Domestic Electricity Generation

[Badly Shaved Monkey]

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=1460763#post1460763

Mulling this all over, I'd be grateful for some realistic (i.e. jaundiced and cynical) views on the costs and practicalities of installing wind or solar systems in your home to generate electricity. I can look up simple figures, but I'd like opinions, especially from anyone who has installed these systems. It is probably relevant in these considerations that I live in SouthEast England not in either Dubai or a windswept hill in the Outer Hebrides. What output could I expect and at what cost?

Many thanks in advance of any replies.

[Jon.]

I don't know any specifics but I do know someone who used to work at a store that sold solar panels. She said that unless you were in a remote location where it was going to cost an arm and a leg to get on the grid, the cost of the panels was so high that you would not be seeing any savings for decades, if ever.

Of course, that was in British Columbia, where we have relatively low electricity costs. YMMV.

[Jimbo07]

I may post more later, depending on time, but right off the gun:

Every off-grid house I have been exposed to has been put together by someone 'in the know.' One is an electrician, the other an engineer. The engineer had a 4000 W inverter, and the electrician more (trying to run a shop off it). There are web calculators, but a house with teenagers/big familly will want more ;). Both supplemented solar with wind. As Jon said, if environment is not your concern, only cost, your payoff on solar will be long. Then, you have system monitoring and battery maintenance to think about...

When my wife and I are ready, we will have an off-grid house, but that is a decade + out.

[Capsid]

The Centre for Alternative Technology (http://www.cat.org.uk/index.tmpl)is quite helpful. They recommend that the most economic option is to install solar water heating (http://www.cat.org.uk/information/catinfo.tmpl?command=search&db=catinfo.db&eqSKUdatarq=20020210164613)on your roof. That's not generating electricity, but it does supplement your water heating costs and cut down on the fuel bills.

[CriticalThanking]

I did a lot of research when I built my house in the usually sunny Southwest US. The good news was that solar technology was readily available - decent batteries, interties, etc. The bad news was that electricity was so darn cheap that the payback was 20+ years for my usage patterns and where I lived. The worse news was the regulatory environment in my state: if you still wanted to be connected to the grid for emergency power or to resell your excess generated, 1) you still had to pay a large flat fee to the provider for the privilege of being connected, and 2) they could pay you below market rates for the electricity. If I stayed connected to the grid, the payback went to 40 years. :mad:

Net result: it was only worthwhile in Texas if you lived far enough from the grid that the cost of establishing service in the first place was prohibitive.

On the plus side, it made me honestly evaluate my energy usage. I ended up changing the house design slightly and invested instead in high-efficiency HVAC systems, super-insulation (including thickening the outer wall), solar attic venting, and much, much more.

The equation may be better now that oil and gas make electricity more expensive here, although the regulatory climate is still driven by the utility companies and not citizen needs. There are great catalogs/magazines for calculating loads and system sizes. Try Real Goods catalog or Home Power magazine. Home Power provides back issues on CD.

Living in sunny England... um... yeah. You may have a much greater issue with payback since the number of hours of daylight is likely far less than optimal. That still does not mean you cannot have a "guerilla" system (see Home Power magazine) for supplementing your power or for specific needs (water pumping, DC lighting, etc). I will look for links, although I am still prohibited from posting complete links - darn newbie restrictions.

CriticalThanking

[drkitten]

Of course, that was in British Columbia, where we have relatively low electricity costs.

And no sunlight!

[Jon.]

And no sunlight!

Not true! We have plenty of sunlight!

Liquid sunlight.

[CriticalThanking]

HomePower DOT com
homepower DOT com/files/beginner/SolarElectricBasics.pdf
homepower DOT com/files/beginner/SolarElectricSystemCosts.pdf

RealGoods DOT com

I would have found them faster if the URL names weren't so cryptic. :rolleyes:

CT

[DRBUZZ0]

Well you *can* run your house off-grid on solar power, without investing millions of dollars.

I used to know a guy who does it.

When he gets home from work, he sends some e-mails on his small laptop (well...only in the summer. In the winter he cannot use a computer at home). Then he may catch some of the news on his portable tv, before he reads a book by the light of some LED's.

[CriticalThanking]

And no, this still does not answer your question about examples of costs for a specific implementation, BUT...

The result of the insulation, efficient windows, etc. mentioned above was a house on the same block having twice the temperature-controlled square footage but the exact same gas and electric bills.

CT

[Angus McPresley]

Back in college, we used to stay in a place where the landlord covered the water bill for us. We used to joke about constructing a water wheel in the bathtub, to save on electricity bills.

[sophia8]

This South African outfit (http://www.int.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=143&art_id=vn20060211110132138C184427) claims to have developed a new form of solar energy generation that can supply all household electricity needs.
I like to get some expert opinion on this.

Edited to fix link.

[richardm]

I don't have any windmills or solar panels yet, but I know several people who do. At least one of the windmills seems to provide the vast majority of their power, to the extent that they're able to sell off the surplus to Scottish Hydro (our local electricity provider), so it's clearly a quite practical thing to do.

