CA: Gov. Schwarzenegger to tout solar energy on reality television show.(EXtreme Makeover: Home Ed.)

Bakersfield Californian ^ | 3/26/05 | AP

[NormsRevenge]

SACRAMENTO (AP) - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is scheduled to make a cameo appearance on the ABC television show "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" on Sunday to tout the use of solar electricity in homes and businesses.

The Republican governor will appear during Sunday night's episode, when a home is renovated with a solar photovoltaic system that allows the house to produce its own electricity, helping the owner to save on electricity bills, according to ABC's Web site and the San Francisco nonprofit Vote Solar.

Schwarzenegger is championing new legislation - known as the Million Solar Roofs Initiative - that would create an 10-year incentive fund to encourage both residences and commercial buildings to install solar power systems.

In each episode of "Extreme Makeover," now in its second season, a team of designers, contractors and several hundred workers completely rebuild a house within one week.

[cripplecreek]

Not a bad idea really. One of the first things president Bush did when he moved into the White house was ordered solar panels installed in some areas of it.

I have two sets of solar powered pathway lights and a solar powered floodlight with a motion detector over my driveway. We've been happy with them.

[farmfriend]

Sigh.

[farmfriend]

I don't see him pushing our too Senators to pass the engergy bill.

[NormsRevenge]

Happy Easter!

Got chocolate? : A man stands next to a giant Easter egg made by Belgian chocolate-maker Guylian in a bid to establish a new world record in Sint-Niklaas. (AFP/BELGA/Lieven Van Assche)

[farmfriend]

Oh man, that is cruel!!!

[Myrddin]

I took advantage of the tax credits to install a solar hot water heater (thermosyphonic) on my house in San Diego. It provided all the hot water I could use from March to November. I used "pre-heat" mode from November to March to send warm water to the gas hot water heater for a final heat boost.

The equipment was rated for a 20 year life. It survived 10 years before the hard water in San Diego screwed it up. Leaks developed in the storage tanks that caused the insulation to become wet. At that point the efficiency of the system dropped to an unusable level. The manufacturer and retailer had already gone out of business. Even with the tax credits, the system never saved as much natural gas usage as I spent on it. I ended up donating the perfectly good panels to a solar contractor in San Diego to get them off my lawn before moving to Idaho.

[SierraWasp]

If you don't stop posting these delusional opportunities for our deludable Governator with which to delude the CA populace with, how ya spect ta git us outta the pickle we're in??? We ain't gittin out, ya know, don'tcha???

Reality is an illusion and vice versa, don'tcha know?

We're 20 years past 1984, remember??? True lies, and all that...

[NormsRevenge]

I can't wait until they remake Annie as a GReen epic.. with Big DaDDy GReenbacks as the lead.

Tomorrow, Tomorrow,, The sun will come up tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar :)

I been trying to figure out what to call this new blending of infotainment, government and hollywood special effects we been witness to the last few years..

boutique politique

InfoGovt




Pickles ,, ummm.

[Texas Eagle]

I was in Vavacville, CA just yesterday on business and happened upon a brand new subdivision of beautiful new houses. One of these houses had practically one whole side of its roof covered with solar panels.

My immediate thought was, "Man, that looks like crap." My second thought was, "If this idea catches on, all these houses will look like crap."

Why don't they take all those crappy looking windmills that cover California passes and give them to these idiots?

[Carry_Okie]

CA: Gov. Schwarzenegger to tout solar energy on reality television show.

Seeing as and his contributors have heavy investments in this waste of energy.

[SierraWasp]

Hey Norm, that Texas Eagle dude is right! Although I dunno what he's doin up in Vacyoomville, CA lookin up peepole's roofs and stuff!!!

Hey Tex, I used ta live in that town, back when they had an onion dehydratin plant right next to I-80 and I lived right next to it, too.

The smells from that plant would waft all over I-80 causin all them Bay Area skiers and gamblers to stop at the Nut Tree for a steak, then stop again at the Milk Farm in Dixon for a milk shake from that cow jumpin over the danged moon!!!

I watched the moon landing in that house...Can you dig it???

[Texas Eagle]

Actually, I live in Cahleefornya. I was in Wackyville picking up a motorcycle my brother-in-law bought on E-bay.

The roof of the house in question was hard to miss. It stood out like an Austrian accent.

[SierraWasp]

"...like an Austrian accent."

