Solar Power

[Ret60sp]

Any solar system for your house without batteries is half a system, your batteries must be compatible with your inverters; inverters go obsolete, I also have a 29 panel system for my house, I also have 2 enphase batteries with enphase inverters, it runs the entire house, leave out the water heater, clothes dryer, microwave and stove. This system with a nice generic generator on it would be a good thing, with the right software, u could charge your batteries for the solar system off your generator, u could also fry your system doing this, better know what your doing!...I don’t do this to mine....About affordability, my system will never pay for its self in my life time, it was $62,000, with a 25 year guarantee, batteries last about 15 to 20 years..if your looking for affordable do not go solar!..also an EMP blast will fry your inverters. I hope this information helps someone make a decision...if your a green nut? Then consider the lithium in these batteries, and disposing them in 20 years ! Lithium is very toxic, should probably never be mined!

Its always fun to enlighten one of those Tesla owners who thinks they are going to install a solar system at their house to charge their Tesla. A system large enough to recharge a Tesla actually costs as much as that Tesla. Most Tesla's have a 100Kw battery. Some of the emerging EV's have much larger batteries. Right now the average LIFEPO4 battery costs $0.39 per watt delivered to your door, but not installed. That's $39K for a 100Kw battery bank, or 20 x EG4-LL batteries from Signature Solar.. The amount of solar paneling needed to charge that bank is no less than 60 x 400 watt panels, or 24,000 watts of solar paneling - $16K. 24K of PV will charge a 100Kw battery bank in 5 hours. Why not 4 hours? Because the 400 watt panel rating is NOT what the panels produce in the wild. Expect 375 watts on a cool clear day, and less than that if its anything less than perfect outdoors. Factor line loss, inverter inefficiencies and PV angle and your 24k array might produce +/- 20K from 10am - 2pm. All of this PV requires a really large roof or two Sinclair ground mount racks - $12k. To manage 24k of PV the (arguable) best current option is to install two Sol-Ark 15k inverter/chargers - $16k. Copper wiring is astronomically expensive these days, and depending on how far the runs are for your DC conductors from the array to the inverters, you could easily add another $10K in wiring, conduit, disconnects, breakers, and miscellaneous electrical gadgets. Its prudent to pay someone who knows how to install all of this, and the installation costs are no less than $15K for a system this size.

Add it all up and 39+16+12+16+10+15= $108K. Sure, you might get a 30% rebate and end up with an actual cost of $70K, but this scenario is what it would actually take to charge ONE EV, only needing to charge it 35-50% daily and the rest goes to powering the home and its loads.

BTW - Sol-Ark inverters are designed like Swiss Army knives. The new 15K has 200 amp pass through and can control a whole home standby generator to recharge the battery bank when the weather sucks. We are waiting for their EMP hardened version of the 15k to hit the street. Right now we have the 12k EMP and its sufficient for our needs.

 

[Ret60sp]

Solar Power: the renewable Burden on American Tax Payers

excerpt from an article I wrote for the local "mullet wrap".........

Solar-photovoltaic power is not a “green” technology. Being “green” is a deceptive PC-socialist-political invention that is designed to make people feel good about living lavishly riding the backs of productive taxpayers without having to put forth any effort to understand, much less solve the underlying problems associated with “green” energy. While solar-photovoltaic power is relatively clean at the point of production, the manufacture and installation of the necessary solar-photovoltaic components needed to produce it is not.

There are virtually no USA manufacturers of solar-photovoltaic cells today due to environmental regulations. Over 75% of the solar poly-silicone, cadmium telluride and silicon tetrachloride cells produced today are made in China where there are no environmental controls whatsoever. It is only a matter of time, (think Fukushima) until the pollution from foreign manufacturing and toxic waste dumping reaches us here, notwithstanding the pollution from disposal of existing solar-photovoltaic products are probably here now.

Factories around the world that produce solar-photovoltaic components are spewing fossil fuel pollutants into the environment simply because using solar power to produce their own solar energy-producing products is cost prohibitive. There is a host of environmentally hazardous chemical-cocktails involved in the manufacture of photovoltaic cells such as tri-methyl gallium, tri-methyl aluminum, tri-methyl indium, and other tri-ethyl derivatives including hydrogen-selenide, di-methyl-hydrazine, silane, and worst of all, arsine. As an example, a typical solar-photovoltaic-component manufacturing facility with a 10 MW/year production of flat-panel solar-photovoltaic-modules will put about 25 tons of arsine a year into the environment. Arsine is a chemical with toxicity equal to methyl-isocyanide, the chemical released in the Bhopal/Union Carbide incident. Include the pollution from the mining, processing, and transportation of raw-materials used by the solar-photovoltaic industry, and a different picture of “green” energy unveils.

