. It`s called a Sunflower.
Posted on 05/17/2011 9:36:31 AM PDT by dangerdoc
Ah, Grasshoppa, so much to learn, so little time: even if you could produce 100% of your electrical needs the gov’t will find a way to tax your use of your own electricity or demand it be fed back into the grid for you to repurchase. They are moving adroitly and aggressivly to ensure no one can truly live off the grid.
If the average home uses around 2kw to 3kw daily, and average sunlight wattage per meter is around 164 watts at sea level on average over 24 hours...
That's a lot of your property that'd need to be carpeted with your Supercells just to keep things running while the suns up. Gods forbid you hit a cloudy stretch.
But, if they make 'em cheap enough... Even someone like me would replace every flat sq/inch of my roof line with them. Redundancy is good.
More cheap power= better quality of life.
“Capturing the light and then converting it to energy are two different things...”
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That was my initial thought as well.
That and the miraculous and sudden, quantum leap from 20% to 90% collecting efficiency.
Just a stream of consciousness attempt at humor: 95% absorption = black, black = the Black album by Spinal Tap. Hence the quote.
This sounds like a photocopy of a typewritten paper made by a friend of the professor’s friend’s friend that thought he might invest $100 into it and see what investors his faxed press release would bring in.
It’s amazing that every free energy project is always “five years” away from release.
This is total bullshit.
. It`s called a Sunflower.
Do you mean kilowatt-hours?
Regards,
So... I can power my laptop with the heat generated by my laptop.
Added bonus; you have little or no grass to mow. ;)
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_watts_does_an_average_home_use_per_day
Google strikes again. Wattage per hour. Kilowatts per day...
I’m picking a lot of this up on the fly. Sorry for any errors. As I said, “please correct me if I’m wrong...”. ;-)
I have a couple of acres. Lots of oaks and maple with a few scattered pines. I like my lawn just the way it is. :-)
At 90% effiency, you wouldn’t neet to change your lawn, your roof would be space enough.
Most you can get out of sunlight is 1300 watts per square meter of Earth.
Most you can get out of sunlight is 1300 watts per square meter of Earth.
If I'm not completely missing the point on these numbers, I assume that the power generated at sea level is 3.936 kWHr per day per square meter (that's 164 watts constant average rate times 24 hours). At 90% efficiency, that should cover a 3 kWHr per day household usage. With one square meter.
So I'm thinking that this doesn't sound right. One of the numbers above must be off.
Now, of course, even if right, that presumes 90% efficiency and proper batteries to store energy from sunlight hours for use at other times, plus you'd want some kind of backup for prolonged overcast conditions.
Okay... a little digging says that the average US household consumption is about 31 kWHr per day. At 3.5 kWHr (90% efficiency at sea level, unobstructed) per square meter, that house would need just under 9 square meters of solar collectors to cover its needs, subject to conditions about storage and backup sources as noted above.
Not enough energy density to power a car but plenty to power a house.
Not enough energy density to power a car but plenty to power a house.
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