Was it really, really thick, like the head of our silly Schwarzenegger???

[Texas Eagle]

Well, it was thicker than the rest of the roof which was made up of that cool looking roundy tile stuff.

[Boot Hill]

8	“The Republican governor will appear during Sunday night's episode, when a home is renovated with a solar photovoltaic system that allows the house to produce its own electricity, helping the owner to save on electricity bills”

Promoting solar power is not just stupid, it is criminally stupid.

---

When used as a supplement to, or replacement for the public utility grid, there is simply no rational technical or economic way to justify the use of solar power...

 

The Inefficiencies of Solar Power
(Based upon a horizontal PV array located at
the average continental U.S. latitude of 38º.)

ref.	source	loss (%)	power (per m2)
1.	Solar flux	-	1,368 W
2.	Atmospheric losses	45	752 W
3.	Night times losses	50	376 W
4.	Solar angle losses	50	188 W
5.	Cell conversion losses	88	22.6 W
6.	DC®AC inverter losses	10	20.3 W
7.	Net efficiency		1.5%
8.	Net energy             (per m2 per day)		0.5 kWh
9.	Value of energy     (per m2 per day)		4.3 ¢
10.	Solar panel cost               (per m2)		$530
11.	Payback period		33 years

Notes:

1.	Above the atmosphere. Compare to solar constant.
2.	Loss = atmos. absorp. + atmos. reflect. + cloud absorp. + cloud reflect. See additional references: 1,   2,   3,
3.	Necessary for calculating average daily value of energy production.
4.	Effect of solar angle on efficiency. Line 4 equals 4.5kWh per day. Compare to U.S. Average Daily Solar Radiation.
5.	Shell SQ175-PC, including specified de-rating for cell temperature and irradiance level.
6.	5kW modular, certified, grid-interactive, inverter.
7.	Line 6 divided by line 1.
8.	Line 6 times 86,400 and divided by 3.6E6.
9.	From 2004 DOE stats for average U.S. residential price.
10.	Shell SQ175-PC solar panel, $699, 1.32m2 area.
11.	Exclusive of installation, inverter, interest, etc.

---

Let's see, for an investment of a mere $530, you become the proud sucker owner of a boondoggle that will repay you a stunning rate of return of 4.3¢ worth of electricity every day. That means it will be 33 years before you break even with the residential price for utility power. And this is not counting the additional manditory costs of interest, installation, power inverter, wiring, building permits, etc. If you count all those "extras" in, you'll have to wait 100 years to break even! (Of course your photovoltaic cells will have died loooong before that will ever happen.)

By promoting solar power the governor is condoning hi-tech fraud.

--Boot Hill

[Texas Eagle]

And then there's the money you will have to invest to remove and properly dispose of the stupid thing when it wears out and THEN there's the cost of a new roof since surely the new tiles that will go where the solars panels were will be a different color than the rest of the roof.

[Attention Surplus Disorder]

Wow! I didn't know it was that bad.

[Myrddin]

Nice analysis. You should also add the cost of labor to keep the damn things clean. Dirt on the surface is a constant maintenance headache.

[Boot Hill]

"You should also add the cost of labor to keep the damn things clean."

You're absolutely correct. Only someone who's had the joys of owning a solar system would notice that missing detail. And not just dust, dirt and bird droppings, but also snow.

Another little known fact of solar panels is that the 50-100 individual cells, that make up a panel are wired in series, so that just like the old style Christmas tree lights, if one goes out, the whole string is useless. But unlike the Christmas tree lights, you can't replace just the bad cell, you have to replace the entire panel ($700 per panel, for the example used in the above table)!

--Boot Hill

[FYREDEUS]

Note #1 in your chart and it's corresponding annotation.

SOLAR IS GOOD - just not here on Earth lol.

The PROPER place for solarvoltaic electrical generation is "ABOVE THE ATMOSPHERE" [emphasis added] where the sunshine is 24/7/365 with a solar flux of >1.3kilowatts/m^2 [solar constant >340 w/m^2].

Solar Power Satellites beaming practically-limitless clean energy beamed to rectennas on Earth to power national grids or electrolyze water for hydrogen fuel cell/combustion engine use.

*sings in Sixties voice*

"...let the sunshine...let the sunshine in...the sunnnnnshiiiine innnnnn..."

LOLOL

[E.G.C.]

