Climate Policy

[kandrathe]

It just the result of your faulty assumptions and wrong approach.

You just need to look around at projects (or here) to see that I am spot on. My estimates are higher, since I don't live in a particularly sunny area. However, I do live in a particularly windy area, so it might make more sense for our community to invest in wind power. (It would make more sense to use a distribution of larger 1.5MW units for every 200 homes in a community). The two biggest mistakes that people make when looking at that 1000 W/m2 of potential sunlight is that due to inclination, clouds, and atmosphere, a very small portion of the potential is procurable, and they assume that solar panel are 100% efficient in procuring what does hit them. It's more like 20% of 20%, rather than the panacea you expect.

Don't you have any feeling for numbers?

Well, yes I do.

Allright, let's calculate backwards. One Watt is 1 Joule/Second, and 1 Wh is 3600 Joule. If you need 20 kWh per day, you need 20*3600*1000 = 72.000.000 joules per day. If $3 gives you 1 joule/second for 8 hours a day (your winter conditions), it would yield 1*8*3600 = 28.800 Joules per day. So, you would need 72000000/28800 = 2500 units of $3, which is $7500. Which is 3 times the $2500 we had earlier, like I predicted.

If you've looked at the prices of solar panels, then you would know that $2500 would buy about 3 or 4, 130 watt panels. Hardly enough to generate 20,000 watt hours. I submit there is an error in your calculations and assumptions. More likely, $40,000 for solar panels (validated by the costs other people report) is a fair number.

Well, I guess that shows you are wrong too. This person has the following conclusion: "So our estimated annual power bill will drop from about $4,400 a year to less than $1,100 a year, with the average cost per kWH dropping from 25 cents to 6.3 cents. The payback time, assuming energy costs don't spike steeply, is a little under nine years."

Or, they are wrong and full of wishful thinking. One part I omitted from my calculation was that they sell their excess energy back to the grid, and borrow from the grid when they don't produce enough. This still requires you to maintain a grid. Any rational level of thinking should lead the enlightened to conclude that large centralized plants distributing power through the grid is more efficient use of resources, than many decentralized tiny power plants. This same phenomena is exhibited in computing, where there are competing strategies for centralization and decentralization. There are upsides and downsides in both strategies, so a hybrid approach is best, although I would subscribe to a manageable number of 1000-5000 MW generating facilities.