The new mantra in energy circles is “national smart grid.”
In the New York Times, Al Gore insists the new president should give the highest priority to “the planning and construction of a unified national smart grid.” President Barack Obama, responding to a question by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, declares that one of “the most important infrastructure projects that we need is a whole new electricity grid ... a smart grid.”
We lump together the two words, “national” and “smart” as if they were joined at the hip, but in fact each describes and enables a very different electricity future. The word “national” in these discussions refers to the construction of tens of thousands of miles of new national ultra-high-voltage transmission lines, an initiative that would further separate power plants from consumers, and those who make the electricity decisions from those who feel the impact of those decisions.
The word “smart,” on the other hand, refers to upgrading the existing network to make it more resilient and efficient. A smart grid can decentralize both generation and authority. Sophisticated electronic sensors, wireless communication, software and ever-more powerful computers will connect electricity customers and suppliers in real time, making possible a future in which tens of millions of households and businesses actively interact with the electricity network as both consumers and producers.
Advocates of a new national ultra-high-voltage transmission network offer three main arguments:
1. New high-voltage transmission lines are needed to decrease electric grid congestion and therefore increase reliability and security.
There is indeed congestion on some parts of our distribution and transmission networks. Congestion reveals a problem; it doesn’t demand a specific solution. It can be addressed by reducing demand through increasing energy efficiency or by increasing on-site or local energy production. Both strategies are often less costly and quicker to implement than building new transmission lines. An analogy from the solid-waste sector may be appropriate. Exhausting nearby landfills does not inevitably require us to send our garbage to new and more distant landfills. We can emphasize recycling, composting, scrap-based manufacturing and reuse.
2. A new national high-voltage transmission network is necessary to dramatically increase renewable energy.
President Obama wants to build new transmission lines because, “I want to be able to get wind power from North Dakota to population centers, like Chicago.” Writing in Vanity Fair, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants a new high-voltage transmission system to “deliver solar, wind, geothermal and other renewable energy across the country.”
But do we really need to deliver renewable energy across the country? The distinguishing characteristic of renewable energy is its availability in abundant quantities virtually everywhere.
The Institute for Local Self-Reliance recently pulled together the modest amount of data available on the amount of renewable energy available in each state. Our report, “Energy Self-Reliant States,” concludes that at least half the 50 states could meet all of their internal electricity demand with renewable energy found inside their borders, and all states could meet their current renewable electricity mandates from homegrown energy sources.
High-voltage transmission lines are not necessary to dramatically expand renewable-energy generation. But they are essential if we want to expand coal-generated electricity, because coal is found in limited places, and coal-fired power plants tend to be very large and therefore must serve very large markets. This is why, until recently, the primary advocates for new high-voltage transmission lines were those who wanted to construct large coal-fired power plants.
One of the most effective ways to stop new coal-fired power plants is to stop building new high-voltage transmission lines.
Before building new transmission lines, we should first investigate how much capacity there is on existing lines. Tellingly, that data is not readily available. A several-year campaign in Minnesota by the North American Water Office led to the nation’s first utility-led analysis of the capacity on the existing transmission system in one part of the state. The results were so positive the state legislature ordered the utilities to expand the analysis.
The most recent study’s data suggest that Minnesota can achieve its renewable electricity mandate of 25 percent by 2020 without building any major new networks of high-voltage transmission lines (a report summarizing the utilities’ studies is available at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance website).
3. New transmission lines allow us to harness renewable energy in its best locations, thereby lowering costs.
Many would argue that although renewable energy is available virtually everywhere, sunshine is more plentiful and the winds are stronger in a few locations, and therefore by generating electricity in those locations, we save money. Sunny Nevada, for example, can produce solar electricity from solar panels for about 20 percent less than Iowa and about 35 percent less than in Pittsburgh. A wind turbine in windy North Dakota could produce electricity at a cost close to 30 percent lower than the same turbine located in Ohio.
But in most cases, these significant variations in production costs result in modest variations in the final cost of energy to the ultimate consumer, because more remote generation resources have an added cost of transporting the energy across long distances. For example, my colleague John Farrell estimates that if Ohio’s electricity came from North Dakota wind farms—1,000 miles away—the cost of constructing new transmission lines to carry that power, and the electricity losses suffered during transmission, could surpass the lower cost of production.
