Okay folks, how about this as part of our energy strategy

[island911]

Originally Posted by ZOANAS

No need to put them in anyone's back yard. Power lines can be run for miles.

So you're say'n you want it a Looooonnnng way away from your back yard?

[aigel]

Originally Posted by Joeaksa

My house is 7.5 years old now. The solar system would be 80% paid for now if it had been installed on the house when it was built. [...]
I bought a small solar system a while ago out of Craigs List. Going to play with it ...

I am not arguing that we should not "play" with it or if you are environmentally conscious, that you should not put a system in place, regardless of the price of gas.

I explained why solar water heaters are not an option today for the average Joe who doesn't wrench on their house and doesn't care about renewable energy. It is good that you are in your house for almost 10 years now - it is a fact that the average American lives in their house only for about 5 years. If I knew for sure that I live in my current house another couple decades, I would have installed a solar water heater.

Cheers,

George

[sammyg2]

There's a nuke plant about 50 miles south of my house, doesn't bother me a bit. If they built one 5 miles from my house, woudn't bother me a bit. But my backyard isn't big enough for a whole nuke plant, my lot is only 85 by 115 feet.

[djmcmath]

Originally Posted by Flatbutt1

A friend of mine near Squam built a fan powered cooling system for his new cabin that was ingenious. He dug a trench in the basement that was 4 feet deep. Installed concrete pipe (18 inch IIRC) in the trench and connected duct wirk to both ends. One end removed warm air from the top floor , the fan circulated it through the buried pipe and then brought it back up to the top floor. Worked rather well. I think the temp delta was about 15 / 20 degrees.

I'm not sure I understand how that works. It sounds like he's basically pumping air from the top floor through a pipe under his house ... and that bought him 15 degrees? Holy cow. Imagine, just for a moment, if you had a system like that, except with, say, a radiator installed in the path of the flowing air, connected to a large water bath. If you set it up correctly, the water flow could be natural circulation powered by the temperature difference. An alternate setup could pipe the hot water from roof coils to the water reservoir in the basement, thus heating the water in the basement, which would heat the buried air, which could heat the house.

That's really novel. I wonder if it would work?


Dan

[Tobra]

The cement in the basement acts as a big heat sink/exchanger.

If the return on a solar system is only realized over the long term, it seems that would make the argument to install it on contruction all the more persuasive. This would maximize the time over which the expense is amortized.

That the average Joe does not care about renewable energy is part of the problem, not part of the rationale not to pursue this.

[island911]

Originally Posted by sammyg2

There's a nuke plant about 50 miles south of my house, doesn't bother me a bit. .....

Yeah, there are quite a few nuclear facilities w/in the same proximity of my house. But my point was, locals really freak when a project like that comes along. --a knee-jerk reaction to anything "Nuke"

[frogger]

Originally Posted by Tobra

Was talking to the wife last night, and she suggested making solar panels a required part of new construction. I don't know how practical this would be in places with severe weather, snow and what not, but it did not sound too bad to me. I would not add that much as a percentage of expense, and would hopefully give long term return.

Let the market decide. We don't need more liberal government policies telling us what we have to do.

[jyl]

The economics of photovoltaic solar for an individual homeowner depend a lot on where you live (how much sun, what state/local tax incentives, what net metering the utility allows) and on how much electricity you use.

I looked into it here in Portland, and concluded that panel prices need to fall by 1/3 or more for it to make sense for me. So I am waiting 1 to 3 years, until panel prices do fall (requires more polysilicon plants to come online) and hopefully we have a plug-in hybrid to charge from the panels.

As for the length of the payoff, you need to figure out if the solar system adds to the value of your house when you sell it. My guess is, a clean, neat, professionally done system with documentation would add value - there are enough home buyers who would like a "green" feature and a real scarcity of such houses. But a sketchy homebuilt system - not sure.

I've wondered about roof maintenance, after racks and panels are installed up there. The negatives are clear. But wouldn't roof materials that are protected by solar panels have a very long life?

