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Comment Re:Jack Thompson is already on the case (Score 1) 1719

by djh101010 (#42339461) Attached to: Adam Lanza Destroyed His Computer Before Rampage

62 mass shootings in 30 years 61 took place in gunfree zones an attempted mass shooting tok place this weekend in texas, (ignored by the media) a citizen stopped the crazy with 1 bullet from his legally carried gun. yeah...guns are the problem...

It's almost like, stay with me here, it's ALMOST like the criminals seek out places where they know they won't have someone shooting back at them. You'd think they'd see that "gun free zone" sign and stop, because, after all, it's posted and all. Weird.

Comment Re:"Grid Parity" ... on sunny days only (Score 1) 735

by djh101010 (#42292191) Attached to: Solar Panels For Every Home?
So you're OK with them charging $.25/hWh, but not with them paying it? Did you catch the point about time of use billing? You seem to have ignored that repeatedly. Anyway, I don't care for your attitude. Feel free to be all superior and stuff; I'll be over here building arrays with a 5 to 8 year payback. Assuming panel prices stay this high, and energy costs stay this low.

Comment Re:"Grid Parity" ... on sunny days only (Score 1) 735

by djh101010 (#42290265) Attached to: Solar Panels For Every Home?

Let me try to address some of your points. First, while it is true that solar panels are dark and absorb sunlight and they are angled to help snow slide off, that only works if it is a nice, dry, powdery snow. For those people that live in areas that get ice storms and heavy, sticky snow there are times that the snow won't just slide off. So while the GP is correct, I am not sure how many people it affects and for how long.

Snow-clearing is an area that has been given a great deal of engineering attention. Textured front surfaces of glass, to provide a golf-ball like effect, carefully beveled faceplates, that sort of thing. I'm not sure what kind of snow you're experienced with, but wet snow around here is slippier than dry snow. Snowdrifts could be a problem, I suppose if you mount your panels right on the ground, but I don't know of anyone who does that.

The next point is the concern over what will happen to the utilities. The problem with solar is that it is not reliable. Imagine this scenario. You have a city that, during peak consumption, requires 1000MW of generation to meet demand. Now, the inhabitants of that city want to be able to use their 1000MW peak no matter what the weather is like. (Aside: It can be argued that in the summer if it is cloudy then people will need less AC to cool their house and therefore demand will drop. However, in the winter, if it is cloudy then the demand for heating will increase. End Aside) Now, imagine that this city goes green and 50% of their peak power is produced by solar. Now, during peak hours the city only needs 500MW of production. The big question now is, what happens on cloudy days? If the residents don't have their own grid storage system, then they will rely on the utility to provide the full 1000MW. Thus the utility has to have the capacity to provide 1000MW of power, even though on sunny days it can only sell 500MW. This is expensive for the utility.

Sure, but no more expensive as the infrastructure that they'd need if there was no solar on their network. They have to design for the peak; sometimes, they'll need to supply that with no help.

Now lets take this analogy one step further. Imagine that the city is really into solar panels and they install 110% peak capacity. Now, during peak time the city is selling back to the utility company 100MW of power. The problem is, the utility has to buy it, but it doesn't need it. In addition, the utility still has to have the full 1000MW generation capacity for the days when the sun isn't shining.

Well, that's not how a grid works - it would just go out beyond that utility's area. I'm also not too worried about 110%, or even 50% of our capacity being supplied by Solar - we use an IMMENSE amount of electricity in this country. A kilowatt or three on every house roof would save people money and delay power plant upgrades and new installations, improve the whole carbon thing, and maybe even give people who spring for batteries some emergency backup power.

This is one of the big concern about large scale adoption of solar. If people decide to go fully solar then I think that they should have to go completely off the grid. The cost associated with the utility having such a large flux in demand would be astounding. For the few poor souls that didn't have solar panes for whatever reason, their electric bill would skyrocket as the utilities attempted to recover their operating costs.

The utility companies have those operating costs TODAY. They have to build for peak usage today. They have to balance their outputs to demand today. I'm not seeing where this makes anything worse - seems to me it makes things significantly better.

Comment Re:"Grid Parity" ... on sunny days only (Score 1) 735

by djh101010 (#42290061) Attached to: Solar Panels For Every Home?
Which is part of my point. If this artificial $2500 barrier to entry surcharge were removed by streamlining the regulations (like maybe, "if it's UL approved, you can self-install as long as you pass code inspection"), then people could buy as big or small of a system as they wanted without this huge upfront hit.

Comment Re:"Grid Parity" ... on sunny days only (Score 1) 735

by djh101010 (#42289917) Attached to: Solar Panels For Every Home?

Your installation cost for a residential system is extremely cheap !

Not especially. $4/watt installed is pretty much the going rate this quarter, in Wisconsin.