BTTT!!!!!!

[cripplecreek]

"Wow! I didn't know it was that bad."


It's not.

[Boot Hill]

"The PROPER place for solarvoltaic electrical generation is "ABOVE THE ATMOSPHERE" [emphasis added] where the sunshine is 24/7/365 with a solar flux of >1.3kilowatts/m^2 [solar constant >340 w/m^2]."

Solar Power Satellites are one of the nuttiest energy production ideas ever to be proposed.

First, because the proposed orbit is 1100km, you would not have sun light incident on the solar array 24/7/365, (as you suggest) because the earth would shadow the satellites during a significant portion of their orbit.

Second, just like on earth, you don't get a conversion of anything even approximating the solar flux level because solar cells have very low efficiencies of about 12%.

Third, you'd be replacing these extremely expensive satellites at a prodigious rate because the best life time you could hope for would be about 30 years (and that's on earth where the silicon cells are not subject to the very high radiation levels of space).

I could go on for several pages with a list of reasons why this so-called SPS project is the goofiest boondoggle to be dreamed up since the invention of tin foil hats, but I have neither the time nor the interest.

SPS is never going to happen.

--Boot Hill

[Boot Hill]

"Wow! I didn't know it [solar power] was that bad."   --Attention Surplus Disorder

"It's not."   --cripplecreek

Look cc, if you really think solar power is not as bad as my table portrayed in post #16, then feel free to jump in and show me where the sourced data I presented was in error!

Until you can come up with an answer to that, here is a real-world example from one of the world's major manufacturers of solar panels.

---

Those are interesting numbers, but what about real world performance?

Shell Solar offered a peak at real-world performance in their document:   "Solar Electric System Case Study". This document reports on the performance of a roof top residential installation in sunny Southern California. The array consists of 32 Shell Solar SP75 solar panels.

The report states that the total projected system electrical energy output per year is 3650 kWh. Using the data from the Shell report and the spec sheet for the SP75, the average power production is 20.6 W/m². A comparison between that value, and the nearly identical value of 20.3 W/m² quoted in line 6 of the table in post #16, suggests that the table data is a highly accurate approximation of what one can expect from solar power.

The SP75 solar panel price, is $349, so an array of 32 panels would cost $11,168. At current California residential retail utility prices, 3650 kWh of electrical energy, is worth $432. That places the payback (breakeven) period at 26 years.

In other words, this technology is so expensive, that you won't begin to "reap the benefits of cheap, inexhaustible, solar power" for over a quarter century! Moreover, when the cost of installation, power inverter, wiring, building permits and interest are figured in, that payback period will be three times as long as stated in the table.

Many owners of residential roof top installations report much lower costs than those described above. The explanation is that the government sponsors, and you fund through taxes, solar power rebate and incentive programs that are used to hide the real costs of massively inefficient and over-priced solar power.

---

Solar power isn't just wrong, it's a fraud!

--Boot Hill

[cripplecreek]

I agree that there should be no tax subsidies for solar but i see no problem with private citizens or corporations using solar as much as they want.

Few people are going to be cutting themselves out of the power grid using solar power but there are a lot of good uses for it. My solar powered yard lights have worked great for nearly 5 years now. They were inexpensive and have required no more maintenance than changing a light bulb or wiping the 8 by 6 inch solar collector clean a couple of times a year. Granted my lights aren't saving me hundreds of dollars every year but they do save me from turning on my outside lights all but a couple of times a year.

My neighbors liked mine so much they've gotten some and they seem to be spreading all around the lake. The guy across the lake from me charges the battery on his raft with a small solar collector and it works fine for him.


Frankly the slash and burn attitude against using any kind of solar is about as valid as the liberal attacks on drilling in ANWR and wind farms off the east coast.

[SierraWasp]

Frankly, the slash and burn is directed at the growing ignorance that except for the few gadgets you mentioned, the expectation of any real value, in spite of all the laws of physics and economics to the contrary, is ignorance to the power of 10 and a waste of everybody's time with frivolity!!!

[dbb]

I guess another question is how much energy does
it cost to *produce* the solar cell/array?

I'll bet it's a net loss of energy over many years.

[Boot Hill]

"Granted my lights aren't saving me hundreds of dollars every year but they do save me from turning on my outside lights all but a couple of times a year."

