Renewable Power Fail – As Usual

Renewable Power is being hyped as the direction for the future, and is even in Legislation the Democrats hope to pass. Real World statistics for Renewable Power show something entirely different. These stats are for the U.S. and for the month of April, and the accompanying commentary shows that Wind Power and Solar Power just cannot deliver the power required absolutely, and that they never will.

I have a friend that was going to move out on some land, build a barn with an apartment, go solar and build a house for his family.

A few years later I visited and no house. I asked when he was going to build it. He pointed to his solar setup and said that was where the house money went. And would keep going as the batteries needed to be replaced periodically.

That is sadly typical of solar installations where someone tried to do it on a tight budget.

I saw no shortage of installations in central NV where some PV vendor had supplied truck or marine batteries for the storage. They work for a year or two, then they have to be replaced. When you’re talking of a 48V system and the vendor paralleled batteries to increase the effective capacity, we’re talking 8 batteries at abot $300 a pop. Add in the inverter, panels, wiring, etc and it becomes real easy to sink $30K into a system and still not have done it correctly.

I continue to maintain the PV is very uneconomical. I can put together a genset with something like and old Lister diesel and alternator that will run forever, can be fixed with spit and bailing wire and will come in well under $15K. The difference between my method and the PV method can buy the diesel fuel for years to come.

Add in heat recovery from the exhaust to heat the domestic hot water and you can achieve overall efficiencies of about 60%.

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