Posted on 05/11/2014 11:23:57 AM PDT by Nachum
In case you had any doubt about the efficacy of government, just consider the four year struggle to get solar panels on the White House, which has culminated in the breathless announcement that they will now generate the power to run all of six light bulbs.
Here’s the pivotal sentence of the announcement:
And while the energy produced by the White House panels may not be all too significant—they’ll generate an estimated 6.3 kilowatts worth of energy—the message it sends is.
Oh good another “symbolic” achievement by Obama – he’s getting great at those! Not so much at actual achievements, unfortunately:
If 6.3 kilowatts sounds like a lot of energy, it isn’t. The average home consumes 27 kilowatts of power each day. Far more than the 6.3 kilowatts that will be produced by the new solar panels adorning the White House. According to TradeWind Energy, “one 50-watt light bulb running for 20 hours will use one kilowatt-hour of electricity (50 watts x 20 hours = 1,000 watt-hours = 1 kWh).”
In other words, the White House installed enough solar panels to power six 50-watt bulbs for 20 hours each day. And if you’ve ever been inside the White House, or seen it from a distance, you’ll notice it’s lit up like a klieg light.
(Excerpt) Read more at ijreview.com ...
Didn’t we read that Obama heated the WH to 79 degrees and went around in shirt sleeves, comfortably warm? How would solar panels give him “green” cache?
They said it is going to save 30,000 cars a year’s worth of energy. I wonder why President Reagan took them off. Why should we have to pay for these twice. I mean even if Reagan didn’t like them, he could have just keep them and use electricity.
Yet another in an endless litany of pointless and stupid Obama gestures.
Can America survive for eight years without a president?
The energy is stored....
Yep, it’s all those old car batteries in the sub basement.
Help the green revolution, send a car battery to the
White House...
I vote we last for 100 years without a government. Let the states collaborate on a meeting center and have that body determine how to protect the states from outside invasion.
Oh wait.
How about this: government disband six out of every ten departments, and those departments that remain fire six out of every ten employees.
We’d still have too much government, but it’d be a start.
And the tax dollars for them is?
LED bulbs run around 5-20 watts. >6kW is a lot of LED bulbs. If you’re going thru the trouble of installing solar panels, and have basically an unlimited budget, use LEDs. And yes, we assume any discussion of “watts” in colloquial conversation really means “watts per hour”.
My EV has a 26kW/hr battery. The WH could charge it in a little over 4 hours using that solar setup (assuming maximum output).
The setup is not nothing, but it’s also not exactly impressive. Nice for augmenting domestic use, but paltry in light of government-scale use like the WH.
The real question is cost: if the complete installation, maintenance, depreciation, etc doesn’t add up to a lot cheaper than standard power, it’s at best a demonstration.
6.3 kWp x 5.5 hrs/day avg sunshine x 365.25 days/yr = only 12,647 kWh, which is nowhere near either of the two contradictory nonsense figures given in this article.
Moreover, that 5.5 hr/day figure is based on panels installed with an optimum tilt and orientation. The White House’s PV system is mounted nearly flat, which reduces the power output. My guess is that it’ll manage to produce about 10,000 kWh per year, which is about half what the White House initially claimed:
http://archive.today/Uli8T#selection-671.65-671.84
At current D.C. residential rates, that 10,000 kWh of electricity is worth a little less than $1000, per year.
The White House won’t say what it cost to install the system, which surely means the price was exorbitant.
An installation cost of $10/watt would come to $63,000, but the White House boasted that they used all American-made components, which certainly increased the cost, and everything the government does costs at least twice what anyone else would pay, so I’ll bet the system actually cost taxpayers at least $150,000 (probably more).
You might think that means it will pay for itself in 150 years, but that ignores maintenance & repair costs, and the fact that the system’s output will decline with age, and the fact that it’s unlikely to last more than about 30 years.
What’s more, this system will probably cost taxpayers more than $1000/year just to maintain and repair, which means that it will never even start to repay the cost of installing it.
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