<DrumBeat: June 18, 2007The Oil DrumLies, damned lies and BP statistics>

89 comments on Some Notes on The Midwest Renewable Energy Fair, Solar Ovens, And Small Wind

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robert2734 on June 17, 2007 - 10:13pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I'm not sure I'd want to mess with 360 volts of electricity if I can't get a licensed electrician out here. I'm an electrical engineer by profession, so I know what a volt, an amp and a watt is, but I don't deal with more than five volts. I'm pretty sure I could walk around with a multimeter and identify where the break in the circuit is. It worth noting that there are no moving parts, the solar panel output is guaranteed for thirty years and the inverter is guaranteed for ten years. Beyond that there are just wires and circuit breakers like any house would have.

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Nate Hagens on June 17, 2007 - 10:25pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

You forgot to mention you were an electrical engineer!

In my opinion though, the important societal impacts will come from both the macro/policy scale and the micro/practical scale and hopefully in the twain shall meet.

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Gilgamesh on June 18, 2007 - 10:11am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I figure it all depends on what you wanna do with your electricity. Without batteries to store the energy you are using the grid for that purpose. What can you power with your solar cells directly? Probably not a computer, or microwave or mostly anything.

You can probably power lights (but during the day O.o?) or heating elements.

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robert2734 on June 18, 2007 - 2:37pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Of course I'm using the grid to store energy (well the grid doesn't store energy either but there's like a petawatt on the US grid at any one time). I'm grid connected anyways, batteries are a pain in the rear, and they paid me $3.50 a peak watt to do it. I dump all my power to the grid, run my house off the grid as always, and at the end of the year, me and the electric company will settle accounts.

If you are off grid, you will probably have batteries somewhere in your system. Remote traffic lights are powered by solar. There are solar powered cell phone battery chargers for backpacking and gabbing at the same time. Solar powered water pumps. Your energy reserve can be the gravitational potential energy of the pumped water rather than batteries. If you use solar power to heat a working fluid to run a heat engine, then the hot fluid is your energy storage and it can work all night long.

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greg on June 20, 2007 - 9:56pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

I just installed a 300v 3KW grid tie system on my garage.
I worked on wiring them to the combiner when it was dark outside, no light no power. I suppose if you had some way to cover them it would work also. It does not take much light to get some voltage, over 1 hour after sunset and it was at 14v.

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