Posted on 02/24/2014 7:53:12 PM PST by grundle
How much time is lost due to rain, clouds, snow, nights and of course winter sun when it is low on the horizon?
Who get to wipe the dust off and how many feet of snow per year will need to be cleaned off?
10-15% productivity????
I just love the way you put that in perspective.
NYC gets about 4kwh/m2/day for a tilt=latitude photovoltaic collector. These collectors are flat. NYC is about 41N.
http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/map_pv_national_lo-res.jpg
photo of installation
http://tdworld.com/renewables/con-edison-customer-installs-nycs-largest-solar-array
write up by equipment supplier (photo not NY, but SF)
Here in south Texas, where the sun actually shines a bit, a typical “sustainable” solar house might have about 36 kilowatts of solar panels. The NY panels bragged about in this article would thus be the same as about 44 houses. These “sustainable” houses, though, are anything BUT sustainable. They use the grid as a large storage battery, selling the power to the grid (at subsidized rates) the few times they supply more than they use, and buying from the grid the rest of the time. The “rest of the time” happens to be “most of the time”. All of the rest of the time, it’s that dirty coal and oil that keep the lights on.
Exactly, our windmills here in Texas(the last I heard) have about 5% productivity.
Thanks for the links in post 25.
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