Replies

Solar Panels...

>>>210 watts times $3 per watt
is $630<<<

Some companies are touting their costs of production at under $1.00 per watt..... BUT - the rest of the story isn’t pretty... The rating is at peak sunlight which only occurs for a short time during the day - Number of sunlight days varies (after 5 straight days of clouds I can attest to that) Installation runs about 2.5X the panel costs - Storage costs (chargers, inverters, switches, meters, wiring) are about 3X the panels costs - PLUS the conversions are not 100% efficient by any means...

So with an investment of around $2,000 I can be assured of being able to turn on one 100 watt light bulb when I want to. At the national average rate for a kilowatt hour, I would need to use that bulb for 16,666.67 hours to break even.

Other potential considerations might be solar concentrators which are more efficient in the energy conversion and produce heat and hot water along with the electricity and are somewhat less in cost.

Quite possibly nuclear is the best answer - particularly with some of the newer smaller scale thinking.

“Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.

The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.

The US government has licensed the technology to Hyperion, a New Mexico-based company which said last week that it has taken its first firm orders and plans to start mass production within five years. ‘Our goal is to generate electricity for 10 cents a kilowatt hour anywhere in the world,’ said John Deal, chief executive of Hyperion. ‘They will cost approximately $25m [£16m] each. For a community with 10,000 households, that is a very affordable $2,500 per home.’”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/nov/09/miniature-nuclear-reactors-los-alamos

(Note: they have firm sales from the Czech Republic, Romania, and many other countries. None scheduled for U.S. - We are still throwing obstacles in the way. Maybe that is why France gets 80% of their power from nuclear and we are far far behind.)

Could we afford it?

Let’s see.... $787 Billion in recovery/tarp/whatever spending = 31,480 Mini Power Systems @ $25 million each. - hey that would be enough power for 629 million homes - Way more than we have - Gee, maybe we would be able to then do the electric car thingy sensibly... Nah, that might make sense - we can’t do anything like that. We might become power rich and the other nations would be jealous. Let’s give that money to a few deep pockets and some of our foreign enemies - just to keep things even...

Whatever we do, we need to be utilizing co-generation. It makes no sense to generate electricity and throw away most of the heat into the air and water, then we burn more fuel to heat our homes and let a major portion of the heat go up the chimney, then we burn more fuel and heat water with most of that energy going up into the air. same with our cooking, driving, and basically everything we do... Somehow we need to integrate systems to more fully utilize the energy in our fuels.

LOL, OK, now off my soapbox...

You can make a wind generator out of a Franklin Rear end, mounted on a windmill tower.

Ben Gilbough did, about 1910 and he was still using it in 1965, at Ramona, california.

He was the original owner of my property there and still lived in his old home, full of real antiques.

Ben and Barney Oldfield invented the ‘Hot Tube’ the forerunner of todays spark plugs and I think hold/held the patent on it.

My 11 year old daughter fell in love with him and invited him to dinner, which turned out to be one of many that he joined us for.

I think he is the only intelligent person she ever listened to.