I guess a better way of asking the question would be, "Will $10,000 buy twice the generating capacity today than it did at the end of 2009?"

Pretty much. May even be more due to the oversupply the last few months.

FTBoomer1 wrote..

Most of you are still not grasping the implications of solar following Moore's law.

Moore's law depends on building integrated circuits on an ever-smaller geometrical scale factor AND more efficient logic circuits that create less heat.

Neither factor applies to solar cells. There are definite quantum-mechanical limits that wont be surpassed, ever.

We may discover ways of making thinner cells, but power return scales by area, not by volume.

We may be able to layer several junctions on top of each other and achieve higher efficiencies, but one junction will shade the other and there is a definite quantum-mechanical limit on achievable efficiencies. Not quite as draconian as the laws of thermodynamics, but close.

Even if we do figure out how to make thinner or more efficient cells, the cost of packaging, wiring, bracing against wind, energy storage to average over 24 hours arent going to get too much cheaper, ever.

There aint much more development possible: volume, efficiency, mass, or cost or energy storage. Perhaps a factor of 20% or so in each category.

I dont see any kind of development making PV solar competitive with fossil fuels. What will make PV solar competitive is the cost of fossil fuels jumping by a factor of 5 or 10. Either Saudi peak oil OR a shooting war in Hormuz straits will do that.

It will be a poorer life for us all if PV solar is a better deal than fossil fuels.

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You need to do this before you drop 20-30k on solar/wind power...once you do, you'll realize that the payback is a LONG ways off.

Odds are the Collaspe is about 1 - 4 years away. My forecast is Spring Solstice 2013. So, one could wait until the price of the 'system' is more affordable through devaluation but one is taking a chance on not being able to buy it at any price, you know, the components may not be available. Also, the price of energy may change drastically to the upside. Also, need to factor in the inevitable 'knock' on the door and off you go to indefinite detention, or in the alternative the 'mobs' come and you're 'done in' that way. On the other hand, if the system continues on a 'normal' track then you'll have a decent system and life goes on.

What's the downside of doing it now? Take the risk,

The lowest right now is around $1.50 a watt on a decent 240 watt panel with +10/-5 tolerances in bulk. That higher tolerance shouldn't matter if you use micro inverters which are about $150 each. If you want lower tolerances you will pay more for the panels and less for the inverters. That is about a dollar a watt less than it was two year ago, but you have to realize the manufacturers are getting all kinds of govt incentives in the last two years which is distorting the reality of the manufacturing costs.

Nidster, you listed the downside to doing it now. If it all comes apart, you'll have a more efficient home that doesn't require much energy (electric or otherwise) to operate...and those 'mobs'...you don't think they'll see your solar panels and wind gen and think they've hit the jackpot? Those are going to literally scream to the mobs "Come take our stuff, we have some great stuff here!!"

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Also, need to factor in the inevitable 'knock' on the door and off you go to indefinite detention

Seriously? If that happens, you've thrown that cash away anyway.

Get the home to be super efficient asap...then you won't need near as much 'green' stuff to keep it operational.

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On the other hand, if the system continues on a 'normal' track then you'll have a decent system and life goes on. efficient home that requires less than half the energy than before to build your system on.

Thanks, Mpilar for the advice and the genuine concern. My house was built in 1889 and for it to be 'super efficient' would be, well, difficult. Thin film PV on a 12:12 pitched roof is not the type of 'bling' that many would want to try and 'rip-off'. Same with a wind turbine. It can be a bit scary way up there on my roof to say the least. Unique situation, eh? I see we live, sort of, close to one another. All the best my friend, we may need each other in the days ahead.

I have been working on solar stuff for my place for about three years now. Work great powering vent fans when the sun is shining, great at maintaining my batteries for 12/24v systems. Great for lighting and running small demand water pump. Setting up a system that would run Air Conditioning, multiple tv's, blow dryers and **** like that would be very very expensive. I guess if I had the money required for that.....I would just get another quiet Diesel generator and a few thousand gallons of diesel!!

One word: Batteries.

I want a few panels for the SHTF scenario, temporary or permanent. Just enough to charge batteries, keep some low wattage lights on, and run well pump a few times a day.

But I don't want to sink a lot of money into solar. I'm waiting to get a Rossi, home fusion unit.

Marvin,

My first point that i agree with you on is that energy storage changes the picture. I discount energy storage outright. That is a separate technology that makes solar very unattractive. I am assuming micro generation and access to the grid for base generation power for normal users and off-the-grid types will have to do something else for power storage as i doubt batteries will ever be the answer. I have enough experience with battery systems in IT to make me think batteries will never be viable. A PV install will be expected to last 30 years. I believe they will but there is no battery technology available or on the near horizon that I am aware of that can make that claim. I believe that off the grid installs will use water towers and micro hydro, and/or thermal batteries to store the energy. They do not have great conversion efficiencies but I am betting the relative reliability will more than make up for the efficiency loss.

