Would you mind posting a spreadsheet of all your expenses so the seabreeze community can properly assess your vast profits.

shes a pup mate. I prolly did 46kw today. All fed back in at 44cents...

Simondo said..

Today was Day of Production... Almost 24kW hours produced today... We have also averaged about 20kW hours per day, over the last year...

5kW System, and it was peaking up at 5.5kW in the middle part of the day... The guy said the systems are slightly over rated, so that at 20 years, they are still doing at least 80% output...

We'll wait for the bills to come in, but I expect pretty minimal bills from now on... except maybe in Winter...

Instead of putting money on the home loan, we bought Solar Panels... Effective interest is $1.08 per day. But I'm comfortable that we'll save $3-$4 every day... off the bills.

Ahaa!, Bur were you tricked into North facing over E-NE?

myusernam said..
5kw up here gets you up around the 30KW per day here. further north u go the more u generate.

Only in this hemisphere.

Every time I see us solar panel electricity producers getting bagged, I remind myself that we helped our state governments, not have to hurriedly build an extra powerstation just to run all your refridgerated A/C units on a hotsunny afternoon

Agree with both of you. The electricity generators are now complaining solar power is affecting their planning, ie they don't need to build a new power station as planned. They also complain they are not making as much money as projected. Through technology the time will come where it make financial sense to cut yourself off the grid and escape the rip offs.

There will be moaning and groaning along with lies and confusion spread by the powers that be when this starts happening.

WA71 said..

Will you get more or less with day light saving?

more obviously as we get an extra hour of sunlight

Mobydisc said..
Agree with both of you. The electricity generators are now complaining solar power is affecting their planning, ie they don't need to build a new power station as planned. They also complain they are not making as much money as projected. Through technology the time will come where it make financial sense to cut yourself off the grid and escape the rip offs.

There will be moaning and groaning along with lies and confusion spread by the powers that be when this starts happening.

Unfortunately, that will not be true until such time as we can store the power generated by solar panels when the sun is shining.
Also, the use of solar panels does not remove the need to build new power stations, and it does not reduce the design capacity required of the power stations by even so much as one watt.

The reality is, the same number and size of power stations is required no matter how many people install solar panels.
The difference is, these power stations will be sitting around spinning over on standby, just waiting for the clouds to come over and stop the solar panels working.
Thus the running expenses of the power station are only reduced by less fuel used.
The capital expenditure is exactly the same, and the staff costs are exactly the same, and maintenance costs are almost the same.
Otherwise it means that whenever the sun stops shining, the power cuts start, and that is unacceptable in a first world economy.

Also, the greatest power use, which determines the number and capacity of generators required, comes in regularly each day at 5pm when everybody comes home and turns on their air conditioners, electric stoves, ovens, plasma tv's, pool pumps, hot water systems, etc etc.
And wouldn't you know it? this is when the solar panels switch off,.. all of them, across the whole town.
And by 7pm,.. not so much as one watt comes from solar power.
All the power has to come from the usual generated supply.

So, to all those who believe you are saving the government a fortune by installing solar panels,.. you are not.
You are costing them (us) money because they still have to build all the same infrastucture,..
and supply the staff to run it,..
and then have them sitting around unused for half the day.

In some country towns, (Exmouth and Broome amongst them) they are now restricting the connection of new solar panels to the grid for exactly that reason.
The cost of keeping diesel engines up and running all day just in case some clouds come over, is making the system unworkable.
They can't shut them down because it takes time to start them up and bring them on line.
In small towns where it is quite easy for a small cloud bank to suddenly cover the whole town, this means the entire town supply is lost while the generators are started up and bought on line.
Nobody wants 10 power outages during the day so the total normal power capacity has to be kept running on standby.
This means the normal costs of running it all still apply but there is no income from power sold to cover it.
Guess who pays for that?

In the US they are installing "Smart" electric meters to better integrate the solar into the grid, the meter is connected by radio frequency to the control center where they can real time monitor the demand and the solar output. With the output monitored they can better anticipate clouds and storm fronts to know when more electricity will be required to keep the grid going.
The downside is this is a foot in the door to a time in the near future when they will be able to adjust your usage without asking, for instance they will be able to shut off your AC or your clothes dryer if the grid demand becomes too much. There has even been talk of them having control over your thermostat

Battery technology is coming on slowly but is still not there yet.
Every six months or so, some company puts out a press release about amazing new power densities from some new battery technology, but then when I read up on it they are talking about milliwatt power levels or some other equally useless specification for the home power industry.
If they ever get this sorted out, then solar power will become very much more useful than it is now.

The problem is at present, say a house has a power drain of 4 kilowatts, which would be say an aircon, fridge and the usual tv and such, to power this for even 30 minutes with current battery technology would require 18 amps at 240 volts worth of batteries.
That would be a bank of 10 batteries the size of a large 4wd battery, because you can't consistently drain a lead acid battery more than 10 to 15% of its capacity without wrecking the battery.
So, 10 batteries would give you a 30 minute buffer.
So if the sun went off for say 15 mijhutes or so, the power company would have time to crank up their generators, or maybe the sun might start up again so you wouldn't need to switch back to grid power.