On average in the USA a 3kW system would be a $17000 investment [1]. Also your annual savings are quite incredible: with the average household cost of electricity in the USA at 11.72c per kWh [2],

I've already stated twice that the on-peak rate with WE Energies on a tier-2 time of use is $.25/KWh, and that the utility buys the power back at retail (and resells it at a premium to people who subscribe to green power). Your adversarial attitude is both misplaced, and puzzling. I have no reason to make this shit up, feel free to go look up WE Energies billing rates.

it would mean that your system produced around 13413 kWh [12x(163-32)/0.1172] over a year ! For a 3kW system this would mean that your magic installation as a capacity factor of 51% !!!! [13413/ (3 x 24 x 365)].

If your math wasn't based on an assumption based on the wrong cost per KWh. Lose the attitude, sparky, you're boring me, I'm trying to share facts, and you're just spouting insults.

So yes, I don't know if you're delusional but you have been most likely lying by forgetting to speak about the subsidies you received for the installation and feed-in tarif.

WTF is a "feed-in tarif"? The raw cost of the install (the bill from the electrician) was $12,000. This is for (10) 300W Helios 9T6 panels, a Fronius 3000W synchronous inverter, meter, pedastal, associated wiring, and installation. Tax rebate plus "Focus on Energy" subsidy brought the out of pocket expense down to $7,000. I don't know how much more specific I can be.

Oh and if you want to prove your case, please state your location and the supplier of your system...

What is far more annoying than your convenient omission of subsidies is all the idiots solar fanboys moderating you informative when they have absolutely no clue about the real cost of Solar PV energy....

[1] http://www.irena.org/DocumentDownloads/Publications/RE_Technologies_Cost_Analysis-SOLAR_PV.pdf [2] http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_5_03

So yeah, I can't speak to whatever idiot fanboi whatever this or that you complain about, but your use of emotionally charged namecalling in the face of simply stated facts that I have direct personal experience with, makes me not all that interested in trying to convince you of _anything_. So here you go - yeah, you're right man, it's all an illusion. Installed systems at $4/watt are impossible, and, there's no way it'll ever payback the investment. Burn more coal! Woo!

Comment Re:"Grid Parity" ... on sunny days only (Score 1) 735

by djh101010 (#42288489) Attached to: Solar Panels For Every Home?
You might want to look into the "Outback Power Flexpower" series. It has the charge controller to manage the battery bank, the MPPT inverter to optimize and invert the DC from the panels, instrumentation so you can manage and measure what it's doing, and of course the transfer switches and other anti-islanding components. They're about $3K. From there, it's just a matter of adding your panels and battery bank, both of which you can scale however you want to meet your needs. So, you program it to run the house off the panels during the day but use batteries to augment, and buy power if you have to. At night, it runs everything off of the grid and tops the batteries back up. Cost savings are dramatically better with this if your utility offers a "time of use" billing arrangement where you pay more for on-peak electricity (and they pay more for on-peak production).

I figure enough batteries to run my critical loads for 2 days without sun, is a good design goal. From there, the rest is all about investment vs. cost savings payback. But the Outback looks like a nice all-in-one solution.

This makes sense for the first 3000 watts. After that, I think something like the AC panels from Helios (250W each, with a networked microinverter on each) would be a good upgrade path from there. Instead of buying a new inverter every 3000 watts (with a big up front cost for that jump), then you can buy the 250W panels as you go, and scale as the money allows. Having individual panel inverters is also helpful if you have a partially shaded array; each panel makes the most of what it individually gets. Lather/Rinse/Repeat until you get to 20KW or whatever the upper limit of what your utility allows for a home power generation limit.

Comment Re:So much missing of the point. (Score 1) 735

by djh101010 (#42288251) Attached to: Solar Panels For Every Home?
I'm familiar with the requirements and installation processes. Maybe I'm oversimplifying it for purposes of this discussion, but, no, it's not a particularly complex install. Like the examples I've given, there's mechanical and electrical requirements and considerations. But, grounding a solar array isn't fundamentally different than grounding a satellite dish. Sure, there's DC wiring if you're not using AC panels, but again, nothing magic there.

Comment Re:"Grid Parity" ... on sunny days only (Score 1) 735

by djh101010 (#42288193) Attached to: Solar Panels For Every Home?
Wow, so much FUD all in once place.

It costs money to make power and large expensive facilities. You can supplement with wind and solar. Those certainly are worth it for the individual, but not for the group.

[citation needed]

Power generation must always consider the worst case. If the Fimbulwinter strikes for a month, covering everything with snow and wind turbines with ice, society will require power supplied by industrial grade facilities.

Solar panels are dark. They absorb sunlight well, and because they're mounted at an angle, self-clear snowfall well. The blocking and bypass diodes built into them optimize the output so the panels still output a high percentage of their rated power even if partially covered by snow.

People should install solar panels, yet someone must pay to maintain the huge infrastructure and facilities for when all else fails. A possible solution is that when a person with solar panels requires power from the grid, the rates shoot way up to help pay for having that power available instantaneously when they have a problem with their own.

So what I think you're saying here, help me if I missed your point, is that if I _stop_ using my solar panels, I should pay more for the power I buy from the utility? What about if I just turn my extra lights off and save energy that way? Should I also be penalized? How would the utility be able to tell?