Even if modest financial savings do occur, they are easily outweighed by the arduous and contentious prospect of having to seize or negotiate for the use of the land of hundreds of thousands of farmers, homeowners and businesses to build the new lines.
The arguments against building and overlaying a new national transmission system are more compelling:
1. Building a new high-voltage transmission line diverts resources from the more important task of making the best use of the existing electrical network and integrating the new generation of decentralizing energy technologies.
Some advocates estimate the full cost of a new national transmission grid at $100 billion. In these tough credit markets, as states and the federal government design financial incentives that make it easier and more financially attractive to build high-voltage transmission lines, they undermine the potential for energy efficiency and decentralized production. Richard Cowart, director of the Regulatory Assistant Project noted back in 2002, “Over-investing in transmission will tend to support remote generation and undermine the value of distributed resources. Under-investing in transmission will have the opposite effect.”
2. Building new transmission lines requires the federal government to increasingly pre-empt state and local authority, which may undermine a generation of advances in state electricity regulation.
To accelerate the construction of ultra-high-voltage transmission lines, the federal government may well have to pre-empt state and local authority, because states and localities and their citizenry will not look kindly on tens of thousands of miles of new transmission lines crossing their lands to deliver power to distant communities. Indeed, it is the fear of popular opposition to such transmission lines that fuels the drive for pre-emption.
Billionaire T. Boone Pickens, the country’s most visible proponent of a national transmission system, bluntly told Congress a few months ago that he is “disconcerted that state public authorities ... are required to consider the benefits of the project to the citizens of their state.” He worries that, “Where state utility commissions are limited by state law to considering benefits to citizens of their state, eminent-domain power may not be available to transmission developers wishing to cross the state without providing transmission service to local generators or local electricity users.” He wants Congress to give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission “exclusive jurisdiction” to site new transmission lines.
An increasing centralization of authority over electricity planning has been slowly occurring over the last 15 years. It was speeded up with the passage of the 2005 Energy Act that requires the Department of Energy to designate “national interest electric transmission corridors.” Once designated, state regulatory bodies have one year to approve an application for a new transmission line, or the federal government can step in and issue the approval.
Corridors of Power
It is instructive to see how the federal government has exercised this newly acquired authority to designate national interest transmission corridors. In late 2007, DOE released its first group of designated transmission corridors, setting off an immediate outcry by the affected states. Governments and regulatory agencies in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Delaware, Maryland and New Jersey all petitioned for a rehearing. DOE rejected their petition.
Over the last 30 years, grassroots activism has pushed state energy regulatory agencies away from their traditional focus on encouraging bigger power plants and higher-voltage transmission lines and toward a new decision-making matrix called “least cost planning.” Utilities are required to examine and pursue alternatives like increasing energy efficiency or installing smaller, dispersed power plants before they can build new traditional power plants or transmission lines. Recently, states also require utilities to take into account environmental costs and to give renewable energy a priority.
The states complained that in designating transmission corridors, the DOE had refused to consider non-transmission solutions to congestion problems, something their own state laws require, as does the Federal Power Act. The FPA specifically directs the DOE to issue its report only “after considering alternatives.”
The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities asked the DOE to refrain from designating corridors “until after it analyzed whether alternative means, including energy efficiency, demand response and clean local generation within the critical congestion area could relieve congestion more effectively, at lower cost, with less harm to the environment, with better assurance of the reliability and security of our electricity supply, or with less vulnerability to uncertainties such as future fuel costs, future environmental requirements and other variables.”
The DOE claimed that an examination of non-transmission solutions was outside its jurisdiction. According to the DOE’s perverse interpretation of the law, the federal government can pre-empt state authority but it cannot take into account the same factors states do in deciding whether to approve new transmission lines, even though almost everyone agrees that consideration of those factors results in better decisions.