If you wanted 300 minutes (5 hours) off grid no sun supply, that would be 100 large batteries, say 70 amp hours each.
You can see that this would very quickly wreck the planet from lead poisoning, not to mention the $15,000 cost of the batteries every 3 or 4 years.
All up, with current battery technology, it does not work.

It works well for camping because you only use about 25 amp hours a day to run a small fridge, computer and radio etc, plus minor nick nacks, shaver, phone charger etc.
This can be run from 2 X 70 amp hour 4wd batteries in parallel and they are quite happy to spit out 10 amp hours each per day, without killing the battery too much.
So, if people were content with the electrical facilities they use when camping, then we already have the technology to disconnect from the grid.
But then, we want our 10 kilowatt output air conditioners, the 500 litre fridge with the barn sized freezer, the ice water dispenser, the 55 inch plasma tv, the washing machine, clothes dryer, hair dryer, 500 watt computer, the 1000 watt surround sound system, the electro fragmentiser perfume dispenser, the 100 watt 'you name it',.. all of which add up to make your off grid power supply totally inadequate.

Soooo,.. we await a cheap battery with a useable daily capacity of about 12 kilowatt hours to make all our dreams come true.
Well, maybe not all of them,, only those in relation to cheap power.
I might say that lithium batteries are getting close but they still have a bad habit of bursting into flames from time to time, particularly if not used correctly.

Peak demand times are mornings and evenings not mid day.

5:30pm can a bit of a peak, with offices are still running, and houses are also being cranked up...
But Victorian Daylight Savings, would mean reasonable solar input at 5:30pm (in Summer).
I had a look at some other charts, and the consumption between 7am and 9pm is kind of flat lined! Peaks are only marginally higher that the base load... Gas is already being used for "peaking power".

As human's we'll eventually sort out a better solution!

Beaglebuddy said..

Peak demand times are mornings and evenings not mid day.

On a stinking hot summer day, peak demand is at 3:30pm or 4:00pm in NSW in summer. In winter the main peak is at 6pm, with a smaller peak in the morning.

Mr Milk said..

I heard something the other day on RN, talking about developing tropical Oz where the professor guy was saying that his calculations said that it is viable to pump water uphill using solar by day and then run hydro at night for towns in the north

www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/sundayextra/the-northern-myth/5080184

But I still don't get why there is the idea that you can drive a car powered by Hydrogen in a tank, but that you can't do the same thing with a set of much bigger tanks to store solar power ie Why does it have to be an ionic battery? There is also a proposition that you can chill air to a liquid and then use the expansion when it boils to drive a turbine.

The snowy hydro scheme already does this. They can pump water up and run it back down again to generate. Energy recovery is in the order of 80%, so if the solar cells could produce power for the right price it could work. Now you only need a big enough dam (actually two dams, you need another at the bottom) and enough solar cells. The energy you can store is dictated by two factors...size of the reservoir, and the height difference. To store enough energy you need to build two huge dams, and they need to have a large height difference. It's hard enough finding somewhere suitable, but then you need pressure rated steel lined tunnels. It's not cheap! With the dams, tunnels, generators and pumps already in place at the Snowy, the solar would maybe pay for itself, but if you had to build it all, the economics just do not stack up. Your talking billions of dollars in infrastructure on top of the solar cells. Although, we're about to blow $66B so we can download movies faster, so you'd think we could spare a little bit of cash.

Simondo said..

PeeWee,
You raise some good points! But lighten the fark up dude! (Heavy Weather!) I can see you are of above average intelligence!

Your issue about small scale towns being blocked by clouds is a bit of an exaggeration...

Not really an exaggeration, in WA if you draw a line from Kalbarri to Kalgoorlie, basically every town north of that line is not connected to the south west interconnected grid, so they run small scale power stations just for each town. So they are highly susceptible to network fluctuations from an over supply of solar power and rapid fluctuations from clouds etc.

Chris6791 said..

Beaglebuddy said..

In the US they are installing "Smart" electric meters to better integrate the solar into the grid, the meter is connected by radio frequency to the control center where they can real time monitor the demand and the solar output. With the output monitored they can better anticipate clouds and storm fronts to know when more electricity will be required to keep the grid going.
The downside is this is a foot in the door to a time in the near future when they will be able to adjust your usage without asking, for instance they will be able to shut off your AC or your clothes dryer if the grid demand becomes too much. There has even been talk of them having control over your thermostat

Isn't there already a trial in WA somewhere where they have installed smart meters that can control hungry appliances like air conditioners during peak periods?

Soon all air conditioners sold in Australia will be required to have an interface to allow them to be controlled over the internet. At present there are trials where people are paid to turn off their air conditioner at peak times to relieve the grid. The exact time you want to use your air conditioner!!

I'd rather they raise the thermostat a couple of degrees than have a blackout.

Pool pumps are a better idea though. No big deal if your pool pump is turned off for a couple of hours.