A solarpanel on every house

[insane_alien]

if the government and/or the people of a country paid for a solar panel on their house even something like 2m^2 and a number of batteries to store excess power(like ther would be any) wouldn't they generate a significant amount of power? we could shut down the most polluting powerplants(coal and oil fired) thus saving fossil uels and helping the enviroment. buildings that are larger than the average home could also have additional panels. and obviously people could add more panels if they wanted.

any thoughts on this idea?

[GeminiinimeG]

This is a good idea and I think many wish it could happen but its just too expensive and solar pannels dont produce too enough power, they can only replace regular power for some things in your house but not all.

[insane_alien]

i'm not saying that it should provide all our power just a bit of it so we can shutdown a few powerstations that burn fossil fuels which would reduce the pollutants pumped into the atmosphere. it would also help when we have to use electric/fuel cell cars.

[GeminiinimeG]

yeah your correct then =D. what is needed is to put solar panels on a desert in order to get higher ammounts. A desolate desert is unused space and could be turned into pretty hgh ammounts of power

[insane_alien]

yeah well i live in scotland and as far as i know theres no desert around here.

[YT2095]

electric solar panels aren`t all that expensive nowadays, and of course the price Would drop significantly with greater demand for them, the way I`de do it (personaly) would be to have a panels array large enough to work a 12 volt water pump, and then have a solar water heater cycled by this pump, these heaters even work in the winter, and if you can heat a 50 gallon hot water tank by even 10c you`ve saved a considerable amount of money in electricity or fuel, in the summer this water can can even have a 50c increase, it would ceratainly subsidise your heating costs!

[AL]

if the government and/or the people of a country paid for a solar panel on their house even something like 2m^2 and a number of batteries to store excess power(like ther would be any) wouldn't they generate a significant amount of power?

Here in California, the power companies have a program whereby a solar panel on your house would feed energy back into the power grid if you generated excess power, so there's no need to get batteries. Excess power you generate and feed into the grid also go into lowering your energy bill, which is a nice bonus.

 

we could shut down the most polluting powerplants(coal and oil fired) thus saving fossil uels and helping the enviroment. buildings that are larger than the average home could also have additional panels. and obviously people could add more panels if they wanted.

any thoughts on this idea?

Sounds easy, but there are some complications. Consider that not everyone lives in a sunny area. I spent a month in Seattle in summer, and I am not engaging in hyperbole when I say I never once saw the sun over that city. Also consider that many people live or work in high rise buildings and apartments that consume a lot of power, but offer very little surface area for collecting solar power, so there will still be a need for non-solar energy sources.

[swansont]

electric solar panels aren`t all that expensive nowadays, and of course the price Would drop significantly with greater demand for them

 

While that's certainly true, it must also be noted that silicon cost is low because the solar panel industry can use the remnants of Si that isn't quite good enough for the electronics chip industry, so they are basically using scraps, and that (sort-of artificially) lowers the cost. Part of the reason that the more-efficient GaAs is more expensive is that it's made mainly for PV cells alone. In any large-scale electricity production mode, you'd want to go with the higher efficiency.

 

As fossil fuel costs rise, the payback time for investment in PV systems will become shorter, and thus the investment will become more attractive in areas that have sunshine and relatively cheap real estate. Pure economics will drive this at some point. I think it's a little bit of wait-and-see to see who can get into the game when the prices drop, rather than being the first mover.

[calbiterol]

Here in California, the power companies have a program whereby a solar panel on your house would feed energy back into the power grid if you generated excess power, so there's no need to get batteries. Excess power you generate and feed into the grid also go into lowering your energy bill, which is a nice bonus.

 

I would like to add two things. First, the need for batteries is not to store excess energy because there's nowhere for it to go - it's because solar cells don't produce energy consistently. What if you have a day that's excessively cloudy and/or dark? The batteries store unused energy on good days for use on bad days when there is a defecit of available solar energy.

 

Second, there are some designs out there that focus solar energy for heating applications, such as the driving of a sterling engine attached to a generator. This, it should be noted, is far more efficient than normal solar panels. There's already a thread on the efficiency though, it's in engineering, IIRC.

 

Oh, and most states have the same requirement of the power companies - they must pay you for putting energy into the grid. Some people attach solar equipment straight (and only) to the grid, and are paid more for their power than it costs them to buy it back from the power company, especially after their reduced rates. In other words, they are actually earning money from their power company by buying power from them.

[Callipygous]

i dont know about other states, but you cant make profit off of it in california. you can earn back your entire bill, but its just a reduction to your bill, not selling your energy to the company. so the best you can do is not have an electric bill.

