Posted on 05/07/2023 6:19:43 AM PDT by CFW
Shortly after President Joe Biden offered tax credits to anyone buying solar panels, a Colorado homeowner named Stacie took out loans to install $30,000 worth of panels on her roof. Nearly six months later, however, those panels sat unused, generating no power.
The problem seemed to have a simple fix: Stacie's energy provider merely needed to hook the panels up to its power grid—but there's no room.
Increased demand driven by Biden's green subsidies, combined with inadequate power grid capacity, has left thousands of green energy projects like Stacie's without power, rendering them useless. "When you put out $30,000, you sign loans, and don't have a working product, it's frustrating," Stacie told a local reporter. "There is no communication."
Stacie's predicament reflects a significant snag in Biden's green energy revolution. While the hundreds of billions of dollars in green energy spending allocated through the Inflation Reduction Act led to a flood of new wind and solar projects, America's antiquated power grid is not ready to accommodate them. Nearly 1,300 gigawatts worth of green energy projects, for example, are waiting to be connected to power, according to a recent Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report. The country's entire electric grid has an installed power capacity of just 1,250 gigawatts.
(Excerpt) Read more at freebeacon.com ...
“The car is at work during the day.”
If working from home, the car could be charged from panels on your own property.
If working at the office/store/factory, the car could be charged from panels at the employer’s facility (or solar farm).
I wonder how much sooner your car battery would need to be replaced if you use it to power your home?
what was the actual start up cost. i’m guessing that you make 6 figures....unlike most of us.
So...Solyndra 2023?
For the most part, Solar for powering your home with all the goodies is a big scam that will NEVER work.
I solar powered my Well because it would cost over $100K to bring electricity up my mountain to my well. I have 3 out buildings and my well all with Electricity from my Solar Setup, for my situation it works great and I can use all the power I want during the DAY! But at night time about the only thing you can use is Lights, a TV and keep the fridge going.
8 350 Watt 24 volt Panels $125 Each NEW!
1 MPPT 60 amp Charge Controller $175 on EBAY NEW
8 225 Amp 6 volt Golf Cart Batteries $90 each at Costco NEW
1 Magnum MS4024PAE 240 Volt Grid Tie Inverter $2500
misc boxes,breakers,wiring,... A few hundred dollars.
my system puts out 50 amps DC solar power during the day and the well uses 84 amps DC, so the batteries never really go down in voltage much and are fully recharged in less than an hour after the well shuts off, The well is setup on a float valve on a 10,000 gallon tank and runs about 40 minutes per cycle.
This runs everything flawlessly but it isn’t designed to run ANYTHING or very much at Night because of the storage capabilities, If I made it 80-100 Batteries and 40-50 panels it would run a house, but it wouldn’t be very cost effective.
“Make the batteries in the cars, directly charge from daytime PV energy.
Make household power from those same EV batteries at night.”
Use batteries in the car and make it so they can connect to the 240-volt cables of the house.
Have a second set of batteries connected to supply the 120-volt cables of the house.
The 240-volt cables supply the AC, stove and water heater, all of which use large amounts of electricity. If there’s no car in the garage, probably no one is at home and there’s no need to run the AC, stove or water heater. The major exception would be teenagers in the afternoon, in which case the AC would be powered via the panels without need to access car batteries.
The 120-volt cables supply low consumption devices (such as LED light bulbs) in general. The refrigerator uses moderate amounts of power.
“Make the batteries in the cars, directly charge from daytime PV energy”
difficult to do that with household panels when those EVs are all parked at work during the daylight hours ...
For me, just having the panels on my house is sufficient (along with my Tesla, always parked in the driveway), as that SENDS THE MESSAGE to others that I care about the future of the planet. Hooking the panels to the grid doesn’t help with that message (and costs money), so why bother doing it?
“I wonder how much sooner your car battery would need to be replaced if you use it to power your home?”
I use USB tethering off my cell phone to connect to the Internet. My cell phone charges up and discharges several times a day. The cell phone battery seems to be holding up. This setup is similar in terms of battery cell cycling.
This method has the advantage of ensuring my cell phone is nearly fully charged most of the time.
Well, for me, at $50-100/month electric bills, depending on AC season, it’d take a long, long time for that $30,000 solar installation to pay for itself, assuming that it could even generate enough electricity to meet my demand. And that’s not including the cost of future maintenance (battery replacement, cleaning of panels, etc.). And borrowing $30,000 isn’t free either - there’s interest on that debt.
If you’re going to go with solar, at least do the homework first.
I read recently that Westinghouse is working to build small scale (300 Megawatt) nuclear power stations.
Hopefully, we won’t be making nearly every house in the USA into an eyesore.
“Trust, but verify.”
Ronald Reagan
There are 2 or 3 entities exploring the small scale nuclear reactor, and several utilities are supporting the research as well. It could be a nice fit to replace a lot of the coal plants that the dictators in DC have deemed to be the enemy, as they could be built on the same property that once was a coal plant. The ideal electrical infrastructure is already in place for the most part - multiple transmission lines exiting the plant, a robust substation bus and equipment, etc.
At the other end of the spectrum is large scale solar and wind generation. Solar at the utility level consume a HUGE amount of land, land that could serve better to raise cattle or pigs for food. Wind farms are equally a nuisance, but not for the same reasons. They have a tendency to chop up birds, and are given a waiver for that environmental disaster by the green mafia as they seek to desecrate our power system.
In both cases, a large investment in additional transmission line assets are needed to get the power from the remote generation location to the cities and industries that need the power. And, of course, building transmission lines is NOT an easy task because every single property owner along the proposed path has to be dealt with. There are numerous litigations in effect as we speak over the issue of transmission buildout that is needed to get some of the already-built alternative energy to the customers.
A friend down the street bought a Tesla. He then bought a Tesla solar system with two power walls. His system was turned on by power company almost immediately. He has an app on his phone that he can press a button and shut off the grid and be running completely off his batteries.
I don’t have a Tesla, but am considering a Tesla solar system like his.
Unless you have batteries and an acre of solar panels, you’re not firing up your a/c in the summer using solar panels.
” many grids have the right to take your power from the batteries into the grid”
What you got to worry about in this scenario is the utility drains your batteries to 50% or less, without your knowledge, and the grid fails due to a storm. The whole purpose of the batteries YOU PURCHASED was to power your place and fridges in an outage. If your utility has ‘sucked you dry’ what then !!!?
“Unless you have batteries and an acre of solar panels, you’re not firing up your a/c in the summer using solar panels.”
Mostly wrong here.
I am there. Have had hurricane outages 4 days plus.
You won’t be running the a/c at night — true. But our solar produces more in the daytime than we can store in batteries. So with proper localized management we run multiple central a/c units off-grid during the peak daylight hours despite a multi-day utility outage.
“I did the math and even with zero percent interest, he was paying almost double for the solar panels than he was paying for his electric bill.”
Yeah, but think about the warm feeling they got!
So how long does it take before those panels have paid for themselves in energy cost savings to her?
I used to go on fly in fishing trips to central Ontario Canada. The outpost cabins had a mix of energy sources. Solar power ran the water pump and lighting system. Propane gas ran the refrigerator, stove and water heater. If heat was needed, wood would be burned in in the cast iron fireplace. And of course the boats were fueled by gasoline...
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