Posted on 07/06/2021 6:58:32 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
We can run our world on hope.
We'll see what the costs are years from now. I currently bought 30 kWh storage for my solar for a little over $6K. I couldn't believe how much battery storage price per kWh had gone down. If 5 or so years from now an equivalent EV battery costs $4K I'll consider buying a used EV truck with the knowledge I'd have to soon replace the battery.
That’s pretty awesome and clever.
“When my solar system finishes paying for itself I’ll upgrade it with whatever technology is available for whatever part of my system is at its weakest.”
How much was your solar system and how many watts is it. If you bought it with your own money and used no gov. subsidies it will likely never pay for itself. I should know, I live in the sunniest place in the US, southern Arizona. The original cost of my system in 07 was 62K for 8.4kw system. In a 20 year life span, that system will produce about 45K worth of electricity, in southern AZ. However, I got local, state and federal subsidies. Dumb luck I hit it just right.
The amounts of solar energy hitting the earth everyday is staggering more than enough for all of humanity at American standard’s of energy use.
“The potential is enormous, says MIT physics professor Washington Taylor, who co-teaches a course on the physics of energy. A total of 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously. That’s more than 10,000 times the world’s total energy use. And that energy is completely renewable — at least, for the lifetime of the sun. “It’s finite, but we’re talking billions of years,” Taylor says.”
“Solar thermal systems covering 10 percent of the world’s deserts — about 1.5 percent of the planet’s total land area — could generate about 15 terawatts of energy, given a total efficiency of 2 percent. This amount is roughly equal to the projected growth in worldwide energy demand over the next half-century.”
https://news.mit.edu/2011/energy-scale-part3-1026
Tesla and it’s Chinese partner’s have cross $100 leg and also $80 kWh
The avg European home uses 10kWh per day that’s one third as much as Americans but even at 30 kWh a day only half needs to be stored for night time most days. 80*30 is $2400 for a days storage keeping 3 on hand would be prudent so $7200 in cells for three full summer days and nearly a week and half in winter as solar thermal heat works in winter time regardless of outside temps with evacuated tube collectors.
Add in panels for 10,000 watts and a 10,000 watts inverter both of which can be had today for 15 cents per watt and 20 cents per watt respectively. $3500 in panels and inverters. A install crew of 3 guys at $12 he and one Forman at $18 can do the install in two days. All in $15000 one can be grid free today. Given the average home price of $475,000 in the used market in Texas higher in many states. New homes are averaging above 500K in Texas $15,000 on the mortgage is penny’s on the dollar over a 30 year more. The panels have a 25 year capacity warranty as do the inverters. Both are covered under home owners insurances, panels give a discount on the RCV roof.rate at that. The.future is solar it’s happening now and will.increase in pace and scope as battery costs continue to plummet and.cycle life increases. Tesla cells.Will do 4000 full DOD cycles to 80% and another 4000 to 50% in a second life use environment. That’s 4000 three hundred mile.drive cycles followed by 4000 day night cycles of.full discharge most night cycles would be half discharge or less so double that number.
Solar panels in 10,000 watt pallets are 15 cents per watt with 25 year capacity warranty. I have 15,000 watts on my roof at 19 cents per watt installed.
Alibaba has lots of 15 to 19 cents per watt panels for FOB delivery in the states.
My dual 8000 watt inverters were 21 cents per.watt installed.
Solar has come.way down in price every new home built by two of my home builder friends has panels on them at the first sale built into the sale.price which right now are.going for 100,000 over asking price in North Texas. I have seen 575,000 homes selling for 700 in the last few weeks it’s a seller’s market my friends can’t build them fast.enough.
No state or local credits or subsidies. And no net metering. I'd have to pay a hefty monthly fee to my power company with any agreement I make with them to buy my excess power from me at a measly rate. So I don't use that. Basically I'm dependent on the battery storage to get meaningful use out of the excess power I produce in the day.
The only way my system is doing well for me is because I did a lot of study regarding my own power consumption each month across a couple of years, with study on average peak solar hours per month in my area, and weather patterns per month in my area. With the help of my installer, I hammered out the details of a system that best meets my specific needs. IMHO it's not for people who aren't detailed analytical geeks.
Because my wife is retired and I work from home a lot, some of the random appliance usage can happen during the day (when the sun is out) at my house. That means my one inverter can usually handle the load and my batteries still be fully charged when the sun goes down. But that's not like a two parent household with both parents working: no appliance usage during the daytime, but almost all appliances running simultaneously as soon as the two parents get home from work in the evening -- even with full batteries there might not be enough battery storage to run all of them before the sun comes up, and the inverter can't power all of them at the same time without having to get help from the grid. A two parent household with that kind of evening-only power usage (what my household looked like before my kids grew up and moved out and my wife retired), would need much more inverter capacity and battery storage than I have to keep from pulling over half the power from the grid even with a 10 kW system.
And like you suggested, it's probably good only in the south. I'm east of you in Alabama. I hear the humidity in the air here dampens the solar effect more than dry air does for you, but not enough to give more than a moments look.
And Bama has a lot more cloud cover than here in southern AZ. The best months in AZ are May and June, then July sucks because it’s monsoon season, lots of clouds. One thing I learned to watch was the inverter. My inverter gave out after about 5 years and needed replacement. That’s additional cost I didn’t figure on. Good Luck.
My inverter has a 10 year warranty, my batteries a 2,000 discharge warranty (19 years), and my panels a 25 year warranty.
Of course, all of them assumes each one of those companies will still be around if the products need replacing.