The Mid-Atlantic Area National Interest Electric Transmission Corridor that the DOE designated encompasses nearly all the state of Maryland and New Jersey. New Jersey complained, arguing that the DOE’s own data indicated that much of these areas are not experiencing transmission constraints or congestion. The DOE did not deny New Jersey’s allegation but maintained, “(T)he statute does not appear to foreclose the possibility of national corridor designation in the absence of current congestion ... even without congestion, DOE can approve a line where it wants to encourage ‘desirable generation.’”
In this case, the DOE decided that coal-fired power plants constituted desirable generation. The uncongested parts of the DOE’s designated corridor were largely in areas of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia that account for more than two-thirds of the coal produced in the Appalachian region.
‘National’ or ‘Smart’?
This is the context for Obama’s presidency. It is unclear whether he will emphasize “national” or “smart.” Obama’s fiscal stimulus plan calls for $11 billion for what he calls a smart grid investment program. The program specifically mentions spending on new high-voltage transmission lines, but it also encompasses investments in smart grids. Since the federal government has direct control over high-voltage transmission lines through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission but not over the retail subtransmission and distribution networks, it might find it easier to push money toward the former (“national”) rather than the latter (“smart”).
The DOE’s decisions to date on national interest transmission corridors have come while George W. Bush was president. It is unclear where President Obama stands on the growing state-federal controversy. At his confirmation hearing, Secretary of Energy-designate Steven Chu declared a nationwide grid “in the national interest” and insisted the country needed a “new way of doing business” to get it built quickly.
However, when Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., protested about the DOE’s process in declaring most of New Jersey a federal pre-emption corridor, Chu acknowledged the problem and ended up saying that new lines must be sited “in a way that takes into consideration the local feelings but yet also recognizes the national needs.”
Will Chu require the DOE, and will President Obama ask FERC, to evaluate petitions for new transmission lines using the same least-cost-planning process now used by many states?
Will the federal government require all utilities to undertake the same analysis done in Minnesota to identify the capacity of existing transmission lines to absorb more renewable energy?
Will fiscal stimulus spending on upgrading the electricity grid emphasize smart over national?
The shape of our electricity future might depend on the answers to these questions.
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This piece originally appeared on Alternet.
Making buildings more efficient: rationalizing retrofit markets
Comments
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hapa Posted 5:33 am
04 Mar 2009
"at least half the 50 states" are mostly the empty ones.
"all states could meet their current renewable electricity mandates" but then we all know those mandates are tiny and silly in context, don't we?
even so i wonder if blocking a national grid (whether or not it comes with local and regional resilient distributed smarts) is a good idea until the grid fix is part of a complete clean energy package as it is in the full "repower america" proposal.
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Gar Lipow Posted 5:41 am
04 Mar 2009
even so i wonder if blocking a national grid (whether or not it comes with local and regional resilient distributed smarts) is a good idea until the grid fix is part of a complete clean energy package as it is in the full "repower america" proposal.
I think that is a good point. National transmission can be used for good or evil. It probably should be supported only if it comes with some guarantee against the latter.
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lgcarey Posted 7:22 am
04 Mar 2009
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hdsolarguy Posted 2:30 pm
04 Mar 2009
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amazingdrx Posted 3:01 pm
04 Mar 2009
This is a good point for an HVDC continental super grid. Imagine the ultimate solar solution? A globe circling super grid that powered the datk side of the earth from the solar panels on the light side. No storage.
Wind is similar, but even easier to use this way. Areas with no wind are not large in terms of weather patterns. A super grid would span the areas with doldrums and power them from the windy areas.
4 time zones could be spanned here in the US, that extends solar power hours signifigantly. But it really smooths out the dips in wind power. Storage can be added to the HVDC super grid for ultra reliable, 100% renewable electricty. Maybe 30 years from now the last combustion based power would be gone?
And a buried super grid along electric rail lines would be a very efficient public works project. Lots of employment and gigatons of carbon emissions halted. Lots of high tech manufacturing and installation and maintenance jobs would be created.
Could we get by with renewable local grids? Definetly yes. But this is worth the investment. For one thing it will power clean livable cities that are a green pleasure to live in, then the electric railways will allow goods and services to be transported cleanly. Most people will live in cities and respectfully visit wilderness, saving wilderness from human destruction.
