to hear if you are still happy with your installation at home.
Just noticed that the real time is showing “mostly cloudy”. Now I know that thin film loses less under cloud than crystalline silicon but 72% under cloud? Odd. How often is that updated? Maybe it is pulled of a local weather service in the morning.
Anthony, do you have some reliable weather info for that site for the last couple of hours?
Here is the solar output for the last two hours.
http://climategrog.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/tampa.png
Not sure what this system is measuring but it is not the output of the solar installation.
Firstly there is no way the accumulated output could go backwards ( twice ) nor is it possible for it to have put on a spurt of 90 kWh in 5 minutes to catch up again. That would be 1.08 MW out of a boilerplate 196kW installation.
Either someone is rigging the data or the monitoring system has serious problems and can not be believed in the slightest.
It might be “going backwards” if the array is not generating enough power to offset use there? Say it had generated 425 kWh, then clouds come over or the array falls in the shade of the building, but the building continues to use power during that time that is greater than the production during that time. The net value would fall in that case.
Well in that case it is not measuring the output of the solar array, as I said.
Maybe this is supposed to be what they are feeding back into the grid, they are displaying this figure as a percentage of the 196kW boilerplate figure.
But then where did the 1.08 MW come from ?? This is supposed to be “Real Time Solar Monitoring” that system could never produce that, even for a second: it’s 5 times the boilerplate figure.
The measurements I logged show 195 kWh increase in exactly 2h , that’s about 75% which is fairly close to the speedo gadget. That means it is supposed to be the solar output and it can’t go to 1.08 MW however you look at it.
The numbers I logged are shown here:
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=1003
Another thing I’ve seen happen twice now is a Flash “pause” icon on the speedo for about five seconds then a rush on kWh counter that quickly spins up 6 or 7 kWh.
As KDK noted the clock gadget is not displaying server data but a time derived from the PC clock. It was synced to my clock like he had noted, I did an ntp update that shifted the system clock by -170s, the gadget is still in sync. It’s using the local clock.
I think a lot of this supposedly “real time” read out is fake and is programmed into the flash gadget that is preprogrammed in ActionScript. It reloads about every 15min ( note the AC kW output changes ).
That still leaves a problem. I saw 90kWh jump in two reading 5 mins apart. If the true data comes in every 15mins thats means 90*4=360kW
That’s 183% for 15m, in a system that is averaging <75%.
It still ends up looking rigged or undependable.
Somebody probably got an award or promotion for this. Everybody involved should have the costs deducted from their paychecks.
The worst part about solar is most installations will never recover the energy it took to produce and install it. Solar to often is like spending two dollars to save one people do similar thing all the time like driving across town to save a dollar on a five pound bag of sugar yet they spent five dollars on gas, I don’t mind that so much after all you cannot fix stupid and after all it is their money, I do mind my electric and tax bill supporting solar/renewable stupidity. If the idea is to save energy let us do that but when you waste energy and money on solar/renewable project you are doing no one any good, ditto for recycling, ditto for reusable bags.
Basically you are saying it is a battery that returns 50% of the power used to charge it, and on top of that, you have to put it in the sun to get any back at all.
Lately enviros are claiming the return on power invested in a solar panel is positive. I would like to know if this system can be used to prove it one way or the other. Considering the extruded aluminum frames around most panels, I doubt it.
Questions somebody should have asked first:
What is the unsubsidized cost for a solar installation? Most of these project just shift the costs on to somebody else.
What is the expected serviceable lifetime of the panels? These panels degrade over time and their output is reduced each year?
How many years before their is an actual ROI? (A lot of factors here, such as the local climate, and projecting future energy rates).
I is difficult to get all the numbers as they are divided among panel components makers, panel makers, federal, State and city rebates. Mandated use by utilities at very high prices for a number of years [some only 5 years] then there are accelerated depreciation deductions, direct and indirect tax credits.
Then there are gird upgrade charges that solar and wind require so like CO2 there is no way to actually prove the entire cost of the policy. California is littered with closed failed solar and wind projects most are not even 20 years old.
Well spotted!