As for solar there have been many innovations in coatings, thin-film, layered cells, etc. A quick consult with the goog on the subject netted this: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/gues....

My interest in the topic is as my side residential construction business has bankrupted me, I am looking to solar as the possible next wave of a business. From the years of looking at this through the that view I see it as nearly viable and competitive with grid power, within the limitations of partial availability.

I agree with another one of your points that the physical plant price will not go down significantly. I will say that I doubt it will matter as these systems will be either subsidized or financed and the ROI will have very little to do with install cost over a long term but rather useful conversion of the system will be king as the kWh saved will have more impact on the ROI equation than the install cost.

alot of fail in this thread.

The post is not about solar panels in peoples homes, it is about solar as a power generation source for grid. Solar can indeed make sense in a few situations, like out in bfe where the cost of a power line is 50 grand - yes investing 30k in solar makes tons of sense then. But if your a power company and looking to invest in new plants, solar is a disaster. It's expensive, it requires tons of real estate, it does not output at night, it does not output much. Those thinking of the solar panels and led light kits need to understand that solar is a pittance compared to oil based fuels. Here is a thought exercise. Picture your car, likely some massive 5000 pound SUV. Picture pushing it 1 mile. Think about how much energy it would take to push it one mile. Now imagine pushing it 18 miles, because thats the amount of energy in 1 gallon of long chain hydrocarbons. Solar is a ****ing joke when compared to hydrcarbon fuels. If it was viable, the country would be covered in them - there are power companies investing hundreds of millions to billions in new plants EVERY year. If solar was net positive even on net 10 year - it would be everywhere. It's not.

One minor thing Karl -

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But the competition for peaking plants today is natural gas

The correct term for those generation units is "peakers"

"German solar firms go from boom to bust"

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/12/14....

"Subsidies, or so-called feed-in tariffs, through which operators of solar panels receive a guaranteed price for the electricity they generate, made Germany the world's largest solar market and had created 150,000 jobs by 2010.

But over the past two years, Germany has sharply reduced the tariffs, and a recent proposal to limit subsidies for new solar installations may seal the industry's fate.

Now, German solar companies are either laying off staff or putting them on reduced working hours. The contrast with the broader economy is stark. Overall, German unemployment has steadily declined in recent years as Europe's biggest economy outperforms its rivals in Europe.

Since the end of last year, roughly 5,000 companies involved in the solar business have shut up shop, shedding about 20,000 jobs, according to German solar industry group BSW."

{more at the link}

Solar and wind power have no business being hooked up to a power grid. Their 'driver' is incapable of providing reliable base load generation capacity or reliable peak load generation capacity.

There is simply no way around those fundamental issues, and blowing ANY Public Money on them, to me, is fraudulent abuse of Public wealth, and deserving of jail time.

That said, I am a big fan of both for small scale off grid application - but buy it yourself with your own money, if you have an off grid use for them.

I hope to pick up both in the next couple of years (my place is well off grid).

"Is the performance of solar cells being sold today twice that of those being sold at the end of 2009?"

He means production cost in dollars per watt or some similar measure of "performance". Production cost is falling to about half every 6 years. This long standing trend had a fairly big glitch in recent years; with prices lingering at a high level before suddenly collapsing back to where they were "supposed" to have been.

Cost is no longer dominated by production cost. It's dominated by all the other stuff. If you're installing solar panels on your roof, the photovoltaics in the panels may only cost $1/W to make; but you'll pay perhaps $5/W for the fully assembled module, the mounting systems, the installation cost, the inverters, tying into the grid and so on. If you're going to use battery backup(because the electrical grid is emphatically NOT a battery and all energy put into it is used almost immediately) that's a HUGE extra cost.

There are other, indirect costs of solar panels. If the panels are improperly installed they are a fire hazzard(EnergySafety WA in Australia audited 260 residential PV systems and found 12 to be incorrectly wired and posing a fire hazzard). And if there's a major fire in a house with PV, the firefighters need to take extra precautions to avoid electrocution, which takes time; by then the house may be so damaged already that they chose "controlled burn" rather than fighting the fire.

If you're going to build the panels in a big array on the ground in the middle of nowhere; you can't just plopp them down and wire them up. Land isn't gratis. Grading land isn't necessarily cheap. Spraying binders and herbicides isn't particularly environmentally friendly. Grid connection can be very expensive(and is usually heavily subsidized). Inverters and other electrical components still aren't free.