This would discourage some people from installing solar panels, it would encourage others to become completely self-sufficient. In the long run this will prove the best solution; in the short run the power infra-structure must be maintained and paid for whether or not people use solar panels.

So your contention is that it's BAD for people to be able to supply some of their own power? You are aware, right, that the peak usage period for electricity coincides with when it's sunny? Seems to me, providing power on-peak, helps to use the capacity of the energy grid more efficiently.

Solar panels should not be allowed to put power to the grid. It will cost everybody more in the long run, but people will insist on this and so those costs will just get added to the bills. The costs won't be a sudden hit, just slow and incremental. By the time people realize the cost, a loud vocal minority with a vested interest in selling power from their solar cells to the grid will be able to beat off attacks. That may already be the case.

So you want to penalize people who invest their own money to eventually payback their investment, who are producing energy to supplement the existing infrastructure, and whose power is produced more cleanly than burning hydrocarbons? Can you help me understand your motivations and where you're coming from? Because it's puzzling that you'd want to discourage that sort of thing.

Comment Re:"Grid Parity" ... on sunny days only (Score 1) 735

by djh101010 (#42287995) Attached to: Solar Panels For Every Home?
The panels are on the barn because that's the tallest, clearest roof I had to work with. They feed the panels on "our" side of the meters. The barn itself rarely has any loads running.

So, I use a device called an eGauge (egauge.net) to analyze my load and production. The highest power draw I've ever seen from my house, is 10KW, and that's when the water heater, central air, washer, dryer, and well pump are all running. During the day when nobody is home and it's just parasitic loads and refrigerators, it's almost always under 500 watts.

Even 1000 watts per house, would supply a surplus during the day for most houses most of the time. If we didn't have to jump through the extra hoops to do this, I could install a 1000 watt array in 2 hours and for a total cost of $3K or so. But with the extra overhead, it's closer to 5 or 6K, and not worth doing. It's the "$2.5K worth of paperwork to get started" that creates an artificial barrier to access, which needs to go.

Panels keep dropping. They're around $1.25 a watt retail now, down from 4 times that a few years ago. We're at the point where the rails you mount the panels to, are almost as expensive as the panels themselves. So that cost can only go down so far. Getting rid of this unnecessary $2500 surcharge, would go a long way to saving people money every month. It's working well for my folks, next summer we're going to double the size of the array, and they'll get a check back most months (probably all but july/august, for central air reasons).

Comment Re:"Grid Parity" ... on sunny days only (Score 2) 735

by djh101010 (#42287879) Attached to: Solar Panels For Every Home?
The house has been on the grid for 60 years or so, I suppose, so no new cost there. Wisconsin is a "net-metering" state, where the utility pays retail for the surplus power fed back to the grid. (which, they then sell at a profit to people who subscribe to buy "green energy" from them). Depending on the installation, you either have 2 meters as they do, or you can have 1 meter that runs either forwards or backwards depending on the sun and the load.

Last month's bill, their "on peak" cost was $1. Off peak was $20, and there was about $12 worth of facilities and surcharges. By using the electricity when it's cheap, on loads that can be delayed (water heater, battery bank charger if you go that way), you can change the cost dramatically.

Comment Re:"Grid Parity" ... on sunny days only (Score 1) 735

by djh101010 (#42287817) Attached to: Solar Panels For Every Home?
We refitted the house to pass an EnergyStar audit before we put the panels up. No point buying panels before you fix the inherent wastes of power. So, air infiltration, insulation, lighting, furnace, etc first, and then buy panels. No point buying panels to feed inefficient loads, fix that first. So, I don't know what assumptions you were using for your pvwatts calculation, but, at $.25/KWh, and with a carefully planned time-of-use billing schedule, that's the savings they got. Sorry if my real world experience differs from your spreadsheet. I can only report what is working for us. Granted, it's only based on 3 months worth of data, but the months were Sept/Oct/Nov, so they're a pretty good average, insolation and weather-wise.

Comment So much missing of the point. (Score 1) 735

by djh101010 (#42287565) Attached to: Solar Panels For Every Home?
The article is making a good point that most responses are missing. Right now, any solar installation requires going through permits, inspections, and utility testing, in order to turn it on. This adds, on average, $2500 per installation, just in overhead. This creates an artificial barrier to entry into the technology.

The panels are UL listed. The inverters are UL listed. The Charge controllers, if you want to be able to run off-grid, are UL listed. The UL listing insures the anti-islanding technology is in place and effective (which is what prevents your panels from frying a lineman trying to fix lines that are supposed to be de-energized). Other than making sure the installation follows local code regulations, there is no reason for this overhead.

In many states, Wisconsin included, the utilities are required to buy excess power back from homeowners who produce a surplus. They are NOT required to make it easy, or convenient. So, WE Energies, for example, has ONE GUY in the whole corner of the state they service, to inspect and approve new solar installations. And he works 4 days a week. It takes weeks at best to get him on-site, after getting your plans reviewed and approved by the utility.

This is silly. If you're using all approved technologies, there's no good reason for the added delay and cost. As far as the installation - if you can mount a satellite dish or garage door opener, you can handle solar panels.

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