[MRM]

There isn't a single magic bullet for our future enegy needs, any more than we currently have only one source of power. Wind, solar, nuclear, biofuels (other than corn ehtanol) all have their place. They should be used where they make the most sense.

One problem with wind and solar is the costs of production are too high because too few units are manufactured to spread the overhead costs. The result is that new units are too expensive to buy, no one manufactures enough to hit economies of scale because no one buys enough. The way around that without direct subsidies is to have the federal government start buying and installing solar panels in federal buildings. The GAO is one of the largest, if not largest property management entities in the country. They control hundreds of millions of square feet of office space.

With steady demand industry would respond and start producing more and better cells at lower costs. Suddenly solar would be cheap and plentyful. Same with wind. It may cost a lot to buy a wind turbine, but they last forever. After they're paid off they produce almost free electricity.

[unclebilly]

Originally Posted by silverc4s

I think it still takes more energy to manufacture solar cells than they can return in their useful life...
Their efficiency is pretty low.

This is true. If you think that you put energy into one of these PV (photovoltaic) things to make it, and you are going to get less energy out of it, in essence, these things are really just batteries. Really bad ones at that.

Passive solar heating is something that does work. There is an experimental community up here called drake landing that does all of it's heating with solar. A friend of mine was the first to sign up for a house there.

[Rondinone]

Originally Posted by aigel

Nuclear power plants need uranium, which isn't a renewable resource. Also, when you burn the uranium you get plutonium and that can be used for nuclear weapons. Not a huge deal, but nuclear power has it's own issues.

George

Yeah, this is why Carter worked so hard to derail nuclear power in this country.

There's plenty of uranium if we breed U-238 into Pu-239 using breeder reactors, and then run the reactors on reprocessed U and Pu fuel. Carter killed the breeder program because he was deathly afraid of proliferation due to the fuel reprocessing. However, you can reprocess without removing all the hotest isotopes, rendering the fuel tamper proof. You really only need to remove the isotopes that poison the nuclear reaction.

Lastly if you burn up all the long lived actinides by putting them back in the fuel, and only store the short lived lighter elements (which is what we intend to do, eventually) then the fuel only needs to be stored for a few hundred years, not 100,000.

Happy to see so many fans of nuclear power, get used to it because it's coming whether you like it or not. There are about 20 siting permits and even a few contruction/operations permits in the works, all geared towards standardized designs (e.g. AP1000) that won't take so long to build.

[unclebilly]

Rondinone,

The other option would be to use Candu reactor and use speant fuel form your normal US reactors. This would make things cleaner (less 1/2 life) and would basically be 'free' because your speant fuel in waste that needs to be dealt with.

[tiwebber]

Solar seems the way to go for the long run. Here's a plan

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan&page=2

Some sound bites from the article...

• supply 69 percent of the U.S.’s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy by 2050
• Solar energy’s potential is off the chart. The energy in sunlight striking the earth for 40 minutes is equivalent to global energy consumption for a year
• Converting only 2.5 percent of that radiation into electricity would match the nation’s total energy consumption in 2006
• To provide electricity at six cents per kWh by 2020, cadmium telluride modules would have to convert electricity with 14 percent efficiency, and systems would have to be installed at $1.20 per watt of capacity. Current modules have 10 percent efficiency and an installed system cost of about $4 per watt
• Storing engergy at night...Compressed-air energy storage has emerged as a successful alternative. Electricity from photovoltaic plants compresses air and pumps it into vacant underground caverns, abandoned mines, aquifers and depleted natural gas wells. The pressurized air is released on demand to turn a turbine that generates electricity, aided by burning small amounts of natural gas.

[unclebilly]

[QUOTE=tiwebber;3791790]Solar seems the way to go for the long run. Here's a plan

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan&page=2
QUOTE]

or we could just all go out and invest in flux capacitors and dilithium crystals...

Scientific American is not exactly a technical journal on alternative energy. The information in there is 5 - 10 years old and generally oversimplified or misstated.