This sort of investment in national renewable energy and transportation is the way to lead, government can provide a really free responsibly regulated market that will embrace the best green technology and close down coal and oil the quickest.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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ce1907 Posted 10:10 pm
04 Mar 2009
what is good
bad
negotiable?
some new lines WILL be coming
what should be insisted upon?
what should be heartily resisted?
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hdsolarguy Posted 3:47 am
05 Mar 2009
http://seekingalpha.com/article/119404-smart-grid-s-enabl ...
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amazingdrx Posted 5:12 am
05 Mar 2009
That means a smart grid would need one quarter of the wind and solar nameplate capacity to match the nameplate capacity of the present grid mameplate generating capacity. Or 250,000 mw.
That's 500 billion at 2 dollars per watt. A price point that wind and solar is approaching. That's 25 billion per year over 20 years. If government invested a third of that through subsides, that's around 8 billion per year it would spur private investment.
Wind and solar growth would need to be 5% per year and conservation would need to be a few percent per year to make this happen. Maybe another 5 billion per year could go into conservation and efficiency incentives and 3 billion per year into smart grid subsidy.
Then 5 billion per year into an HVDC super grid/rail road electrification plan.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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hdsolarguy Posted 2:16 am
06 Mar 2009
See also...
http://www.desertec-australia.org/content/twf-3-connectin ...
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2wheeler Posted 3:46 am
06 Mar 2009
Seriously I am thinking this is do-able, increasing conservation efficiency a few percent a year is totally in the realm of the possible. And the price tag of the above estimate does not seem high especially in light of other recent questionable expenses ($2trillion on a war for oil, etc.)
Yes, We Can get sustainable renewable energy and get off the carbon habit.
Moving toward sustainability with hopefulness, one revolution at a time.
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Gar Lipow Posted 4:32 am
06 Mar 2009
So your total per watt cost is high unless most renewable electricity is provided by wind and very little from solar. (Or unless the price of solar drops a lot, which I admit seems likely: but then your scenario depends on a technical breathrough, and is not based on today's costs.)
Also yeah we can cut total energy use by half. But we will probably want to use electricity to drive ground transport. A lot of existing building can't heat and cool with solar, so we will probably want to heat and cool them with ground source heat pumps. Given that most heating of buildings is not done with electricity, this is probably a large electricity increase in buildings even after we increase climate control efficiency in existing buildings. And after we cut industrial energy use in half, we will probably want to provide half of that industrial energy consumption with electricity, leaving half of reduced industrial consumption to be driven by sustainable biofuel or fossil fuel. That means electricity use in a high efficiency scenario will vary from about the same as today, to twice as much as today. In short we can save a lot of electricity, but we will also need to use electricity for a lot of things we don't use it for today. So your numbers are off by many times. And still worth it at the real price.
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amazingdrx Posted 5:51 am
06 Mar 2009
Still possible with modest subsidies over a 20 year time period, incrementally year after year, chipping away at combustion based power and waste.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Gar Lipow Posted 8:36 am
06 Mar 2009
On the other end of the spectrum lets consider flying wind generators, a speculative technology that is barely out of the lab.
FEGS could run at 90% of capacity in certain locations. But most of the 10% of the time they would not run would occur during a single month. You get over 95% capacity 11 months of the year and then essentially no production one month of the year. Which means putting up FEGs in that particular location would require a 100% duplication of capital costs. On the other hand there are locations where FEGS would round about 55% of capacity, but do so all year round. Meaning you could add small amounts of storage, and would need backup equal only to about 30% of that 55%. (Remember, I'm using this as an example, and that FEGS are not commercial at present.)
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amazingdrx Posted 1:43 pm
06 Mar 2009
WEA claims that serious reliability issues due to wind variability will not occur until wind goes beyond 20% of total grid generation. That gives us a few years at least to come up with really effective affordable storage.
Solar tends to compliment wind too, both at 20% each might just prove to be perfectly reliable at a whopping total 40% of grid generation. Especially through an HVDC super grid.
Storage R&D ought to be supported too, along with renewable smart grid technology and efficiency/conservation.
