Whatever happened to Solar Power?

What with all the hubbub about oil lately, I was wondering whatever went wrong with solar energy? A cursory web search turned up such statements as:

And

(http://www.xs4all.nl/~solomon/)

I know from my days teaching semiconductor physics that solar (photovoltaic) cells aren’t a great source of current on demand, and would not be able to replace your home power needs by a long shot unless you had several acres of land on which to lay solar panels end-to-end. But couldn’t a few panels on your rooftop make at least a dent in your draw from the commercial power grid?

Then there are the passive methods of using solar energy- thermal collection systems for year-round home heating that don’t rely on solar cells or storage batteries. To some extent, the passive heat pump used in some newer houses (where ducts exchange heat between the house & the earth) work on solar power to the extent that solar energy heats the ground. Now that I think about it, heat that far down probably comes from the earth itself rather than the sun, but this is just as unpopular as solar.

Anybody have solar panels or a wind mill? They seem like nifty ways to cheat- er, lessen our reliance on oil. Whatever the case, oil will eventually dry up. Maybe not for another 20 or 30 years but how long are we going to wait before we get a real harness on solar power?

I’d love to see solar used more. But I hear mixed reviews about it’s cost-benefit. For example, it may take a homeowner a long time to recover installation costs based on the slight decrease in the electric bill. And like you said, the efficiency of solar collectors is not the best. One big problem is for people who live in non-sunny regions (an obvious point, but oft-forgotten).

But it has great potential if the technology can be improved or produced more cheaply. I think solar power could be a great way to supplement the overall power generation requirements, but it’s not a cure-all.

Outside of heating water, solar ebnergy is a big loser. PV-solar justs costs too much, and there is no efficient way to store the power.
Wind power is another farce-despite decades of research and building, Denmark (the leader in windmill technology) gets barely 3% of its electric power from the wind.
The real answer-nuclear power!

There was an informative thread on this very subject last month, although it did sort of get hijacked into a political issue.

Not Solar Power again! We seem to go over this topic regularly. There was a more recent thread about biofuels also. Search the board and I am sure you will find at least half a dozen threads on these topics.

The people who are paying for the research…the energy companies…have no real reason (aside from altruism, heh) to put money into the development of non-centralized energy systems. (Government research had its funds chopped about ten minutes after Ronald Reagan took office in 1980. Clinton/Gore hasn’t spent too many sleepless nights over restoring it.)

As corporations, their main goal is to maximize profits for shareholders (even the conservatives and libertarians and reactionaries here should be able to agree with that statement, right?).

Funding solar/wind/geothermal research and finding economical ways for people to create their own energy and lessen their dependence on the commercial power grid would only SHRINK future profits.

Of course, they also like to encourage jokes about hippies in Birkenstocks freezing in the dark, and “Solar energy? Whaddaya do iffen in RAINS? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!” Its better for them if people don’t seriously THINK about alternative energy sources.

Hold your noses and pay what we ask, suckers.

There WERE a lot of proposals for Solar that weren’t flaky, but they weren’t followed up. The Meinels and their “solar farms”, the plans for orbiting solar power panel arrays. (I forget the name of the guy who proposed those – which is too bad, as I’ve heard him lecture.) One problem is lack of funding and commitment. Another is that some hoped-for breakthroughs (at one time they were predicting biologically-based cells with 80% efficiency, rather than silicon’s top of 18%)never took place.

Solar energy may not be the answer, but what about geothermal energy? There’s plenty of energy under our feet and as Yellowstone demonstrates, sometimes not very far under our feet. I heard a while back that Mexico was doing very well with geothermal energy. The last post stated that the economic powers won’t allow it, but isn’t it practical? Does anyone have the straight dope on this?

The efficiency of your typical PV panel is pathetically low. And it gets worse: according to Don Lancaster, “not ONE net watt has ever been produced by a PV panel.”

The only way a PV panel could compete with your utility grid is for one or more of the following to happen:

  1. There is a dramatic increase in PV efficiency
  2. There is a dramatic decrease in PV production costs
  3. The cost of grid power exceeds the cost of PV power

None of the above is likely to happen soon. In fact, I’d wager it won’t happen in my lifetime, unless the following happens:

  1. The government forces people to use PV panels and other patently inefficient sources of power.

The above, of course, has already happened in other areas.

