Earth Policy Institute

[FoFa]

One thng about photocells, they produce DC current. Your house runs on AC current. Most people just convert the DC to AC and sell it back to the power company (little power plants). This has the effect of lowering your electric bill. How ever it does not always help during an outage (depends on your setup). The inital cost can rise to a real unaffordable price the more you try to make it do. Of course there is always the completly off the "the grid" version where you run the power into batteries and setup your house to run DC. But that has a lot of problems also (every see a 12 or 24 volt DC oven). I'm no expert but have done a little research as we were thinking about making our off the grid shack at our deer lease solar. Coleman laterns were a lot cheaper.

 

[Rich]

A college here has just installed two wind powered turbines here at a cost of £53,000 ea. They will save appr. £1,000 per year off their electricity bill

 

[FoFa]

So £106,000 to save £1,000 a year. Humm with a payback of over 100 years seems a little far fetched. Just had money to burn or what?

 

[Rich]

All being driven along by global warming, what these people don't realise is that wind not being a constant, conventional electricity generators have to keep going all the time regardless

 

[MrsGorilla]

One thng about photocells, they produce DC current. Your house runs on AC current. Most people just convert the DC to AC and sell it back to the power company (little power plants). This has the effect of lowering your electric bill. How ever it does not always help during an outage (depends on your setup). The inital cost can rise to a real unaffordable price the more you try to make it do. Of course there is always the completly off the "the grid" version where you run the power into batteries and setup your house to run DC. But that has a lot of problems also (every see a 12 or 24 volt DC oven). I'm no expert but have done a little research as we were thinking about making our off the grid shack at our deer lease solar. Coleman laterns were a lot cheaper.

I'm not an expert either as I'm just starting to research it after seeing something about it on Discovery Channel or somewhere like that. I know they have some kind of converter box that transforms it into power that the house can use and the extra goes back to the grid (or something like that). I'm going to check into it though for our future house. Anything I can do to make it more energy efficient would be fantastic and the sun is the most renewable source of energy we have right now.

 

[MrsGorilla]

All being driven along by global warming, what these people don't realise is that wind not being a constant, conventional electricity generators have to keep going all the time regardless

I always thought that wind wasn't the most effective method of generating power anyway, as you have to have so many of such a large size to make a difference with anything.

Just curious, how large were the turbines that the college installed?

As an aside, a university in Michigan did the same type of thing with the solar shingles I was looking at: Oakland University

 

[FoFa]

The more interesting things are what we normally do not think of. I once saw a guy basically turned his basement into a cold storage area for cooling in summer. He filled it with water and using freon in a closed pipe with small radiator fins outside, he froze the snot out of the water during winter, then during summer circulated antifreeze through the ice to cool his house.
But I think the most interesting one I have seen I think was in a Mother Earth news back in the 80's where when they built a house, they create 2 large heat sinks by isolating two internal walls, making those walls concrete, and sinking them 8-10 feet into the ground. Of course the house was energy effecient, but had regular cooling and heating. But the large mass buried in the groud transfered a stable core temp. from the ground into the house and reduced the heating/cooling requirements by something like 70-75% (going on memory so that could be inaccurate). Plus the cost of the two "heat sinks" was not that much comparativly speaking.

 

[MrsGorilla]

It makes you wonder why they don't do that kind of thing more. I guess they think oil and gas are going to last forever.