While solar energy from the sun is free, harnessing it into usable AC-electrical energy is not.

The cost of solar-photovoltaic AC-power, at the point of production is several times higher than the cost of the same power produced by coal burning plants. A typical Georgia Power bill using only utility based solar-photovoltaic energy could be 2 to 3 times higher than one based on the current combination of energy sources.

Solar power inverters do not produce reactive power for powering inductive loads, nor do they function when a cloud comes over the array. So, the utiility must have essentially 100% spinning reserve to cover the reactive load that should be (but cannot be) produced by the inverters, and the likelihood that a solar producing plant can shutdown at any time, especially during cloudy or rainey weather.

However, government promotion of solar and wind power in the USA today, is simply another socialist one-way wealth-redistribution scheme and a regressive tax on rate-payers.

Don't forget that when solar panels die, usually after 5 years or so, they are considered hazardous waste, and must be disposed of at considerable expense....kind of like a death tax.

However, rest assured that somewhere hidden in the taxpayer-funding for all government-subsidized solar projects is usually an embedded “gift” for someone, somewhere.

There is a really good documentary "The Dark Side of Green Energies" that mirrors what you are saying here. The problem is our government is NOT investing in cleaner energy research. A positive fusion reaction was supposedly accomplished recently, but they are saying it'll be another 10 years before anything might become commercially available along those lines. Let a plandemic hit and they'll produce a "vaccination" overnight, but let there be a power problem and where's the plandemic for that? I guess we should be tankful - if the fusion reactor were as "safe and effective" as the so called "vaccination" we would either be in the dark from it, or all radioactive.

 

[Seacap]

I sought information on off-grid whole=house solar system with battery backup awhile back, I could not make the numbers work for me, my monthly electric bill is only $120 so this system has a 41 year break-even point, and panels output actually begins to slowly degrade over 30-35 years and require replacement, as do batteries and generator prolly won't last 41 years either.

Solar panel array, $30,000
Battery storage $10,000
Inverter $3,000
20kw backup generator to power house in emergency and for charging batteries on cloudy/stormy days $11,000
Rent a 500-gallon Propane tank plus install and run gas lines $500 (or buy $3,000)
Propane gas to fill propane tank $1,500
Electrical components, wiring and labor to interconnect to the house, $7,000

I truly wanted it to work for me, I wanted to be free of "the man" most my life, so it's disappointing

If u buy your own propane tank, u can shop around for deals on propane..other wise you have to fill at whom ever u lease tank from tanks

 

[Porter Rockwell]

I’m also hoping that technology continues to make great strides forward and within 5-10 years solar is more efficient and affordable

 

[Seacap]

Again, payoff, payoff and payoff.

I am 100 percent electric house, so only use propane in my backup generator.

The 50cents per gallon savings on 400 gallons every 3 or 4 years is only $200 saved ($50 per year)

Cost of buying a 500g tank is currently $2500 if you can even find someone selling new (or $4000 underground tank).

$2500 divided by $50 is a whopping 50 years payoff/break-even point ???

Personally I didn’t get solar to save, I got it to be away from company’s, and be self sufficient no bills, property tax once a year, and I set up a stock account that pays for that, my world stays the same!

 

[Seacap]

Your POV is skewed and/or you're in denial. Your stock account is controlled by companies and contrary to (your claim of) being self sufficient.

Lol

 

[Seacap]

Lol

Guess u didn’t want to talk solar..argue with someone else

 

[cdb400]

Not sure if this applies, but have ya'll considered using less?

 

[Ret60sp]

If u buy your own propane tank, u can shop around for deals on propane..other wise you have to fill at whom ever u lease tank from tanks

We own all of our tanks, all underground, and you are correct....owning your tank(s) makes it possible to get better deals on the per-gallon cost. And, having LARGE tanks makes purchasing LPG only necessary every three years or so - or NEVER if the SHTF tank is kept full and doesn't have a leak and the **** never hits the oscillating apparatus.

 

[Ret60sp]

I am 100 percent electric house, so only use propane in my backup generator.

The approx 50-cents per gallon savings on buying 400 gallons every 3 or 4 years to fill my generator's propane tank is only $200 saved.. or $50 per year.

Cost of buying a new 500g propane tank is currently $2500 or around $4000 installed for underground tank.

$2500 cost divided by $50 per-year savings is 50 years for my payoff/break-even


.

Let the SHTF and your above ground propane tank will more than likely develop a .223 or .308 caliber leak in it because thats just how mean people will get.