Their biggest expense was not the turbine or the wiring up, but the submarine batteries they use to store the power to smooth the supply, and store it for when it's not very windy. As far as I know these are literally batteries as used in submarines - thumping great things that appear to be either difficult to find or very expensive, or both (can't remember what they said about them now).

Anyway, they do produce enough juice to keep their house ticking over quite nicely.

Caveat: While I don't live in the Outer Hebrides it's a pretty close-run thing, so you may find it's a slightly different situation where you are. However you do have commercial wind turbines running dahn sarf so perhaps it's still worth looking into.

Edited to add: If you have anything specifically specific that you want to know I can ask 'em for you.

[brodski]

I don't have any windmills or solar panels yet, but I know several people who do. At least one of the windmills seems to provide the vast majority of their power, to the extent that they're able to sell off the surplus to Scottish Hydro (our local electricity provider), so it's clearly a quite practical thing to do.

Their biggest expense was not the turbine or the wiring up, but the submarine batteries they use to store the power to smooth the supply, and store it for when it's not very windy. As far as I know these are literally batteries as used in submarines - thumping great things that appear to be either difficult to find or very expensive, or both (can't remember what they said about them now).

Anyway, they do produce enough juice to keep their house ticking over quite nicely.

Caveat: While I don't live in the Outer Hebrides it's a pretty close-run thing, so you may find it's a slightly different situation where you are. However you do have commercial wind turbines running dahn sarf so perhaps it's still worth looking into.

Edited to add: If you have anything specifically specific that you want to know I can ask 'em for you.
You say your friends can sell their surplus power back to the grid?
How long ahs this been going on? Lat time I got into looking at micro generation and micro Combined heat and power (CHP) projects this was big no-no for the energy companies, because it made it very difficult for them to guarantee isolation of parts of the network for safe working.
I would be very interested in hearing how Scottish Hydro got over this problem. The fact that you couldn't sell any surpluses back to the grid was a major barrier to micro generation/ micro CHP being a cost effective model.

[richardm]

Yep. I'll endeavour to find out.

Edited to add: Everyone seems to be out at the moment, I'll have to get back to this later. (Although see CT's stuff below, perhaps it's something like that).

[CriticalThanking]

[snip]Lat time I got into looking at micro generation and micro Combined heat and power (CHP) projects this was big no-no for the energy companies, because it made it very difficult for them to guarantee isolation of parts of the network for safe working.
This is indeed an argument trotted out by the utilities. Many interties are now built with a disconnect as part of the unit. You can also buy separate disconnect units. The manufacturers typically promise that you will automatically be disconnected when utility power goes out in a small enough number of nanoseconds that you cannot harm a utility worker.

Home Power magazine also had a recent discussion about interties and "islanding." For example - what if you and your next door neighbor(s) are all selling power back to the grid? Wouldn't the power you are both putting on the grid cause your interties to think the power were still on and pose a hazard to the utility worker? In short, modern interties would easily detect the fact that the power still seen on the line was not of the same "quality" and would disconnect. HP goes further to claim that there has never been an injury from such a system.

My utility wants to charge $15US per month just to keep you on a list of people who could possibly sell back power, weather or not you actually do. They claim this is in the name of safety, yet they refuse to provide any evidence of a problem encountered anywhere.

As long as you pass the relevant inspections I don't understand why it should be treated any differently than any new house being attached to the grid. In my state, however, individuals have little sway over our "Public" Utility Commission. The rules will be specific to the body governing your utilities.

CT

[Soapy Sam]

RichardM- Dinna wheenge! You could have had all the wind power in the world, but for yer petty NIMBY niggling!:D

[richardm]

Hehe...

[NIMBY justification]
We never said we didn't like little community-sized wind turbines, it's hundreds of gigantic ones we're not keen on.
[/NIMBY justification]

:D

By the way although the threat to Ardnamurchan has gone away for the present moment we don't think it's completely nixed (http://www.fairwind.org.uk/) yet, with Morvern still in the firing line.

[brodski]

This is indeed an argument trotted out by the utilities. Many interties are now built with a disconnect as part of the unit. You can also buy separate disconnect units. The manufacturers typically promise that you will automatically be disconnected when utility power goes out in a small enough number of nanoseconds that you cannot harm a utility worker.

Home Power magazine also had a recent discussion about interties and "islanding." For example - what if you and your next door neighbor(s) are all selling power back to the grid? Wouldn't the power you are both putting on the grid cause your interties to think the power were still on and pose a hazard to the utility worker? In short, modern interties would easily detect the fact that the power still seen on the line was not of the same "quality" and would disconnect. HP goes further to claim that there has never been an injury from such a system.

My utility wants to charge $15US per month just to keep you on a list of people who could possibly sell back power, weather or not you actually do. They claim this is in the name of safety, yet they refuse to provide any evidence of a problem encountered anywhere.

As long as you pass the relevant inspections I don't understand why it should be treated any differently than any new house being attached to the grid. In my state, however, individuals have little sway over our "Public" Utility Commission. The rules will be specific to the body governing your utilities.

CT
Thanks for that. Odly enough when I was lookign at micro generation (arrond 2001), it was the utility companies who where all for it, but the regulators who where wary.