On price/performance, are the cheap ****ty Chinese panels being pumped out now of a comparable quality to panels that were produced in the past (ie ones as mentioned that have lasted 25 years?)? I have my doubts, and that throws the entire price/performance calculation out the window.

Solar for baseload aint happening anytime soon, as there is a finite amount of solar energy and the efficiency of panels isnt even close to what you need. A molten salt solar plant isnt a terrible idea, but its not cost effective nor able to produce power on a large enough scale.

As for solar in the home it has it place. Heating hot water is the obvious one, drying clothes another (i bet a lot of homes with solar panels on the roof use clothes dryers!). However building a home with heating, ventilation and position in mind can drastically reduce energy consumption and is a much better way to go than tacking on some dodgy **** panels on your roof.

My old man's double brick 3900 square foot house costs bugger all to heat or keep cool. Its north facing and build like a bunker, concrete slabs top and bottom and properly insulated. The orientation of doors and windows is such that the night breeze can blow through. It has no air con, and doesnt need it, even though summer temperatures easily get to 95 and on occasion 100. They use a small natural gas heater in the winter (temps can get down to 20 in winter) to heat the living/family room and kitchen...although the upstairs bedrooms have ducted natural gas heating they dont use it.

Contrast that with my house, almost impossible to get the breeze going through (even though its a nightly sea breeze), requires air con in summer and heating in winter even though winter temps are a lot milder. Rubbish construction, poor positioning, no regard to heating, cooling or breeze. I reckon, even though its less than a third of the size, it costs more to heat and cool than my old man's place. Cant wait to knock this ****er down and build something proper.

Despite my two posts to this thread debunking base load solar, I'm not down on the PV technology in the right applications.

I'm considering picking up some panels and supporting infrastructure, and a chest freezer to use as a refrigerator. Perhaps waste energy would be dumped into hot water heating.

It turns out that a significant fraction of household energy use is for food refrigeration. I calculate that a solar boost would have a pretty quick payback. The bulk of the energy storage would be in "coolth", and the chest freezer could stay cold for a few days.

This technology is NOT what Karl was describing in his ticker. It would let meet keep food stored through power outages.

The chest freezer "works" because it doesn't let all the cold air out every time it is opened. A traditional side-by-side or similar refrigerator device is built for convenience, not energy efficiency. In terms of the latter they SUCK.

My approach - if I wasn't a renter - just tear apart the fridge, add 1' solid insulation plus radiant barrier, put the coils where they can be easily accessed & cleaned, add some extra mass on the inside of the insulation - could be bricks or whatever. Maybe add a glass door behind the solid door so you can look without losing cold air. Maybe have redundant cooling system with failover so if a compressor goes out you just swap out the bad one at your convenience. Ideally the back of the fridge faces a hallway, so to work on it you open the slatted door (to allow airflow) swing out he coils on their hinge - or they're screwed to the back of the door and swing out with it - and all/most of the working parts are laid out there on the exterior, outside of the insulation. You could have a vent to the basement below so cooler air gets pulled up across the coils.

I imagine a setup like that would keep cool a long time in a power outage. And with the cooling sytem having to turn on less often, all the parts ought to last a lot longer. And I'd think, if you DIY it couldn't be too expensive. And it should pay for itself eventually. Ah the joys of homeownership. If only. Heh.

My wife and I run a small nursery business on our property. We are looking at a Honeywell solar hot water heating system to heat the floor of the greenhouse and, thus, heat the roots of the plants which, combined with sunlight... you get the idea.

We estimate we will still have to spend around $1500 on propane to heat the greenhouses when the temp in them at night goes below 40 degrees.

Our "payday" is the week leading up to mothers day. We sell thousands of hanging flower baskets. We also sell geraniums to Bi-Mart, which was profitable.

The system will pay for itself in 4 years, we estimate, in saved propane costs.

When talking about solar I think it is important to differentiate the country/region. The US? Sure lots of cheap nat gas, coal, nuclear and infrastructure. Other parts of the world? no coal, no nat gas, no nuclear, no infrastructure!

And maybe some countries that do not have these resources that pay 5+ times more for energy then we in the states do find it a worthy alternative to either 1. expensive imports or 2. maintaining their sovereignty from unstable middle east or tyrannical Russia that will either shut off with the new sectarian violence or revolution flavor of the month; OR gladly shut off there gas/power to hold that country hostage to either higher price or move that country to the political will of russia.

Not every country has the benefit of US's resources/prices and solar in other parts of the world is closer to grid parity or needed to maintain some sort of leverage to keep their sovereignty

Sundanzer has an excellent 12v chest freezer. I have two 120 watt panels and a sixty amp hour deep cycle battery hooked to it. The freezer is expensive...my cost was in the neighborhood of 1500 bucks after shipping.....but this thing is awesome.