There is also debate concerning the use of passive methods for heating your home or hot water using solar energy. One person who posts here - I believe it’s Sailor or Engineer Don - has a solar heating system on his house. He made some calculations and determined that it was actually cheaper to use power supplied by the utility company.

http://www.firstsolar.com Incidentally, Dan Quayle is on the board of directors of First Solar. Again, I’ll see if I can get my buddy, who’s in the First Solar R&D department to post something here. He said he was going to post is the last thread and never got around to it, I guess.

As it happens, I just discussed the idea of satellite-based solar power a friend yesterday. The reason that nobody’s done it is that there’s a very serious concern that nefarious persons could use the satellite as an orbiting death ray. Think about all of the energy they’d be beaming down to earth from the satellite. If misdirected, it could kill an entire city! Noone wants to risk a real-life Goldeneye or Diamonds are Forever.

UncleBeer:

Thanks for that link. I was going to say something about Solar Cells, Inc. (they’re based in my hometown, and researched at my alma mater) and I hadn’t realized they’d partnered with someone else–but it explains why they don’t have a homepage to themselves :slight_smile:

LL

The REAL reason we haven’t orbited solar power satellites is because they don’t make any sense. All they gain is the ability to produce power 24 hours a day vs maybe 12 hours for earth-based panels, plus the added efficiency of being outside the atmosphere. But what you pay for that is a huge expense in putting them in orbit, maintaining them, etc. Plus, there is some energy loss in the beam anyway, because it has to travel 24,000 miles and go through our atmosphere anyway.

If you do the math, you find that it’s much cheaper to simply build bigger panels on the Earth along with batteries to store the energy. But then if you continue doing the math, you find out that even this method doesn’t make any sense.

One little-considered fact about solar power - If we all had solar collectors on our roofs, thousands of people would be killed every year from falls.

And BTW, you still couldn’t get rid of our current electrical plants, because they are sized for maximum power demands, which typically go to industrial plants and such which can’t operate under solar anyway. The peak energy requirements might go down a bit, but not as much as you think.

And if you want to store all that energy at night and during times of bad weather, you’re going to need a LOT of batteries, which create a monstrous environmental hazard.

A few random thoughts–

As much as I hate to agree with The Friends of the Earth, the best way, in the short run, to avoid energy shortages is to conserve energy.

Some oil companies (Mobil is noted for this) do invest in alternate energy sources. The reason being, when the oil dries up, they don’t want the company to dry up. THey don’t necessarily invest alot, just enough to keep their feet in the door and to have trained people who recognize the best possible options for moving forward in that area if the time comes.

Most alternate energy proposials now are centralized locations using existing power grids for distribution. There is less work going on is single home energy sources. Two reasons exist for this. One, houses arn’t generally built where the energy is and two, the big companies are paying for research in this direction.

Ukelele Ike, you really haven’t the foggiest idea what you are talking about and you haven’t learnt anything from previous threads about this very topic. It is just too easy for you to claim a vast right wing conspiracy isn’t it? People who know what they are talking about (Anthracite for instance) have already stated the state of things. Do I really need to go over this again? <sigh> I guess I do.

Nonsense. If the energy companies saw this was a viable alternative they would try to grab it before someone else did. Example: Kodak may have no interest in developing digital photography because it competes with chemical photography but they know that if they do not join the bandwagon someone else will do it anyway and they will be left out.

And rightly so. The government is not best suited to decide what avenues of research look promising, private business is. If you really believe this looks promising I would recommend you invest your money in some of the companies working on this. But don’t force other people to invest (through the government) in things that do not look promising to them.

Yes, so they would be foolish not to invest in technologies that look promising.

Nonsense again. Somebody has to sell and install the equipment. Even if the power company is not interested in doing it there are plenty of companies already trying to get a go at it and the only reason they are not doing so well is that it is not competitive.

In several states, including California, the power company is forced by law to buy back any energy produced by consumers and they have to pay the selling rate which is just outrageous. This law was passed by people who do not have a clue in an effort to promote alternative energy and yet the result is negligible.

