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Issue #202 May 2007
Keeping the Lights On
by Steve Ciarcia
We all have our personality quirks. I’d like to think that one of my positive attributes is that I don’t mess around talking about doing a project. I just go do it.
Of course, rapid-action decisiveness can be tough on the people around you. I’m sure my wife considers it par for the course when living with an engineer, but still, every time I say, “Honey, I feel like starting a project,” I see the color drain from her face and the fear in her eyes. Over the years, when I have said “project,” she has never known whether to expect a bulldozer or cement mixer the next morning. Either way, the task as well as the complications will be monumental.
Perhaps it’s a cold-weather New England thing, but I like self-sufficiency. It hasn’t happened for a few years, but getting snowed in or having an ice storm or hurricane that takes out the power for days becomes an adventure when you are prepared for it. In today’s culture of complete interdependency, it’s almost fun being able to fire up the diesel-powered generator, light the big wood stove, blast through the drifts in the four-wheelers, and thumb your nose at the temporary suspension of our fragile infrastructure.
I say fragile because it seems like we are becoming less and less in control of key pieces of it every day. All it takes is some whacko zealot with a bomb to take out a tanker at a narrow point in the Persian Gulf or set his sights on a propane barge in the wrong place, and welcome to price increases and fuel shortages. Similarly, if everyone continues adding more air conditioning and electric consumption without increasing efficiency or adding new power-generating sources (a particular problem here in CT), then periodic power outages will be the norm during the summer months. Basically, unbalance the system and the lights go out.
Unfortunately, the underlying foundation of my self-sufficiency has a big hole in it. Full sufficiency and convenience needs electricity to function. Certainly, in a crisis we’d be snug and warm in front of the wood stove, but there might be no lights and no water to flush the toilets after a few days if I hadn’t stored 100 gallons of diesel fuel to power the well water pump, run the refrigerator, and even start the gas stove in the kitchen (I think it might start with a match). Even “environmentalists” with their eco-friendly lifestyles could find themselves on the short end of the electron. Shutting off the air conditioning during summer shortages might be less of an inconvenience for them than me (they probably use fans anyway), but I’ll bet they go ballistic when they try to charge their brand new hybrid electric car and find out that the variable-rate power meter on the house says that if they want to charge their battery now or during the next 12 very-hot no-reserve-supply hours it will cost three times the equivalent of gasoline.
Honey, I feel like starting a project. ;-)
It’s only been a few days since I decided to do this, but if it can be installed at my location (without clear cutting half the county), I’m going to install a photovoltaic power-generating system. From what I can tell so far, installation costs border on the insane, but the fact that it satisfies my major objective for an independent, secure source of power, it may trump all the mitigating factors. Besides, at $0.20 per kWh in CT right now, I love the idea of selling electricity back to the power company.
The idea behind a PV system is to produce your own power. Since the average home consumes around 8,000 kWh a year, most residential systems are sized at 3 kW to 5 kW. They are configured to connect directly from the PV panels to an AC inverter and onto the power line. If the electrical load in the house exceeds the panel output, then all the power will be consumed directly. If, however, the sun is strong and the house load is less than the panel production, the excess power generation is directed out to the utility pole and into the rest of the electrical network. The effect is that excess power causes your electric meter to move backwards, like an electrical credit, reducing your power bill. Later, when the sun sets and you start drawing utility power again, the meter moves forward again.
PV systems are typically designed to satisfy about 50% to 60% of electrical needs. While reducing my power signature is definitely a problem that I have to work on, my current 22,000-kWh consumption suggests that I should be installing about a 10-kW system (presuming I have enough surface area to fit it). This is also where the insanity part enters the equation. There are some significant credits and subsidies available for PV installations, but a PV system costs $8 to $10 per watt installed. (Do the math!) ;-)
So, this is a work in progress that I’ll report on later. If you have any experience or insight into this, please let me know. It’s only been a few days, so I’m sure I have overlooked something and I prefer not to learn the hard way. The good news is that the charts and graphs say that a 10-kW system should produce about 13,085 kWh of electricity and eliminate 22,585 lbs of CO2 emissions in the first year at my location. Let’s just hope this doesn’t involve another bulldozer and cement mixer (if I have to ground-mount everything) or my wife is surely not going to see the humor in keeping the lights on like I do.
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