Too bad a major political party has chosen to align itself against solar energy for temporary political gain.

But Solyndra!!

ghare: And yet, in every energy thread, some nitwitted, booger-eating moron GOP shill will pop up with their 1970's information telling us solar is not cost-effective.

/disinformation never dies on the internet

Booger-eating? Great insult, poopy-head.

You see, solar energy is bad because it's not in the Bible. If God had wanted us to have solar panels, he'd have sent them down the Temple Mount with Moses instead of those silly 15 ten commandments.

dittybopper: I was always under the impression that it wasn't so much cost of the panels that was the big stumbling block, but that outside of the Southwest, the average insolation isn't actually enough to keep up with electrical demand, especially in areas that experience limited daylight and snow in the winter.

/Would love to live completely off the grid.
//I could do it. My wife and son? Not so much.

They're popping up all over the place in NYC. It doesn't completely replace regular power, but it certainly helps. I believe there is even a scheme where you can sell excess back to the power companies on sunny days.

The National Renewable Energy Lab, or NREL, the DOE office responsible for the research, and a corporate partner AOS Inc. are now working to bring this technology to scale.

The National Renewable Energy Lab? Where have I heard about them in the news lately?

Oh Yeah: 'Green jobs' farm in Colorado sheds jobs after receiving $200M in stimulus funds (new window) - note the headline makes it seem like another failed loan.

President Barack Obama's "green jobs" initiatives suffered another major blow late Monday, as the nonprofit National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado, announced a plan to lay off roughly 10 percent of its staff...

NREL spokesman Bob Noun blames Congress for the organization's failures...

Oliver also suggested that the NREL layoffs may indicate another failure of the Obama administration's "green jobs" agenda.

The government funded research lab, which is cutting staff because of budget concerns resulting from Republicans in congress, is blaming congress for its 'failures' (where 'failure' is actually reduced funding from Republicans).

Perlmutter Hits Back At GOP's Bizarro NREL Spin (new window)
It's a bit of a whiplash to see Republicans, who have been trying to cut NREL's budget for years (witness Doug Lamborn's recent ill-fated attempt), to now place blame on NREL, and by extension the Obama administration, for Republicans getting their way enough to force these job cuts. We assume that the Solyndra bankruptcy stuff has emboldened them some way: after all, even Lamborn blinked when the damage was represented to him in terms of job losses.

I think it's cute that subby believed the issue was really about the cost of making the cells.

Freakin' amateurs...

Raharu: ghare: And yet, in every energy thread, some nitwitted, booger-eating moron GOP shill will pop up with their 1970's information telling us solar is not cost-effective.

/disinformation never dies on the internet

Hey, Shills got to make a living too man!

Shilling for the shillings.

Cool. Make them cheap enough that they replace shingles.

dittybopper: I was always under the impression that it wasn't so much cost of the panels that was the big stumbling block, but that outside of the Southwest, the average insolation isn't actually enough to keep up with electrical demand, especially in areas that experience limited daylight and snow in the winter.

/Would love to live completely off the grid.
//I could do it. My wife and son? Not so much.

They're using it all over the place in Germany with great success, and they get far less sunlight than the SW US.

Serious question:

What are the gains from a photovoltic cell vs a regular steam turbine driven by steam made from a parabolic mirror?

I'm not in college and I'm not doing research at 10 PM on Samhain, so just tell me one's better and I'll believe you.

TheWizard: dittybopper: I was always under the impression that it wasn't so much cost of the panels that was the big stumbling block, but that outside of the Southwest, the average insolation isn't actually enough to keep up with electrical demand, especially in areas that experience limited daylight and snow in the winter.

/Would love to live completely off the grid.
//I could do it. My wife and son? Not so much.

I too have failed in that battle. Not the off the grid part, the convincing the wife part.

I've secretly been snowballing our debt payments, keeping our 'expendable' income the same while rolling each payment for an eliminated debt over to the next.

Result: 0 net in our checking account at the end of each month gives me the justification to eliminate another expense. Last month the AT&T text plan was blocked. $30. This month, it's excess entertainment fees. $30.

Each goes to killing a bill.

Should be debt free except for her student loans in January. And her loans are thankfully under the national avg, so I'm not worried about that.


Then comes the challenge. Convincing her that a 1500sq ft house is perfectly fine to live in. The sad part is we used to have a 1600sq ft house and didn't use all of it. We even rented a room!

But the solar option? We are looking to move back north. Our renewable energy option there is to burn sawdust from a lumber mill or just cut and cure our own.

In my dream world Id get a house near a raised creek and run a water wheel generator. In the real world the EPA or DEC would arrest me for illegally disturbing minnows.

You're actually living your life as though you were the republican party... amazing.

dittybopper: I was always under the impression that it wasn't so much cost of the panels that was the big stumbling block, but that outside of the Southwest, the average insolation isn't actually enough to keep up with electrical demand, especially in areas that experience limited daylight and snow in the winter.

There's plenty of solar energy out there to keep up with demand. Let's start with the residential case. I am telling you that there will be math:



That's how much energy is dumped on the ground by the sun. It's seasonally averaged, includes weather, snow on the roofs, etc.

Let's be pessimistic and assume you live in one of the northern areas of the US, somewhere in the green like Buffalo. There, you're only getting an average of 4 kWh/day on each square meter, or 1460 kWh/m² every year.

Efficiency: Modern modules convert ~20% of incoming light energy to electricity. You can quibble about inverter losses, storage issues, etc., so let's call it 18%. That means you're getting only 263 kWh/m² of electricity.

Let's assume this graph from wikipedia is about right, and households in the most demanding states (rural, low-density, cold, poor) need 80 million BTUs of electricity annually. That's equal to 23,445 kWh.

How big is the average roof? The average home is 2,700 square feet, and let's assume two floors, so 1,350 square feet of roof. The roof is usually slightly larger than the actual house footprint, but we're being pessimistic here so we'll ignore that.

1,350 ft² of roof is ~125 m². Using the numbers above:

125 m² * 263 kWh/m²/yr = 32,875 kWh of electricity produced, or 140% of the households needs.

Note that this uses conservative present-day efficiencies, poor climate, weather, snow, and all the other excuses. Most panels have a warranty to lose no more than 20% of their rated electrical output over 30 years, so even when your panels are old and ready for retirement, you're overproducing by 20%. Some houses may use more electricity than average, but that's going to correlate with larger houses, which means larger roofs and more electricity. I'm also not assuming that the houses will do more cost-effective things (like improving insulation) first to lower their energy needs. I'm assuming the owners are extremely lazy and just installing panels.

Hopefully, that's crystal clear. Even with pessimistic assumptions, off-the-shelf garden-variety panels, and no auxiliary power systems (like solar heating, which would take advantage of the 80% of sunlight you're throwing away on the panels), you're producing more electricity than you need.

It's a cost issue, and the cost has dropped by a factor of two in the last two years alone. Like every other technological innovation, costs will plummet as manufacturing scales up. Panels are being made with less and less silicon, other technologies are creeping in, the cost of framing/mounting goes down as the panel weight declines, etc.

But the supply question? There's plenty right now.