If the total goal for conversion to renewable energy and conservation totals around 6% per year, storage would have to start ramping up 5 or 6 years later. Can it be ready? Remember we will still have fossil fuel backup in the form of natural gas peaking that can supplement storage.
And solar furnace thermal heat storage is ready to go, so is hydro storage, and biogas distributed backup. Utility scale superconducting energy storage is on the near R&D horizon. Battery storage in homes and building and plugin vehicles could be a huge stabilizer. I think it can all fit together in time.
I like compressed air storage combined with geothermal heat, they would work well together, returning more energy than went into the compressed air.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Gar Lipow Posted 2:44 pm
06 Mar 2009
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Bob Wallace Posted 3:14 pm
06 Mar 2009
They used actual 2000 output data from 19 wind farms.
(Don't confuse output with nameplate. The study was based on power actually produced, not nameplate/peak potential.)
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2007/december5/wind ...
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amazingdrx Posted 4:25 pm
06 Mar 2009
I wonder about boosting compressed air with solar thermal storage too Gar, maybe a geothermal preheat and a solar thermal booster from molten salt just before the turbine?
How would one calculate the energy added by the heat? It would eliminate the need for water use in geothermal and solar thermal generation. How would the overall efficiency compare to a simple geothermal or solar thermal phase change turbine system that uses water or a refrigerant compound?
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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TheDentist Posted 3:35 am
07 Mar 2009
Without the coal fired power plants, we would be paying 30 cents per KW versus the 8 cents per KW we are paying now. Will you personally pay the difference of the bills for all the customers? I'm not saying that we don't need an alternative. We HAVE alternatives but everyone seems to think that everyone can simply install a bunch of solar panels and we will have all the electric we need. That simply isn't true. Even if we covered the entire south west desert with panels, and started sending giga watts towards the east coast, only about 12% of the electric would reach us because of resistance in the wire. Solar is NOT the ultimate answer. Wind makes more sense but wind isn't reliable enough to produce constant electric.
Nuclear is our best answer, given our current technology. Reprocessing capabilities makes the spent fuel safe after 600 years. Start building more nuclear power plants now and continue to improve on the reprocessing technology. We should be able to get the reprocessing capabilities down to 6 years if an investment is made into that technology.
Before you try to gather the people around your agenda, you had better be prepared to pay the difference in everyone's electric bill when it doubles for everyone. That is what the cap and trade is going to do.
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Gar Lipow Posted 8:18 am
07 Mar 2009
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Bob Wallace Posted 12:19 pm
07 Mar 2009
I generate 80%-90% of my electricity from PV solar and the cloudy day stuff with a generator.
For the "sunny months" my generator sits idle and I do everything I need to do with 16 75 watt panels.
Your "384 200w panels" sounds like what one would do to power a small town. You're installing roughly 75x my system.
I store my "dark hours" power with 12 golf cart batteries. They hold enough power to get me through three days of no sun.
You're looking at 45 tons of batteries. My pack weighs less than half a ton. That's 100 times smaller than what you purpose.
Perhaps you should take a long, hard look at the consumption part of your system.
At least take a serious review of your math.
I do suspect that you have somehow tapped into a very faulty information stream.
When you talk about removing coal generation from the grid would take power costs from 8 to 30 cents (wind costs only a nickel), I wonder.
When you talk about how long distance shipment of power would waste 88% (HVDC is very efficient, about 3% loss per 1,000 kM and a 1.5% loss for end/out conversion to lower voltage AC), I worry.
When you advocate more nuclear and I look at the other stuff you've posted, I fear....
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Gar Lipow Posted 3:02 pm
07 Mar 2009
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Bob Wallace Posted 5:11 pm
07 Mar 2009
I've got 16 75 watt BP panels mounted on two "yard" racks. I mounted on the ground rather than on the roof as cleaning snow and angle adjustment can be hard to do if the panels are up high.
I'm running a 24 vdc feed to the batteries/inverter. That allowed smaller wires than 12 vdc. I could have used even smaller wire by going to 48 or 96 volts. (I know one person running 96 because it's a long way from where he had to put his panels and his house.)
