Tag Archives: solar

Solar Power for a Month

Solar roof
A writer for a tech magazine converted his house to solar last month and he has written about his project and his amazingly low power bill. Here’s the highlights from converting his home to solar:

-The entire array consists of 27 panels. Each panel has a peak rating of 225W (nominal rating 207W). Nine panels face south, 18 face west. Total peak output of the array at the panel is 6.1KW.

-It’s summer here in California, so it’s the peak season for solar power generation.

-On the other hand, you may have read about all the fires that have been burning in Northern California. I’ve had to go up about once a week to rinse the ash off the panels.

-I have a minor tree problem. After about 7:30PM, a large tree several hundred yards away effectively blocks the sun. Since it’s late in the day, it’s well past the peak generating time, but it’s still worth noting.

Additionally, I’ve received my first electric bill since the installation, although it’s only for 19 days, not the usual 29 or 30.

So what was my electricity bill for 19 days?

$11.34

Use Solar Power During the Night

Storing energy in batteries is expensive, not the best thing to the environment, and inefficient when used on a large scale. The inability to store solar energy over the long-term has been a problem for hte adoption of solar power generation. That is, until now. THe New York Times is reporting on some companies that have found ways to store the energy solar power plants use in a giant thermos.

At Black & Veatch, a builder of power plants, Larry Stoddard, the manager of renewable energy consulting, said that with a molten salt design, “your turbine is totally buffered from the vagaries of the sun.” By contrast, “if I’ve got a 50 megawatt photovoltaic plant, covering 300 acres or so, and a large cloud comes over, I lose 50 megawatts in something like 100 to 120 seconds,” he said, adding, “That strikes fear into the hearts of utility dispatchers.”

Thermal storage using molten salt can work in a system like Ausra’s, with miles of piping, but if the salt is spread out through a serpentine pipe, rather than held in a heavily insulated tank, it has to be kept warm at night so it does not solidify, among other complications.

A tower design could also allow for operation at higher latitudes or places with less sun. Designers could simply put in bigger fields of mirrors, proponents say. A small start-up, eSolar, is pursuing that design, backed by Google, which has announced a program to try to make renewable electricity for less than the price of coal-fired power

Britain Loves the Sun

Soon in Britain people will be able to operate their own solar power generators and wind farms. This is a great way to lower one’s carbon footprint while saving money!

From April 6, all homeowners in Britain will be free to install microgeneration equipment like solar panels without getting planning permission for them, as the government tries to cut climate warming gases emitted from coal and gas fired power plants in order to supply electricity.
“We want to make it easier to help people reduce their carbon footprint. Technology like solar panels can make a real difference, but homeowners can be put off by the time and expense of getting planning permission,” planning minister Caroline Flint said.

Nanosolar Producing Cheap Solar Energy

A company in California, Nanosolar, as produced solar chips that generate electricity at $0.90 per watt. If sales go well this is a massive breakthrough for solar energy as this a milestone in solar electricity.

After five years of product development – including aggressively pipelined science, research and development, manufacturing process development, product testing, manufacturing engineering and tool development, and factory construction – we now have shipped first product and received our first check of product revenue.

… Today we are announcing that we have begun shipping panels for freefield deployment in Eastern Germany and that the first Megawatt of our panels will go into a power plant installation there.

As far as the first three of our commercial panels are concerned:

Panel #1 will remain at Nanosolar for exhibit.

Panel #2 can be purchased by you in an auction on eBay starting today.

Panel #3 has been donated to the Tech Museum in San Jose.

Google to Make Solar Energy Cheaper than Coal

Google logoGoogle is at it again, we’ve covered Google quite a bit, more than any other company I think. It’s just so nice to see a company with billions of dollars at their disposal directing their energy at improving the world (and yes, I know that Google is nowhere near perfect and Sun is more the environmentally friendly tech company).

This time around they are contuning their solar power drive by investing in companies that will encourage the use of renewable energy. They emphasize solar power, but they are not limiting the hundreds of millions of dollars they want to invest in solar power.

“Our goal is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal. We are optimistic this can be done in years, not decades,” Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and president of products, said in a statement.

One gigawatt can power a city the size of San Francisco.

Google is seeking to capitalize on the recent excitement among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to apply the risk taking that computer, biotech and Internet businesses are famous for to the field of alternative energy production.

Google’s latest moves come as the price of a barrel of oil nears $100 and coal, which produces 40 percent of the world’s electricity, faces regulatory and environmental pressures that could drive up prices.