I think the big solution for hydrogen storage and transport will come when they have found a simple way convert hydrogen to ammonia and convert it back again cheaply. Ammonia storage and transport is much less costly than storing and transporting pure hydrogen
I don’t think we are in the age of lithium, but we’ll see.
Power density is still too low for consumer towing. And the capacity is NOT increasing fast enough to attack that requirement anytime soon. And even worse, charge performance is not increasing all that well either. Your price on kwh has no bearing if you can’t build enough capacity into a tow vehicle. And the problem is a exponential one. More tow distance, means heavier weight of the tow vehicle, which means decreased distance. Batteries can’t win here currently. Maybe in 10 years?
Unless you subscribe to the Klaus Schwab idea of “you’ll own nothing and be happy”, I don’t see myself happy unless I can tow a trailer with my tools, generators, and luggage to anywhere I want without stopping every 100 miles for a 45m charge.
And that is the other thing. Often there is no sun for up to 48 hours after a hurricane, and ice storms can last days, not to mention the damage wind storms can cause to solar installations. When you can’t buy gasoline, remember, you also won’t be fueling your portable light plant, and you won’t be charging your solar-powered battery bank.
Are they going to offer us hurricane, tornado, and ice storm alley folks 100$ 5 gallon drums of gas in limited amounts for these special occasions? Or is that the coming equity, prevent anyone from preparing for a disaster?
Concerning wear, other than glowing commentaries from Tesla about their million mile cars, we really don’t have an insight into how long the batteries actually last, since Tesla is the only serious application of large Lithium Ion packs.
If gasoline starts to dwindle in availability, I guess I will have to make ethanol to power my light plants. I sure won’t bet on solar in a time of disaster!
BTW, I may sound like a Tesla hater -— but I am not. The problem is that everywhere I normally drive, does not have superchargers for extended distances. And when I go to those places I tow a trailer, and while there is downhill, back is uphill, I can calculate the Megajoules of liquid energy difference between the two directions, going through the injectors of my truck’s V8 engine.
Honestly, my favorite idea is to convert nuclear electricity & heat (cheap) into gasoline. Problem solved. CO2 stabilizes, if you believe that religion, and we still get the best store of energy known to man (that doesn’t have nuclear radiation risk), oil. I know there is no free lunch here, but if you are producing lots of cheap thermal and electrical energy, why not?
BTW, we will eventually be using CO2 to create hydrocarbons at some point in the future anyway. Eventually oil drilling will cease to have value for fuel. This will increase costs of petrochemical stocks to produce the goods they source.
Nuclear will be looked to for the synthesis of gasoline from CO2 to create these cheap petrochemical feed stocks.
Even a Tesla has a lot of plastic in it :)
“Nuclear will be looked to for the synthesis of gasoline from CO2 to create these cheap petrochemical feed stocks.”
...should read...
“Nuclear will be looked to for the synthesis of hydrocarbons from CO2 & water to create these cheap petrochemical feed stocks.”
Fireman, thanks for that link!
Hydrogen is a byproduct of nuclear.
In Washington State our Governor Dimsley and his merry band of Democrat thieves have mandated that all of our electric power be “100% carbon neutral by 2030”. They are banning any new natural gas infrastructure. They are also mandating homes that are currently using oil, natural gas or propane for heat to switch to electricity. And of course coal will be banned completely.
Solar of course is one of their favorite “alternative energy solutions” despite the fact that we have approximately a quarter of the solar potential than places like southern Arizona where you live. Because of nearly constant drizzle and rain 8 months out of the year in Western Washington, failures from corrosion, mold, algae, fungus, moss, and other moisture related issues assure failure before the projected life spans of these systems. This means that even heavily subsidized solar systems have no chance of ever penciling out in this area.
My wife and I live in the foot hills and typically have several power outages a year due to wind storms causing trees to knock down power lines. Often the power is out for days and sometimes weeks. Fortunately, we have natural gas and we along with most of our neighbors have generators that are hooked to our gas lines. This means that the inconvenience and expense of having the power out for extended periods is far less.
Like you... this experience helps to give us a better perspective and understanding of our actual power usage patterns and what it takes to live our lives in a normal way given the limitations power generated at home. Most people do not have a clue.
We have friends who live completely off the grid all of the time. Most started out sinking small fortunes into huge solar systems with battery backup that they thought by the specifications would provide them with enough electricity to live their lives in a completely normal way. Sadly most discovered the hard way that solar in this area does not live up to the hype. Despite huge solar arrays in some cases... almost every one that I know living off the grid has a backup generator hooked to a large propane tank that they use daily to charge their banks of batteries. The one exception is a guy who charges his Electric Vehicle for free every day at his government job. At night he uses his Electric Vehicle battery to top off his solar system's backup batteries. He does not believe this is theft; he brags about it, but not to his supervisors.
The authorities make it sound like our area has almost as much potential for solar as Southern Arizona. Where we live we have a “sun number” of 70 and Phoenix in Southern AZ has a score of 90. This makes it sound like Phoenix has only around 25% more solar potential than areas near Seattle. When in reality Phoenix has approximately 4 times the potential for solar power than we do. The "Sun Numbers" are a marketing and leftist ploy. They are an absolute lie meant to mislead.
Seattle has a sun number of 70? lol. Wow, that’s one of those, piss on your leg and tell you it’s raining, type of lies.
As we all know, alternative energy is much more expensive than conventional energy. And they only way for the left to push wind and solar is to increase the cost of conventional energy up to the level of wind and solar.
PING
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