"That's 7 Horse Power. Before 1850, almost NObody had ONE full horsepower available. Most of the world lived, indeed -still- lives, on less than 1/4HP. Why are you so greedy? Alot 100W (or less!) of light for each person, each PC and TV. Stop keeping starches and sugars in the freezer, keep rutabagas and smoked-pork in the cellar. Shiver in the winter, sweat in the summer. You can still love your family, do your work, have a wonderful life."
Honestly, how is this knowledge supposed to benefit me today?
I keep all my lights off unless I'm using them, I turn my PC off when not using it, keep my fridge at the best possible setting, etc. I DO shiver in the winter but my heat is gas. I DO sweat in the summer and my bills are still high. 5kw would cover my power usage on the hottest day of summer 100%
Just because it was done like that back in the 'good ole days' doesn't mean we have to do it like that now.
"Who is pushing you to "accept" it?
Is it even beneficial?
Turning raw light into electricity is not easy. Or profitable. You can use large mirrors, boilers, steam engine... all of which needs metal, which is red dirt plus HUGE quantities of energy to melt and shape it. Silicon panels are conceptually simpler, but the Silicon has to be more refined than a tinned-iron mirror and boiler. I have a strong feeling that the materials needed to capture energy from the sun take more energy to make than they will capture in their real-world working lifetime. Which makes sense if you have cheap energy one place and time, and need long-term energy at another place. Spaceships. Desert seismic stations. Not a house on the tracks midway between Texas oil and West Virginia coal."
Everybody yearns to get out from big brother and his electric company cousin. This includes me. I want to be self-sufficient and I want to buck the system. Secondly, although I don't believe in global warming, I still want to rid our world of smog and pollution and this helps. I already have to smog test my car every single year to be able to register it here in Atlanta.
"Economy of scale. If you could collect light energy at a cost remotely comparable to PSE&G, PSE&G could do the same, at a better rate."
Not really. They have an infrastructure that they have streamlined. Building infrastructure is no cheap or easy task. Once you've built it, you have to train everyone on maintenance, repair, etc. You also have to stock replacement parts and get new tools and so forth as well. This is one of the reasons Big Oil refuses to actually put forth the effort to rid this country of it's dependencies on oil. It would ruin any profits they make and surely dry up their bank accounts to actually put forth a significant effort to move to another energy source.
You have to ask yourself, "why are there such huge taxes on importing alternate energy generation equipment?"
"In fact when the cost of oil/coal really rises again, that may be what happens: utilities rent your roof-space and share power all over your block and county. Not really rent, but credit customers who have sun-space to use. That's a better plan: if your roof panel fails, you are not in the dark nor put-out for cash. A PSE&G computer dispatches a low-priority work-ticket, a truck shows up eventually and changes your panel from PSE&G stock."
Power companies ALREADY purchase power you put onto the grid if you generate electricity from alternate power sources.
"BTW, PSE&G probably has $10K invested in your electric bill, from coalmine to boiler to distribution gear. I know the line from the street to my house would cost $2K, a 5KW transformer is similar, but PSE&G does that for free (up to a point) because they invest now to capture all my future electric bills."
My power cable from the pole is the original one from 1968. It has long been paid for. I doubt the transformer is that old but it looks pretty old to me. Unless either of those give up the ghost, it's likely that GApower will continue to make money on me without ever having to do any real service FOR me other than supply the power. So yes they have "invested" but they have long since recouped any investment.
"We gripe about the cost of oil, but the energy stored over a billion years in underground oil/coal is MUCH cheaper than any other source of energy, and will be until we run out."
It's taken how long to get where we are today? Centuries you say? Yep. So if we start moving to alternate energy sources now we can safely say that our grandchildren will be comfy in the future without worry.
"The cost of everything is mostly energy. Red dirt is cheap. It takes a heap of energy to melt the dirt into iron, to shape the iron. Sand is cheap, big energy to melt it to glass or Silicon. Less obviously, there's a lot of damp soil on earth, but it takes a summer of solar energy to make wheat or corn or rice or soybean. It takes 1HP to plow and harvest 40 acres, several thousand HP of sunlight to grow the crop."
Sure and it takes more energy to purify aluminum than most any other metal and/or mineral. It takes HUGE amounts of electricity. However, most aluminum is processed by Alcoa in places like Montreal where they use a lot of hydroelectric power. yup, completely renewable energy.
"Some of that is DC/AC conversion. And you know how overpaid DC/AC converter designers are."
You couldn't be more right!
I played around with the innards of an old Xantrex 3kw inverter and unfortunately I have to say that it's design is completely outdated and overly complex. It was completely analog with some kind of ROM running the whole thing. I bet a nice FPGA would do away with half of the circuitry and cut 500$ off of the BOM.
They sell for 3k$
"Anyway, I bet you -could- swing a loan on a $30K Lexus, if you wanted to."
Hmm. I'm not sure I would choose lexus.. I'm a german car guy and I'm completely happy to keep on fixing up an eleven year old BMW until it finally dies rather than get a loan..
"And the car would get used just an hour a day, for 5 or maybe 10 years. And suck fuel and insurance. For a job which really should be done better with a GOOD shuttle-bus system. Instead the US has rushed out to low-density housing, low density employment, long commutes in solo-occupant 200HP cars, returning to houses with a mere 3 to 6 inches of insulation in wicked climates. And thanks to the coal/steam fad of the 1880s, expectations of a constant 72 deg F."
My car moves me less than 10 miles a day. A tank of gas lasts me 2.5 weeks. I wish I had a decent bus system around here but getting from point A to point B would take 3 hours according to the bus routes and wait times.
"When the time is ripe, if it really falls-out to individual systems, then you will see home-size solar systems featured at Home Depot. And they will probably still be $30K. So it won't happen until the cost of dino-electricity makes $30K look small. And before that happens, you will be driving a much smaller car (or take the bus) and adding a foot of fuzz to your walls."
I recently spent a lot of money over-insulating my house. You should have seen the absolute lack of insulation. I mean the attic didn't have ANY insulation at all. My car gets 30 mpg on the highway already and Home Depot barely stocks anything but pink insulation.
This solar power kick I'm on is only the beginning. I want to make everything in my house the most efficient that it can possibly be.