I'm a UVIC mech eng grad and was part of IESVic while I was there. Photo Voltaic Solar ain't goona fly on it's own, the only real renewable options are wind, tidal (using currents, not lift), passive solar heating, geothermal (provided the energy to run the pumps is not generated by coal or natural gas and the delta T is great enough).

Nuke is also a good, clean option. Solid Oxide Fuel Cells running on liquified natural gas (on cell reforming at peak power) are another good option for mobile applications.

[RWebb]

What makes you say that?

And where are you folks getting this idea from that a PV panel takes more energy to make than it returns in its lifetime??

As for nuclear, I think the best option is to build a single really huge plant, and put it far away. About 150,000,000 km is a decent distance.

[jeffgrant]

There's some interesting research at UWO that is showing some promise that may pay off big in the near future. (Friend of mine is working in the lab, and is pretty excited about it all).

http://www.eng.uwo.ca/research/compendium/faculty/pcharpentier.htm

Solar Devices: Due to the ever-increasing energy needs of society, a new class of low-cost solar cells is required to produce electricity in so-called photovoltaic (PV) devices. We are developing a new class of low cost PV devices based on nano TiO2 and quantum dots. Quantum dots have been shown to produce multiple excitons per photon, which provides the potential for a new generation of high performance materials. As our manufacturing process is made in a reactor with low cost ingredients, scale-up issues are being explored. As well, solar absorbing materials are being studied using conductive plastics, for a new generation of nanocoatings that convert sunlight directly into heat for hot water and floor-heating.

[lyon]

Solar? Blasphemy.

[MRM]

That's part of America's problem. Our energy policy has become politicized along irrational lines. If you are a lefty, it is dogma to be against nuclear power. If you're not, you get kicked out of the club. Lefties hate nuclear power because it's associated with Big Business and has been long supported by the right wing and military types. At the same time Conservatives just bristle at the idea of solar power and electric cars because Carter pushed stuff like that on a public that wanted it almost as much as they wanted the metric system.

So if you're a lefty, you have to push solar and alternative energy and despise the pawns of big business pushing for profit energy; if you're a righty, you have to look down on the fuzzy headed liberals pushing solar and driving Priuses and support red meat energy systems. I'll bet someone will start teasing Joe about supporting solar before long.

Our energy policy should be simple: Not everything works equally well in all situations. We should use what works where it works best, and improve technology on existing energy as we use it. Some places that means solar, others it means nuclear, others it means low sulfer coal plants.

[Chocaholic]

Wait a minute. The energy industry is setting records in terms of corporate profitability. The government is setting records in terms of energy-related tax revenues. The energy industry has more lobbyists in Washington than there are congressmen.

...and you're wondering why there isn't a government mandate to use alternative energy sources? We're a petroleum based society, and will be for the duration.

[Grog]

I really like the comments from Oregon where they protested the states only nuclear plant. Year after year the anti nuke people got the plant on the ballet so the oregonians could vote to shut it down. How much do you think that added to your electric bill to pay for the campaign to keep the plant? Like some have said solar is way expensive for a little output. Wind is also expensive but doable. One problem with wind is, you need wind. We are having fits over maintaining frequency on the grid. When the wind dies down you have to load up a hydro or fossil plant. The hydros can compensate fairly quickly but the fossils take more time to adjust. The natural gas fired plant where I work is designed to run at max efficiency and burn cleaner at full load. When we have to cycle up and down to make up for wind power we become less efficient and our emissions increase, not to mention the cycling of the plant taking its toll on the equipment (also adds to your bill), making the plant less reliable. Guess my point is there is more to it than lets just use solar and wind.

Like someone said before, you don't get plutonium from your average nuke plant. The fuel that your commercial nuke plant uses is only about 3% enriched. pretty weak to start with. Gives you an idea of how powerful the stuff is. Even with a breeder reactor you still need to do a lot of special processing to get weapons grade plutonium. We need education on nuclear reactors not fear of the unknown like Oregon.