 

my teacher did it to his house. its really not a cheap project. he got 2 arrays of panals on his house, i dont remember the exact dimensions, but it was something on the order of 10ft x 25ft for each array. they put out enough power that, with the difference in winter and summer output and all that, throughout the year he breaks even. he puts back as much power as he uses. so its making him around $150 a month. he says it should pay for itself in around 15 years.

 

i should also note that he got some pretty awesome discounts for various things. i think it came out to about 2/3 price in the end.

[insane_alien]

You don't need to put all excess power back in the grid since if there is no demand for it(i.e a very sunny day) it would need to be stored somewhere. why not have a distributed power storage system as well?

[YT2095]

actualy, when you charge a battery (or even a bank of them) you get Hydrogen gas as a product too, that in turn could be used for small scale power generation to provide the lights where these batteries are kept, and make maintainence of them alot easier!

 

Waste not, Want not

[insane_alien]

true unless its a lithium battery but they are damn expensive

[ecoli]

yeah your correct then =D. what is needed is to put solar panels on a desert in order to get higher ammounts. A desolate desert is unused space and could be turned into pretty hgh ammounts of power

 

Yep, that's a well known fact in Israel. While I was at the Weizman Institute, I saw accelerators that run completely off of solar energy. It was pretty amazing.

[Callipygous]

You don't need to put all excess power back in the grid since if there is no demand for it(i.e a very sunny day) it would need to be stored somewhere. why not have a distributed power storage system as well?

 

 

because batteries are expensive and have lifespans. its much cheaper and easier to just pump it back into the system and still buy your power from the company, then just give it back to them with your solar.

 

the power company has much more efficient batteries than you. they are called lakes. all they have to do is reduce the flow during the summer (when the houses are more able to carry themselves) and then release more in winter when solar production goes down.

[Lance]

It takes energy to make solar cells and batteries. The energy that is no longer being sent to your house is now being sent to the factories that are making the cells. You're not actually saving energy. Also, if demand goes up then cost also goes up which is one of the reasons you see gas prices rise after disasters.

[Callipygous]

It takes energy to make solar cells and batteries. The energy that is no longer being sent to your house is now being sent to the factories that are making the cells. You're not actually saving energy.

 

so you think making a solar cell takes more energy than that cell will produce during its entire lifespan?

[Locrian]

It's worth mentioning that there are some very different designs for solar cells that may come in the future. Thin film is one area, and using quantum dots is another. Currently these technologies are very new and with few exceptions have not begun production, much less mass production. However, by utilizing them, solar panels may more than triple their efficiency.

 

This would send solar panels skyrocketing from an expensive but clean power source, to a cheap and clean power source. They'll never be our sole source of power, but there is reason to expect that in the coming decades they could become a serious player.

 

If anyone would like further information on these I'd be happy to post more of what I know.

[jutntog1]

Sory (cant read the whole post) but it sounds like a great idea, i was just thinking the other day that they should do that, they should even make it a tax deduction to let the goverment install it (free of charge) then use it.... but woudlnt it work to just build more solar panal field? why do they need to be on houses?

[Locrian]

If direct solar to electrical power conversion through solar panels was cost effective there would be great advantage to having them directly on houses instead of out in solar fields. First off, it places electrical generation right in one place it is needed. Wind power is actually pretty cheap, but one of the greatest problems wind power faces is getting the electricity from the wind farms to the big cities. It would be more expensive to install the power delivery necessary to move the electricity from the solar panel field to areas where it is used than it would be to just generate it at those places.

 

Secondly, it reduces the use of land space. Let's say solar power becomes cheap per kilowatt - it will never be cheap per square foot when compared to any traditional power source. Placing them right on houses that take up the space anyhow reduces this problem.

[mezarashi]

I've been reading a bit on advances in optical->electrical energy technologies and as Locrian mentioned, it seems promising. If our solar technology can advance to the point where we can get reasonable voltages and current from a roof-top installation, I think that we will start seeing commercial production. They would need to work in non-direct sunlight too I suppose (i.e. cloudy weather)

 

There is one other factor however that continues to stop us from using it as the only source of energy, that is, our inability to save this energy as it is a fact that sunshine doesn't shine all the time. Along with solar technology needs to come battery technology. We could always of course have a complex power grid so that we can relay power from areas in sunlight. Either this or we develop efficient wireless energy transmission systems to beam in solar energy harvested from space. It's exciting to speculate how our harvesting of energy will morph over time. Considering that fossil fuels run out in 50 years, I guess we will start seeing major changes in our lifetimes.

[Martin]

You don't need to put all excess power back in the grid since if there is no demand for it(i.e a very sunny day) it would need to be stored somewhere. why not have a distributed power storage system as well?

 

Isnt a sunny day in LA when people turn on their air conditioners a lot?

 

so maybe the demand would match the PV supply

[insane_alien]

yeah i suppose. hey if they generate power it all helps at least until we can get a fusion reaction where we get a net energy gain.