The power company makes money because it can sell energy at a higher price than it costs to produce it. If you force it to buy energy at the sale price it cannot make a profit on that energy which means all the overhead costs have to be charged to the energy it is producing, further endearing it and distorting the true economy of the situation. In spite of that law, practically NO ONE is selling energy to the power company.

I will remind you there is plenty of research and development going into alternative energy sources and, I for one, have a very strong interest in seeing them succeed. I have a boat and alternative energy sources would be a godsend for me. Check out the internet for key words like “solar” “alternative energy” “boat” “RV” etc and you will see dozens of companies investing in developing these things. They will be glad to sell you shares if you would want to invest in them.

Many large corporations are sinking a lot of money into developing solar cells. Check out Siemens and you will see.

I am an engineer and know the technical facts about these things. All you have to offer is theories about corporate greed and right wing conspiracies to keep innovation out.

As I have already said in every thread, the yield of photovoltaic cells is pitiful and only justified in very specific circumstances (like your solar calculator).

Solar energy can be much more efficiently used for heating purposes and this is still not economic! I know what I am talking about. My house has an installation of solar panels to heat domestic water. I have done a detailed economic study and they do not make economic sense.

The only reason they were installed in the fisrt place was because those government subsidies you like so much. The only reason they remain is that I maintain them myself and enjoy the tinkering and experimenting. Ukelele Ike, I have no doubt that if this installation were in your house it would be gone at the first sign of trouble because it costs more to maintain than it is worth it. Of course, you would still blame the right wing conspiracy… but you would get rid of them.

Let me put it this way. Anyone who says "solar is free"etc does not know what he is talking about and need to learn a bit about engineering and a bit about finances. It is like saying we should use sailships because the wind is free and they use no fuel. Guess what, using fuel is actually cheaper than not using it. If you do not understand that it means you are missing something, not that the entire rest of the world is missing something.

When I build my house I’ll be using these… http://www.solar-tec.com/SolarRoofingSystems.htm

Sailor:

Just so you know – odak may be interested in digital photography, but it hasn’t exactly pushed it enthusiastically. And Polaroid, although it had the elements of such a program, dragged its heels shamefully. Companies don’t always follow the “logical” dictates of the market. Look at IBM and the PC.

From Adam Yax’s link,
1,428 Watt Uni-Solar Shingle Utility Intertie System $12,925 (after rebate)

Assuming 7 cents / kilowatt-hour (a guess. My wife pays the bills.) it will take
$12,925 / 0.07 /1.428 = 129,302 hours to break even.

Assuming 12 hours of peak production per day, that’s 10775 days, or 29.5 years.

Yikes.

CalMeacham, you make my point. In no case was a technology not developed because company A did not do it. What happened is that company B did it and put a dent in company A. Those new technologies were developed in spite of some big companies not taking part and the result is that those companies lost big time. It was IBM’s mistake to not believe the PC would be such a big thing. Others who had more faith invested in it and won. That’s the free market. A guy by the name of Bill Gates started out with very little but faith and look at him now. Companies do make mistakes and they pay for them. When the government makes mistakes you and I pay for them. That’s the difference.

I have a solar system on my roof which, as I have explained, is pretty much worthless except for the amusement and instruction it provides me. Do you know who paid for the installation? Tha American taxpayer did. That’s who. That means you paid for me to have some worthless piece of crap on my roof… And you know what? Now I have leaks in the roof because of this. And I think I have a pretty good case to sue you and Ukelele Ike to pay for the repair because you should never have allowed the system to be installed in the first place. :slight_smile:

In all seriousness now. These panels need to come down at the first opportunity. It’s just that taking them down and disposing of them is gonna cost me more than all the energy they ever provided was worth.

>> Assuming 12 hours of peak production per day, that’s 10775 days, or 29.5 years.

ZenBeam, are you kidding? There is no way in the real world you will get 12 hours of peak production. You’d be lucky to get the equivalent of 6 hrs. Which means more like 60 years to amortize the system. Add maintenance etc and you can see there is no way it can compete for the simple reason that there’s no way it can produce energy cheaper than you can buy it. Note also the the production of PV panels decreases with age. I doubt a panel 20 years old would be worth keeping.

>> My wife pays the bills

Hey, ask her if she’ll pay mine. :slight_smile: