Where does your electricity come from?
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I have no idea (Score:5, Informative)
I have no idea, and anyone "on the grid" who claims to know is fooling themselves.
There is both a nuclear power plant and a windmill farm within reasonable driving distance of my house. This being Illinois, I assume there are coal-fired generating plants as well.
How am I to know where ComEd got the electrons they sent down my wires?
It's all a big interconnected system. Even if you're paying some special "wind power" or "solar power" rate to supposedly get "green" energy you don't know where it really came from.
Re:I have no idea (Score:3, Informative)
Except utilities sell electricity to each other.
You know that, if it was generated by Austin Energy, you got that breakdown. You don't actually know.
0 kWh net grid consumption over the last 12 months (Score:5, Informative)
I'm in Northern Virginia, and I love my solar photovoltaic system (installed awesomely by Solar Odyssey [solarodysseyinc.com]). And if the car companies ever make a decent plug-in hybrid car, it'll only take eight more panels to keep that fully charged - and the cost of eight solar panels would pay back in saved gas in less than two years.
Anyone who says "alternative energy isn't ready" is still living in the 20th century.
-brian
Solar for the win! (Score:5, Informative)
I installed 48 solar panels on my house which generates around 12,000 kW per year. The installation costs were $65,000 in 2003, or $31,500 after all the direct and indirect rebates. Based on my annual savings, I calculated (in 2003) that I would recoup the cost by the end of 2013, but as electricity costs have risen since that I time I think I'm pretty close to having saved all the installation costs already.
I do use the local utility company for power during non-daylight hours, but that's just a matter of convenience. I could have installed batteries at the cost of $5,000 - but why bother when the utility company can act as my battery? They pay me for excess electricity that is generated during the day, and I pay them for electricity used during the night. My annual bill in December 2011 was $(-133) - that's a $133 check from the utility company.
As an added advantage, we leave the house thermostat at the same temperature settings all year - a low of 72 degrees and a high of 76 degrees, so we are always comfortable at home.
Some people say that solar isn't ready for prime time, and never will be. That's just crap.
Re:Solar for the win! (Score:4, Informative)
The Great State of California paid $29,000 and tax rebates paid the rest. But remember, this was 2003. A neighbor installed a very similar installation last year at a total cost of $26,000. The rebates these days are quite minor - I'm not certain if there are any at all.
Re:I have no idea (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I have no idea (Score:5, Informative)
If you live in Germany (as I do), you'd be surprised to learn that almost 100% of your "regenerative power sources" that you pay for are Norwegian dams.
I thought my money would go to solar panels, windmills and biomass power plants in our neighborhood.
You can take at look at the website of your electricity provider (EWS, Greenpeace energy, whatever,..) and get more info about it.
Re:Solar _and_ wind (Score:4, Informative)
I'll tell you where else he doesn't live: the southwest. Here in Arizona, solar power is indeed a pretty decent option, thanks to 300+ days of sunlight a year, and a LOT of it too (way too much in the summer!). However, wind power is non-existent. There's no significant wind here in the desert (we get a big dust storm now and then, but nothing constant; most of the time it's pretty still). You usually need to go to the coasts to have a decent, constant supply of wind for driving wind turbines.
The lesson here is that using renewable power sources is extremely dependent on geography, probably far more so than traditional sources (though those frequently need to be located next to a river).
Re:I have no idea (Score:4, Informative)
OK, here's what I do. I pay about 8 per kilowatt hour for my electricity. It doesn't matter where it comes from. I also pay 1.5 per kilowatt hour so that the electric company buys a kilowatt hour of renewable energy. It doesn't have to be bought at the same time as I use it, just some time. Specifically excluded from the program are certain types of renewable energy (like large hydroelectric dams) and ones that have been around for a long time - they are instead required to buy wind and solar from generation sites that first started commercial operation after 1996.
The point is that this then creates a market for the renewable energy, and encourages more to be built, because customers are willing to pay a premium for it (and thus the electric company will pay a premium for it too, if they have to). The more people that sign up, the more renewable energy they have to buy. (Granted, the infrastructure does not yet exist for them to have 100% of customers on green power - but there's plenty of people that will never pay a penny more than they absolutely have to.)
My local power company is already fairly green; over 40% of the energy they buy is some sort of renewable energy. (About 30% is from an unknown source, and the other 30% is coal and natural gas.) But by paying a little extra (on average, about $3 per month), it means they buy an extra 0.0000005% (yes, I checked) of their total power from a known renewable source. Every year, they are legally required to tell me what I paid for (last year, 95% wind and 5% solar), and where it came from. Sucker tax this ain't.
Re:Solar _and_ wind (Score:4, Informative)
So you don't get your power from a common grid that switches to whatever source it feels like? Looks like the only environmental effect it is to make you feel good about yourself. Elsewhere (Norway), practically all our electric energy production is hydroelectric and clean, but we export some of it to elsewhere (Germany), which then replaces some of their dirtier coal. Of course, that also means we import their dirty electricity when needed, which is more often now as we export a lot and the dams have limited capacity and depend on seasonal precipitation, snow melting, etc., but overall it should be better for the environment than hogging all the hydroelectric for our own use.
HOWEVER, due to the seasonal variation in hydroelectric and corporations making as much money on import as on export, the energy companies sell off their cheap, clean electricity in the autumn so that they need to import expensive, dirty electricity during winter, when people really need it, driving the price up.
Just an example of the free market being friendly to the environment while being hostile to the consumer.
Re:Solar _and_ wind (Score:5, Informative)
Actually one thing worth noting is that effective solar installations are easier to do in temperate areas than in the tropics. North or south of the tropics you can position your panels facing south or north (respectively, towards the sun) and that'll work well. In the tropics you have the problem that some of the year the sun is in the southern sky, and sometimes it in the north...
It's actually not worth noting since the incident angle changes by the same amount regardless of your distance from the equator. Someone using a panel who is at 45 degrees north latitude points them south at an angle of around 45 degrees but half the year that angle is too shallow, the other half it is too steep (exactly as if you were at 0 deg N.)