[Greenbuilding] [BULK] Re: solar payback

[Lawrence Lile]

Here is how you can justify a solar power system right now: 

Buy two solar electric panels, about 200 watts of peak power.  Depending
on where you live, this would give you about a kilowatt-hour per day of
juice to work with, maybe twice that in the summer. 

Decide on loads that absolutely need to run during a power outage, like
a computer, cell phone chargers, a single compact fluorescent bulb, or
some other combination of small loads that you'd rather not do without
in an outage. Keep the load within the power budget.

Get a couple of marine batteries, a good quality charge controller and a
cheap inverter. Don't' skimp on the charge controller, cheap ones will
kill your batteries quick. Cheap inverter is OK. 

Run your non-interruptible loads on solar power, and your payback is
that these loads run when the power goes out.  Forget energy-saving
economics, they won't pan out.  You want to smugly invite the neighbors
over for cards during the next power outage, now THAT's a payback. 

People are going around spending more money than you'll spend for this
system on noisy, polluting, maintenance-hungry generators for the same
purpose.  Where is the payback there?  Often they fail to start when the
power goes, because of lack of regular maintenance. 

Of course people also spend $50,000 for a car with leather seats that
goes no faster, legally, than a used volkswagon beetle.  Where's the
payback there?  None I can see.  


Lawrence Lile, PE, LEED AP
Project Solutions Engineering

-----Original Message-----
From: greenbuilding-bounces at listserv.repp.org
[mailto:greenbuilding-bounces at listserv.repp.org] On Behalf Of Steve T
Sent: Friday, November 30, 2007 10:56 AM
To: Greenbuilder list
Subject: Re: [Greenbuilding] [BULK] Re: solar payback

That is excellent news.  This technology just sounds very exciting.
Hopefully in a few years I'll finally have the solar that I want for my
home.

On Nov 30, 2007 8:53 AM, Lawrence Lile <LLile at projsolco.com> wrote:

> Nanosolar isn't vaporware, they just have their first year's
production
> already allocated.