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Scientific American - Solar at Home
Editor's Note: Scientific American's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here .
Solar homeowners' favorite topic of conversation is the performance of their arrays. As part of the sales pitch, the installer estimates how much power you'll generate, and most systems come with a meter (separate from the utility meter) to monitor the power output continuously. But how can you tell whether your array is really living up to expectations? That simple question set me off onto a mathematical hunt that other solar homeowners might enjoy -- and which would make a good term-paper project for a high-school science class.
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Solar subsidies are a victim of state budget crunches
Editor's Note: Scientific American's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here .
As if the news coming out of Washington about a climate bill weren't bad enough, state budget crises are also sucking the blood out of many local renewable-energy programs, which are the only concerted action the country is taking on climate right now. In my own state of New Jersey, the rebate for buying a solar array was temporarily suspended in May as the state went scrounging for loose change to plug a general budget gap. It has since been reinstated -- partly. Now it provides homeowners only half the money it used to. [break]
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Solar panels versus historic districts: A conflict we need to resolve
Editor's Note: Scientific American's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here .
A few posts ago, I talked about the tragic conflict between preserving historic homes and reducing their carbon footprint. I thought our solar array had managed to evade the controversy. Our panels were mounted on the rear of our mid-19th-century house, away from the street; the town's building department, after some delay, approved the project; and the town's inspectors signed off on the work when it was done. But two months ago I received an alarming notice from the town's building code enforcer: our array violated the historic district standards.
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How home solar arrays can help to stabilize the grid, Part 2 of 2
Editor's Note: Scientific American's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here .
In the first installment of this post, Arnold Mckinley of Xslent Energy Technologies described how "reactive power" -- that is, power stored momentarily by electrical appliances and then released -- destabilizes the electrical grid. Here he explains how home solar arrays can help.
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How home solar arrays can help to stabilize the grid, Part 1 of 2
Editor's Note: Scientific American's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here .
Solar arrays can do more than feed energy into the power grid. They might also be able to help the grid cope with a problem many people aren't aware of: the fact that electrical appliances not only consume energy, but also momentarily store and release it. The worst culprits are motors and transformers, whose internal magnetic fields represent a significant cache of energy, giving these devices a type of electrical inertia that causes them to get out of sync with the grid. To describe the problem and a possible solution, I've invited a two-part guest blog from Arnold Mckinley of Xslent Energy Technologies . Here's part one.
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Cutting the cost of solar by watching every nut and bolt
Editor's Note: Scientific American 's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here .
Solar power involves wondrous quantum physics and materials science , but its fate may hinge on whether contractors can learn to bolt on the panels without losing too many screws. The panels themselves account for only about half the cost of a solar array; the rest is the installation and back-end equipment . As panel makers slash their prices , the nuts and bolts loom ever larger. Fortunately, a quiet revolution is now underway in installation. Brendan Neagle, the chief operations officer of Borrego Solar , a major U.S. installer, says they've sped up installation by 40 percent over the past two years. Zep Solar has invented a new roof mounting system, already supported by the module maker Canadian Solar , that speeds things up by another factor of two. And Nat Kreamer, president of Acro Energy , another large installer, says they've streamlined the preparation work and can get a system up on your roof within 30 days of your first phone call -- quite an improvement on the eight or so months it took me .
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Five tips for people who love both the Earth and old houses
Editor's Note: Scientific American's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here .
Earlier this week I posed the question of whether old houses will ever be able to reduce their energy needs by the factor of five or so needed to combat climate change. My discussion was inspired, in part, by a provocative essay written last year by preservationist Sally Zimmerman of Historic New England . Yesterday she wrote to say that my post and the comments that people left have been widely circulated among preservationists. She offered some more thoughts that I think frame the issue beautifully:
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Are old houses doomed? The conflict between historic preservation and energy efficiency
Editor's Note: Scientific American 's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here . [More]
Focus your mind: The rise of concentrated solar power
Editor's Note: Scientific American 's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here .
I had a fun talk yesterday afternoon with Bob MacDonald, the CEO of Skyline Solar , makers of a new concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) array. The thing looks rather like a big solar cooker, with a long mirror that focuses sunlight so that you only need a tenth as many solar cells to cover a given area. CPV may become the first photovoltaic technology to reach cost parity with fossil fuels.
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Happy equinox! A very special time of year for solar arrays
Editor's Note: Scientific American 's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar ). Read his introduction here and see all posts here .
Who could put a price on spring? Ah, the reawakened life, the budding flowers, the dabbles of green in the grey wood. Well, actually, a solar enthusiast can put a price on spring. It shows up right on my electric bill or my real-time electronic display. On March 4th, my solar array passed the milestone of feeding more energy into the grid than we drew back from it. As the days rapidly lengthen and the sun climbs higher in the sky, a surplus is becoming the norm. For five of the past seven days, we have produced more than we've consumed. Solar energy has even reconciled me to that other rite of spring, tax time: I've gotten a nice big pile of money back from Uncle Sam to help pay for the solar array.
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Tools for doing your own energy audit
Editor's Note: Scientific American 's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here .
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Solar panels for the rest of us
Editor's Note: Scientific American 's George Musser will be chronicling his experiences installing solar panels in Solar at Home (formerly 60-Second Solar). Read his introduction here and see all posts here .