Your yard lights will NEVER pay for themselves, the only thing they'll ever accomplish is to look cute and save you from the onerous task of actually having to turn them on (and you didn't need solar power to do that).

"Frankly the slash and burn attitude against using any kind of solar is about as valid as the liberal attacks on drilling in ANWR..."

What "slash and burn"? If you'll note in the heading to my table in post #16, the information specifically applies to those uses of solar that are a "supplement to, or replacement for the public utility grid". In other words, where your connection to the electric utility grid is either non-existent or problematic, solar cells can and do offer a practical solution. But...

That being said, 99.9% of PV solar panel use is to supplement and already existing connection to the public utility grid. So for that 99.9%, the claim being made both by industry and government that it will "allow the house to produce its own electricity, [thus] helping the owner to save on electricity bills", is a demonstrable lie and a fraud, because any savings on electricity bills will be more than offset by the exhorbinant cost of the PV solar power system.

Just so that we're clear here, my use of the word "fraud" is not in its hyperbolic sense, but rather I use it in the strict legal sense of the word.

Solar power isn't just wrong, it's a fraud!

--Boot Hill

[cripplecreek]

They said the same about horseless carriages and flyin machines.

You better call the feds because I'm going to continue to promote the "fraud" to my fiends and neighbors who seem quite happy.

Get over it.

[Boot Hill]

Nobody, especially the manufacturers or the government, wants to sit down and add up all the energy actually expended to produce the solar panel and compare that to its lifetime production of energy. And this is so for good reason, for it could easily be, as many suggest, that solar panels are a net energy sink.

--Boot Hill

[chimera]

So, Ahhhnold, vot do vee do when zee sun don't shine?

Come mit me if you vant to live...

[Boot Hill]

"They said the same about horseless carriages and flyin machines."

But here we don't have idle speculation, we have the manufacturers data sheets and the actual numbers in cost per kWh (q.v. table in #16), for which you have failed to offer any rational counter-argument other than "get over it".

--Boot Hill

[cripplecreek]

I don't need to offer anything than the fact that my and I are happy with ours and you can't seem to accept it.

[Boot Hill]

"I don't need to offer anything than the fact that my and I are happy with ours [solar power system] and you can't seem to accept it."

That would be incorrect, here are your words...

"Wow! I didn't know it [solar power] was that bad."   --Attention Surplus Disorder

"It's not."   --cripplecreek

You threw down the challenge to what I posted in #16 and then failed to offer any rational counter-argument other than you were "happy with ours". If it's not the economic fraud that I showed in the table, then how is that so? Where are your numbers? Where is your data? Being "happy with ours" is not an argument against the numbers and data I posted, its a non-sequitur, feel good opinion.

--Boot Hill

[Attention Surplus Disorder]

It's at least mildly remarkable (to me) that the mfr's spec sheet [nearly] matched the theoretical calcs which [nearly] matched the real world experience. I hadn't seen the calcs/experiential data done/laid out before, so thanks for the quantification.

My impression, though anecdotal, reached the same conclusion. The cost of manufacture, inclusive of the toxic disposal aspects of the fairly nasty stuff used to fabricate any semi-conductor product (silane, strong acids, etc;) plus the MTBF of PV solar cells and the associated control gadgets, ruled out a reasonable payback period unless those stats were conveniently ignored; which is standard practice.

Nevertheless, I'm not entirely down on PV solar power; there are a few applications where it makes sense, such as boat-battery trickle chargers and those remote emergency telephone deals you see out in the desert. I'm equally "statless" but somewhat more sanguine about the possibilities of mirror focused solar energy on hot water collectors or a tower mounted collector. And I'm curious as to why there haven't been more tidal-generation projects, esp in the St Lawrence Seaway (where I recently visited where the mean tides are something like 18 feet! Dramatic!

[Boot Hill]

"I'm not entirely down on PV solar power; there are a few applications where it makes sense..."

In non-grid tie applications, I can agree with that.

--Boot Hill

[FYREDEUS]

Well, since you "have neither the time nor the interest" to "go on for several pages" I won't either...lololol.

But please don't strawman me with "the proposed orbit is 1100km, you would not have sun light incident on the solar array 24/7/365, (as you suggest)..." those who propose 1100km are NOT I...maybe you can guess where I'D put them ;-)

p.s. nice rhetorical flourish re. "tin foil hats" - an 'IN JOKE'! I like it! :-)