I stopped at 24 vdc as I could find an inexpensive backup inverter in the event I had to send my big one in for repair. I found no inexpensive 48 or 95 volts uits.
I'm using a Trace 4000 watt inverter. The model that I got has a built in battery charger. I wouldn't recommend getting multi-function units like mine. My internal charger quit working and I discovered it to be less expensive to buy a separate charger than to ship my unit in and pay for the repairs.
The inverter is large enough to run most everything. I've got a full woodworking shop and my only limit is I can't run the washing machine and table saw at the same time.
Storage is a dozen 6 volt "golf cart" batteries. These guys don't last as long as L-16s or specialized "solar" batteries, but doing the math over the long term they are less expensive. Also, I know a couple of people who have fried a set of batteries. I'd rather replace a less expensive set if I screw up.
My system runs a standard issue 18 cu.ft. refrigerator. I compared the price of an Energy Star refer and additional panels/batteries with the super efficient Sun Frost models and couldn't make the math work for the Sun Frost.
Heating the house is done with wood. Cooking and water heating with propane. (Solar water heater coming in the near future.)
I've done all the (reasonable) things that I could do to pull down my power needs. CFLs (LEDs when the price improves), swapping desktop for laptop, "boombox" for casual radio listening, closeline rather than dryer, etc.
We just don't use a lot of the appliances that lots of homes do. Even when I've had dishwasher I didn't use them, so I don't miss having one. No garbage disposal, wouldn't use one if I had one, I compost.
No electric toothbrushes, butter warmers, salad spinners.
Don't need AC where I live, fortunately. In the event that things heat up as the climate changes I built the dining room so that it can be closed off from the rest of the house and air conditioned if needed during a heat wave.
I store additional energy by pumping well water only when I've got extra power. I've got a couple of big water tanks (total 2800 gallons) up the hill about 80' higher than the house. That gives me gravity flow water and no need to use power for pumping when it's dark.
Backup by generator. I would like to add wind to the mix but I can't make the numbers work. When gas was hitting $5 around here wind was starting to make sense, but now that it has dropped back under $3....
Even though I'm on the top of a ridge I don't have good wind potential. And my hydro potential is limited. I could make some power in the winter months with water but I'd have to ship it back a half mile or so to the house.
Enough?
When I first left the grid panels were a lot more expensive and inverters were not
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hdsolarguy Posted 12:58 am
08 Mar 2009
For example, a avg house in San Diego using about 800 kWh per month requires a 6 kW (DC) system that will produce 792 kWh/month of electricity. That is (30) 200-watt panels.
At $.15/kWh that is equivalent to a $120/month electric bill.
During the daytime, the house produces more than it needs but the extra is sold back to the utility at prevailing rates, literally rotating the meter backwards for credit.
At night, the house "withdraws" the power which was "deposited" during the day, spinning the meter forwards again.
Solar homeowners in CA pay their electric bills only once per year -- at the end of 12 full production months -- and pay the difference between what they produce and what they use (the "net").
See video at http://www.stellarsolar.net/how.html
In San Diego, a system like this -- installed by professionals -- will pay for itself in about 8 years. Or immediately if you consider the solar house now has a higher market price.
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amazingdrx Posted 1:34 am
08 Mar 2009
I'm wondering if biogas could serve as a backup generator fuel, and maybe you could get a gas refrigerator that would run on concentrating solar and the waste heat from your generator?
With salt-ice storage your refrigerator could coast for a few days, and when the solar concentrator wasn't feeding heat into the fridge coils, the backup generator would be needed anyway, which would power the fridge from waste (exhaust) heat.
You can get a Honda generator that runs on either LP or natural gas. So you have a backup for the biogas/natural gas from your digestor.
Cooking could be done with biogas or LP too. Waste heat from the generator/fridge and cooking could heat water that solar does not.
A blog all about your present system and future modifications would be great! And how about rejoining the car conversion hobby, hehey.
Anyway thanks for the inspiration, yes we can!
