Someone once asked: "if we stop solar energy from reaching the ground, by having it reach our solar panels, what will that do to the air, which is heated by solar energy reaching the ground?"

Has anybody stopped and tried to answer that?

 

Two words: Global Cooling!

The amount of area of land required to supply the majority of the worlds electricity is minute compared to the areas where sun would still fall. The area of land on the earth is minute compared to the area of water. Every time we put up a house or skyscraper we block the sun from reaching the ground. Clouds do it all the time, etc.

 

I owe you a lunch for setting up the perfect segue.

First lets consider a fact that no one has ever brought up in any solar powered discussion:

Q: why do Pennsylvania residents have 'heating costs'?
A: 'cuz most months out of the year not enuf sunlight falls to heat the area up to warm temps

The significance that statement presents is ENORMOUS. If the implications are not clear, read on. btw, I HAVE done the calculations to determine what we need to supply all energy from solar. It aint quite what they lead you to believe. (it IS doable, it just aint what they led you to believe)

Starting:

today, 11/14/2008 you decide: "the power company sucks. I hate them and want to smash their kittens. I am going solar."

So you fire up the PC and type in google and go searching for some commercially available solar panels.

Lets goto 'wholesalesolar.com'. the name seems to imply they might have something for sale.

'Lo and behold....

the Kyocera KD210GX-LP 210 watt solar panel

For $985 you get 210 watts, 7.9 amps at 26.6 volts. It is 2304 sq inches in size (this becomes VERY important later) - a square foot is 144 inches, so it is 16 square feet in size.

How many do you need? well, you likely have 200 amp service. 200amp service will run the stove, fridge, Wii, dryer and hot water heater as well as SOME electric heat (full electric heat in a full size house requires 400 amp service but I digress - lets have a little fantasy here) 200 amps times 240 volts = 48000 watts or 48 Kw.

Now these suckers are 26.6 volts DC and all your dryers and Wiis and heaters etc run on AC, so lets assume the govt is giving away free inverters (they aint)[*1 ] and lets assume inverters operate at 100% efficiency (they dont)[*2] so we can use appx a 9:1 conversion factor to get 240 volts, and roughly .8a from each. 48000 watts / 210 watts per panel = 229 panels.

How can I do this? there is a thing in 'tronics called the 'power factor' that measures power in (watts) vs Power out (watts). We are assuming that the magical inverter is 100% efficient - if gives us the increased voltage, and decreased amperage, to keep the wattage.

at any rate, hook this all up, get a sunny day and viola - you have available to you EXACTLY the same power you had from the power company that you now hate (with or without kittens)

did I mention that you require 3657 square feet to complete this installation? thats ok, its only an area 61ft by 61ft. Everyone has that in the backyard...

and the cost was only $225565 'cuz the govt handed out free inverters, and wires, and solar panel mounting things and the like...

Are we done?

wellllllll.....

We have this thing on earth called 'nighttime'. solar panels dont work well during nighttime - some argue they dont work at all but I digress....

Lets assume you live in an area of the US where daytime = nighttime hour wise (you dont, it dont exist)[*3] and lets assume that a solar panel is as efficient at dawn, or dusk, as it is at noon (it aint, not by a long shot - but hey its our fantasy)[*4]

this means that you would need, to suffer no hardship, twice as many solar panels, half to run the house, the other half to fill a battery. but the wife points out: "Honey, we aint got another $225565 in the checkbook"

We are going to pretend that it never rains or gets cloudy where you live.

Hmmm....how to fix this...ok....lets assume that you buy a battery that will save the juice in the off hours. Ok, given the wattage involved the battery will be the size of your basement - so lets put it in the basement. the govt is giving them away as well. and you can vent off the hydrogen produced to run your fuel cell car.

so lets do this instead - you swear to yourself that you will take on a little hardship - you will allocate your power usage during the day so that during peak hours you use no more than half the solar array capacity - the other half goes into the battery.

right off the bat you have made a concession. Is it a logical concession?

well the average house uses 800KwH/month[*5] (non-algore sized house) and recall, we are using MINIMAL electric heat. This is 27Kwh per day (on average) or a little over 1KW needed per hour. Since we have 48Kw of panels, and since they spread over 24 hours, this is 2Kw of capacity each hour. this overage just might be enuf to store in the battery to pick up slack times at night, or in dawn etc.

Until we have better profile data, lets assume this is a reasonable concession.

It might requrie a backup generator around christmas and thanksgiving when consumption is at a peak and generation are at a low....but ok.

Ok now lets repeat the exercise for the nation:

It becomes apparent that condo dwellers and city dwellers dont have 61x61 ft patches of unshaded ground and some live way up north and people in seattle and pittsburgh get rain etc etc.

Well lets figure some more....300M people in the US, 2.2 kids per mom and dad. That is about 72M homes in the US. not businesses or parks or streetlights or anything else that consumes power - homes.

Mebbe it makes sense to create a giant solar panel farm down south and pipe the juice to those up north using the existing grid? sounds like a winner to me, the conversion factor for the solar efficiency works out better. We start to approach a more reasonable fantasy land....

3657sq feet times 72M homes = (drum roll) 263,304,000,000 sq feet

wow thats a large number - lets convert that to something better, hmm, a mile is 5280ft so a square mile is 27,878,400 sq ft.

Reducing we find that we need 9,445 square miles. Still to large of a number? Ok, a landmass the size of Hew Hampshire is about the same. I never liked those snooty yankees much anyways, 'cept this area needs to be south, so lets carve off a piece of texas the size of New Hampshire, rename it to New hampshire, cover it in solar panels, and the place that was New Hampshire - Just rename it 'North texas'. I imagine they might look stupid all wearing cowboy hats up there but that is their problem.

