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I find that very hard to believe when my ex-boyfriend powers his entire house, including an air-conditioner, and an impressive server room with the solar panels on his roof. His power bills average 10.00 per month to be hooked to the grid after the utility buys his excess energy.
I have 3 neighbors with full solar arrays and I spoke with one of them- 90% power paid for. Helena avg sunshine is a smidge better than Sand Point, but not by much.
An average system in Sand Point should generate 5,088 kWh p/yr.
Helena, MT- 5,313. LasVegas- 7,036 and Charleston WV- 4,968.
Me thinks some people here don't bother to think before they post. How surprising.
And they contribute 0 watts to USA base load electricity demands. Get back to us when you figure that out.
Oh and BTW, the project in the OP is exactly why. It does count towards "installed" solar panels.. They just don't work.
What are you even talking about? Large scale solar sites produce about 40 billion kWh in 2015. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that an additional 19 billion kWh of electricity generation was from small-scale solar photovoltaic systems in 2016.
My previous home had solar and produced 75% of my electricity. Hey, it worked.
Power is metered. Plenty of utilities will allow you to put power back on the grid, and the return can be metered just as easily. Generally, the feed-in tariff (FIT) is priced to match production cost, not retail - in other words, if your local utility can produce a kWh for 2 cents and sell it for 7, they will pay 2. Which is perfectly fair, in my mind.
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And why or how could he have any bill if the power company buys his "excess" energy?
Solar will be highly effective during the day, not so much late at night. So there will be excess at times, lack at others. Fossil fuel's future role is to provide backup capacity for renewable. Of course, if people start adjusting their power consumption to match when they have cheap power, interesting things may happen to the requirement for backup power.
That being said, I'm not a fan of decentralized solar - 10 million small solar plants require too much maintenance for too little return. Like when wind was in its infancy and everyone had to have a wind turbine in the back yard. Much better to erect some whopping big central ones out of everybody's way.
Power is metered. Plenty of utilities will allow you to put power back on the grid, and the return can be metered just as easily. Generally, the feed-in tariff (FIT) is priced to match production cost, not retail - in other words, if your local utility can produce a kWh for 2 cents and sell it for 7, they will pay 2. Which is perfectly fair, in my mind.
Solar will be highly effective during the day, not so much late at night. So there will be excess at times, lack at others. Fossil fuel's future role is to provide backup capacity for renewable. Of course, if people start adjusting their power consumption to match when they have cheap power, interesting things may happen to the requirement for backup power.
That being said, I'm not a fan of decentralized solar - 10 million small solar plants require too much maintenance for too little return. Like when wind was in its infancy and everyone had to have a wind turbine in the back yard. Much better to erect some whopping big central ones out of everybody's way.
O.K., I'll admit it, I'm not that up-to-speed on this, and sounds pretty good, as long as you are not feeding everyone, like having your own and not worrying about anyone else....
Now, you missed a question, why or how should this be distributed to everyone? You say put a few whooping big central ones..but has that not been tried?
You want solar/wind/whatever....someone always going to complain......
Thousands of Golden Eagles have been killed because of wind farms......
And you are not answering the question of why solar is not just as good in the hills.....as the desert....which was my initial response....
O.K., I'll admit it, I'm not that up-to-speed on this, and sounds pretty good, as long as you are not feeding everyone, like having your own and not worrying about anyone else.
Oh, you're perfectly free to just take what you need and not sell the excess - in fact, a lot of utilities would much rather you did just that.
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Now, you missed a question, why or how should this be distributed to everyone? You say put a few whooping big central ones..but has that not been tried?
In Europe - and in my home country - it has. Offshore wind farms in the North Sea, out of sight and out of mind. Build them as big as you want. It's two areas of expertise coming together - Danes and Norwegians, though oil extraction, have decades of experience in building things that won't break in the North Sea, which isn't as easy as it may sound. Danes went a little crazy with wind turbines because the government made them tax-free to reduce dependcy on imported fossil fuel. Every farmer had one, and dozens of small turbine companies popped up. Most went bust, but the surviving companies build some damn fine wind turbines now. And the migrating birds have learned to fly around them.
The really, really clever bit: Electric cars means capacity for energy storage on the consumer level is skyrocketing. All those lovely kWh being generated at night when the wind blows and everyone's asleep are now being sucked up by recharging electric cars.
Scandinavian weather means solar isn't really a huge thing.
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You want solar/wind/whatever....someone always going to complain......
Very true. But coal mines and coal plants aren't exactly improving the landscape either.
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And you are not answering the question of why solar is not just as good in the hills.....as the desert....which was my initial response....
Outside my knowledge, apart from a random guess that there's probably more sun in the desert.
Must be bad panels or concept. The local storage place here in cloudy NJ produces WAY more than that on their roof.
Edit: read other stories. BAD concept and poor execution. Its simpler to put panels over parking lots and on big box/ factory roofs.
Microwave draws around 1200 watts. Not that serious. Roughly 10 amps.
Neither. It's a research project in its earliest infancy.
The purpose of the research is to learn if it is practical to use solar cells in pavement and implanted into structural materials for electrical generation without the need for the present racks and arrays. The easiest place to start, and the cheapest, was a parking lot. Vertical surfaces are harder for experiments, but they will follow.
Next to follow will be some streets, and then a stretch of highway.
If the cells can be developed to withstand the abuse when implanted into highways, streets, sidewalks, parking lots, etc. then it could be possible to power electric cars, for example, from the roadway they're on, with no need for charging stations.
Even better, an electric car could never need to be stopped to charge up at all. A small drag wire could pick up enough charge as the car goes down the road to keep the batteries charged, so future cars may never need fueling stations.
All the pavement that surrounds us could become a source of free power. Decentralized power, so if a power plant shuts down suddenly, millions of people wouldn't be left in the cold and dark. Part of the program is freedom from the grid.
The concept and the solar cell design are both brand new, and the cells have to be far tougher than any that have ever been made before.
The basic premise so far is; each cell can't make much power on its own because it cannot be sensitive and survivable at the same time, but miles of them could generate seriously major power.
The experimental cells could also be implanted into building construction concrete, brick, ceramic, glass, and other fascia materials, allowing buildings to be energy independent.
The reasons why Idaho was chosen for this experiment are twofold; we have a lot of relatively empty highways compared to the congested roads in other states, and the materials, along with all the concept work, is coming from the INL- the Idaho National Laboratory.
The INL is the nation's leading experimental lab. The INL is working alongside Idaho's new Advanced Technology Centers. There are presently 2 of these in the state, and there are plans for more to come.
Essentially, if they can make it work in Idaho, it can work anywhere in the nation. Idaho has extremes in climate, terrain, altitude, with a low population, and is the perfect test bed for a device that has to be durable easy. and reliable. If the cells work well here, they will work well everywhere.
Yea... it never hails or snows anywhere they're installing all those pretty PV solar panels. Hail makes them expensive roof art and snow, well snow covers them just like a blanket making them useless unless someone goes up on that roof and cleans the snow off. Darn those pesky details!
Easy enough to insure against hail damage. It's part of your homeowners insurance. Solar is most useful in the summer when demand is high. Snow really isn't a problem then.
What subsidies? Oh, that's right! They are subsidized by the rate payers of the company that owns them. People like me and the electricity rate paying people in the service territory of the electric utility I'm retired from. A company that owns a nuclear power electric generation plant.
Subsidies my rear!
You realize that nuclear, gas and coal all have substantial subsidies too? Or are you so naive that you think only solar is subsidized? Want to buy a bridge?
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