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Gar Lipow Posted 3:51 am
08 Mar 2009
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amazingdrx Posted 4:17 am
08 Mar 2009
This should give a 1 kw average output with 10 mph winds? Probably wothwhile if it could be done for a few thousand dollars.
I'm thinking maybe an ultralight fiberglass main mast and sail masts that slide together with clear sailboard type sails and parts. the power would come down through a shaft to a generator on the ground. Guy wirers and ground anchors would provide stability and flexibility.
Bringing power to the ground gives the option of powering pumps, compressors or generators. Sails can be made ro roller furl in case of storm or overspeed.
The assembley and installation of this system is more do it yourself small contractor friendly. It's like raising a mast on a sailboat instead of erecting an industrial steel tower. And if this one comes down the leighweight parts will do less damage than a tree falling. negating the liability concerns.
A 20 foot long delivery would house the kit, no problem with a trailer. Pick it up at your local freight depo. Wind has to be easy and cheap and harmless in medium wind speed residential applications. Zoning is out to stop it already.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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Bob Wallace Posted 12:33 pm
08 Mar 2009
In fact, I'm not convinced that panels on individual roofs is the best use of PV. Solar farm panels are more likely to be kept up (cleaned and maintained) than on the average users house.
We might be better off using public money for installing panels in optimal areas rather than supporting individual purchase.
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Rule of thumb that off the griders around here use is that if you're more than a quarter mile from the grid then consider solar/wind/micro hydro.
I haven't checked prices lately, not since ~2001 when I got my $300k quote, but the utility company was charging $14 per foot to run service.
5280 feet/4 = 1320 * $14 = $18,480.
Somewhere around 1/4 mile the cost of hooking to the grid plus monthly utility bills is more than the cost of a stand alone system. In fact my system cost about the price of an 1/8th mile hookup (not including my labor).
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Refer - Biogas, waste heat, etc. Just too complicated in terms of return. At this point refers are pretty efficient and panels/batteries/inverters are fairly mature technology.
Someone may make components that tap the septic tank for biogas, whatever, but until those technologies can be bought off the shelf they will be in the domain of the dedicated tinkerer.
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Wind - I've got a 'feast or famine' site. Not far from me (within two miles) is a river canyon and wind off the ocean blows nicely through there on its way to the central valleys of CA. Folks living along the canyon get most of their power from a modest sized turbine. But I'm out of that flow.
I've built on the top of a ridge and the storm winds are fierce. I built in extra sheer walls and used diagonal metal strapping in the roof. (That was after having all the rafters blown off one night during construction.) So I can't use any sort of turbine that does self furl. Anything that presents too much area to the wind would require a very expensive mounting system.
I'd like to get away with using a generator for non-sunny periods, but I can't make the math work.
I can generate the power I need on a non-solar day by running my generator about four hours. That takes a gallon of gas. I might burn 50 gallons of gas a year. At $3 per gallon it would take many, many years to recover the cost of a $5 - 8k wind machine.
(Tilting towers for small turbines are commonly used. You raise and lower them with guy pole and a simple hand winch. Steel pipe is used for the tower itself and the guy wires are secured to groung screws as used to anchor utility poles.)
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"(A)nnual kWh hours from solar vs. annual kWh from sun...." Not sure what you're asking here.
There are solar infusion charts for the US that show how many solar hours one should expect per day (month by month). Of course those are generalized.
For example, I get far more sunny hours at my elevation than do people a very few miles away living where the Pacific fog bank visits during the summer. When the central valleys heat up during the day the hot air rises and sucks in the fog from over the ocean. Days at lower altitudes, especially along the river canyons, can start sunny and get socked in later in the day.
I also get a lot more winter sun as the cold weather clouds tend to hang out below our site. It's common to get up in the morning and see an ocean of white stretching to the western horizon, with the >3,000 foot peaks poking through like islands. Those clouds might not get blown out until after I've collected and hour or two of power.
--
My experience with being my own power company convinces me that we could get by without dirty electricity (at least for residential purposes).
By doing some very serious work on conservation, tapping a mix of generation sources, and tying everything together with an efficient grid we could turn off our coal plants.
I don't know the most efficient, cost effective way to do it, but I've no doubt that it could be done.
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