Problem solved for the US homes.

Did I mention that the total cost will be $16,240,680,000,000? so much for bailing out Wall Street, Main Street or Detroit!

Did I mention that business and local usage (traffic lights, street lights, billboards etc) dwarf residential?

now in the above exercise I used no more math skills than any 8th grader has. I got usage and other data thru very verifiable web sources. I underestimate or outright ignored inefficiencies that exist. I presented a 'best case' scenario that CANNOT and WILL NOT ever exist.

suffice to say, I once went thru the calculations for the World, and came up with a best solution of 24 stations spaced '1 hour' around the solar equator (the nigh noon line drawn by the sun), each movable due to axis tilt and precession, and each installation aimable to get the most direct sunlight. Each was IIRC 54M square miles to cover ALL usage. And it assumed that no third world nations ever got electricity installed, let alone dryers and Wiis and hot water heaters etc - meaning no improvment in the lifestyle of most of the human population

so. Is solar power ever gonna cut it?





Notes from above:

[1:] If we assume that mass production is going to lower the cost of IFH's (inverters from heck) then lets set a reasonable target cost of $500 each.

[2:] Lets assume that the bestest and greatest of the technology that exists is used, we can get around 90% - inverter efficiency climbs as voltage ratio falls, perhaps its better to series 2-4 panels then parallel the groups into the inverter

[3:] There is a website that will give you the relative day/night ratio based on where you live and time of the year. This number is not a constant, but we will ignore the shortfall

[4:] You can look this up, but the average number of 'sunny' (read: full power hours) each day in the US is south of *6*, and this assumes that noon in Anchorage is the same sun strength as noon in Miami - it aint, but we will ignore the shortfall

[5:] the numbers here are a bit closer to reality and scarier

 

you could also just put the solar panels on top of the buildings and out in the desert....anyone care if the desert droped 5 or 10 degrees?

 

There are new technologies emerging that drastically reduce the cost of producing solar energy. If you'll notice, in my post I said nothing of solar panels. There are better ways to do it.

If it's such a bad idea, why are there solar power generators producing electricity right now?

Does a solar panel really 'cost' $1000.00. My guess is probably not.

I've done some figuring as well and for a relatively small purchase of $40,000.00 worth of panels at current prices, and our bulk rate of electricity price being about $0.13 per kWh. The thing is we use at least 1000 kWh per DAY so the space requirement makes it not really feasible, my point it this; with a 25 year usefulness of a solar panel, at those price points, we would just break even after 25 years of service of the panels. Is the price of electricity going to stay where it's at for the next 25 years? Is the price of solar PV panels going to stay the same for the next 25 years?

Solar panels can be put on the roofs and sides of buildings that are already blocking the light from hitting the ground. There are technologies that have potential for the paint on your walls to produce electricity. There are solar steam generating power stations producing electricity right now.

Most people sleep at night and don't use a whole lot of electricity while sleeping but for the amounts that is used, conventional generation could still be used to fill in the gaps when the sun aint shining.

 

Trickle-down effect...right now, you're seeing the results of the high oil prices over the summer. Glad I don't need an oil change right now, most oil has gone up at least $3 a gallon.

 

here is So cali at our prices it takes about 9 years to break even....and what we can do is durring the day we sell back our extra power we dont use from the solar panels to the electric co., your meter will turn backwards, and some times it turns back faster then it turns forward.....then at night you just buy back some of your power that you sold them durning the day....and for a typical home here it is about $60K after the government helps you out some. after you put the system in your bills normaly end up being for one year what you were paying every month, so they are 1/12 of what they were.

 

I dunno, what does it say here?

 

And buying the juice back from the power company at night during periods of much lower usage costs less due to adjustments in the power factor. The power companies around here could use every little bit they can get since building new infrastructure is an expensive and time consuming process.

Think of all the gadgets and electronic devices we have now - cell phones, PDA's, IPods and so forth that could very easily be charged up using that little bit of juice from a small solar panel. All those little transformers burn a lot of electricity when you add them all up.

I'm in the process of planning a system now that will heat my garage. It will run me about two grand with no operating costs, no permits and no lost space as opposed to the other systems that would cost me several times that. The heat won't be 100% of what I need but on those sunny winter days I should be able to work out there without running the propane heater.

One day the little windmill will go up on the roof, too.....

 

You hit the nail right on the head, I was told by a oil man (Owner of Guthrie Oil out here in West Texas), and he laughed when someone said "its the chinese's fault because of how much oil they are starting to buy" He told me that American speculators buy more oil on speculation than the whole of Asia put together.

So, my theory is with this recent fall in the stockmarket, everyone who had bookoo's of money invested in oil, are now lookin at their empty pockets, thus no one really wants to invest in oil (for now anyway), but I know (sadly) that people are gonna start lookin at oil real soon as a way to buy cheap and sell high in a year or two.

 

Right. Price for a single panel is moot here. I seriously doubt that a government or even a small commercial venture would pay retail and buy PV panels one at a time.

 

But what you're saying is demand. Stock and futures follow the laws of supply and demand as well. If more people want to buy energy futures than the price goes up.

 

I guess this just shows how stupid people are, people invest in energy to make a buck, but during the meanwhile, they are paying higher energy costs because the price is goin up, so even tho it looks like they made money off of energy speculation, they actually are loosing money.

 

Exactly, kinda like investing in the company you work for then demanding profits and wages, forcing the company to get their product manufactured cheaper overseas and losing your job...

 

I think its much more viable to use wind power, over solar power.

If you google search Jay Leno's garage, he has a cool windmill to produce electricity there.

I hope to put a couple up to power my home and shop sometime.