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Article on Solar Panel Costs from Australia

 

Subject Index :-

Town Offered Free Solar Power
Dodgy Sales Tactics
Solar panel costings
A subsidised appendage
Solar power realities
Solar power economics
Wasting your money
How many solar cells
The Energy Saving Trust

'TOWN OFFERED FREE SOLAR POWER DEAL'
By Nick Collins, The Daily Telegraph, Saturday, 25th June 2011

An energy firm has offered to install solar panels on each of the 21,000 homes and businesses in its local area after gaining funding that could lead to Britain's first renewable energy-powered town.

Residents of Southam, a market town in Warwickshire, could become the greenest community in Britain after EOS Energy announced it would supply and install the technology for free.

The firm said residents would be able to save up to £30 million on their electricity bills through the Government's Feed-In Tariff (Fit) scheme. If enough solar panels were placed on a roof it would be possible for a family to reduce its energy bills to zero, the company claimed.

EOS was able to offer the technology for free to all homes and businesses in the town and its surrounding villages after being awarded £20 million of funding by an unnamed private equity firm.

Based on average household energy consumption, EOS expects a cash reward of £950 every year under the Fit scheme for every home taking up its offer.
(That is why they are pushing it! They get a £20 million gift from some 'unnamed' eco-loony and also reap taxpayer funded subsidies of £950 every year for 25 years for every house connected! What a fabulous deal - FOR THEM!).
Lee Summers, EOS director, said: "There is no reason that rooftops across Britain could not be used as batteries to power our towns and cities."
(Absolutely! Now let's see, that's 20,000,000 homes x £950 per annum x 25 years. You do the math. A nice little earner from our taxes.)

 

‘SOLAR PANEL FIRMS USING DODGY SALES TACTICS’
By Harry Wallop, Consumer Affairs Editor The Daily Telegraph, Friday, 24th June 2011

Solar panel salesmen are using "dodgy" tactics and misleading customers into thinking they are saving thousands of pounds more than is possible, the consumer watchdog Which? said.

An undercover investigation found that some companies were using high-pressure sales tactics, contravening industry codes, and failing to give key information which would have led potential customers to believe the cost of the equipment was lower than in reality. Installing a solar panel system costs on average £12,000. Which? said that some of the blame lay with government guidelines.

Installing a solar panel could, in theory, net a profit of £28,000 over a 25-year period, according to the Energy Saving Trust, but only if the roof is in a perfect, sunny location, facing due south and without any shade. Which? found that none of the companies took account of the location of the house when calculating possible savings. That is because Department for Environment guidelines treat Cumbria the same as Cornwall. (My emphasis.)

Richard Lloyd, Which? executive director, said: "It seems extraordinary that the government's rules require companies to ignore whether you live in Cornwall or Scotland when working out how long it will take to pay for the solar panels. It's obvious that the more sun you get, the faster the payback. The Government has to put this right."

Though government guidelines fail to distinguish between different counties, it seems clear that roofs in shady areas should be treated differently.

However, Which? found that seven of the 12 companies tested failed to recommend the correct number of panels to take into account the shady area of the roof. It also found that 10 out of the 12 failed to mention a key piece of information - despite being pressed by the investigator - a failure fiat was seriously misleading.

When asked if there were any maintenance costs, all but two failed to mention that the inverter, which transforms the solar energy into usable electricity, will need replacing after a decade or so at a cost of £1,000 or more. (My emphasis.)

Neil McLoughlin, a trading standards officer, said: "On the face of it, the failure to make the consumer aware of these issues would constitute a criminal offence. This is referred to in law as a misleading omission."

Householders who install solar panels make money in three ways. Their electricity bills should fall by between a third and a half by using all the electricity generated from the roof panels.

The second saving comes from a government payment, called a generation tariff, which is given to every customer who installs a solar panel. For every kilowatt of energy produced from the panels, the customer receives 4.33p (should read 43.3p), a payment that is guaranteed for 25 years, tax-free and inflation proofed.

The third saving comes from a further government payment, called an export tariff, for customers that produce an excess amount of energy and sell some back to the National Grid - this is a less generous 3.1p per kilowatt. (This is wrong! It is actually 3.1p per kilowatt on top of the 43.3p)

Gideon Richards, the chairman of the MCS Steering Group, which represents solar panel companies, said: "Maintaining consumer trust in microgeneration is crucial to the UK meeting its ambitious carbon reduction targets. MCS will continue to play a major part in delivering this trust we take the allegations in this report very seriously, and they will be thoroughly investigated."

 

SOLAR PANEL COSTINGS.
2nd February 2010.

The government has just put out a policy about installing solar panels on your house. They intend to give you £900 per year subsidy and they reckon that you will save £140 per year on your electricity bill. A typical solar panel installation will set you back £12,000.

Now I do not agree that the the Government has a right to offer £900 in subsidy because that will come from taxes that are paid by everyone. Why should some benefit from a tax rebate when others do not? However, how does the cost to you actually stack up?

The set up costs you £12,000. You save £140 + £900 per year = £1040. This gives a payback term of 11.5 years without considering maintenance. Anyone in business would throw out any investment proposal with a payback of over 3 years but no matter.
Now, if you invest that £12,000 @ 4% for 11.5 years you would get £18994.36 in return. At 3% you would get £16936.59. So you are minimum £4936 out of pocket and that doesn’t take into account the fact that the solar cell installation will not last for 10 years let alone 11.5 years.
And as for saving the planet? How much energy did it take to build, instal and maintain the system?

 

SOLAR POWER - A SUBSIDISED APPENDAGE
From an article by Viv Forbes, Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition

Electricity consumers can look forward to soaring charges for electricity and blackouts if politicians continue to undermine the power grid by mandating and subsidising solar power generation.

Solar power can never produce continuous, predictable low cost power. It must always be supported by expensive power storage systems or by reliable power sources such as coal, gas, hydro or nuclear.

No matter how many millions of taxpayer money is poured into “research”, it can never solve the two fatal flaws of solar power.

Firstly, sunlight energy arrives in very dilute form, and thus needs vast areas of collectors to harvest significant energy. This results in high capital costs and much environmental disturbance. Solar power can light one 75-watt bulb for every card table of collectors (in the middle of the day only). How many card tables do we need to run the trains, factories, fridges, homes, heaters, hospitals and tools of a big city?

Secondly, the solar energy produced during daylight hours is constantly variable and unpredictable, and zero power is generated at night. As a result, solar power farms seldom produce more than an average of 15% of their rated capacity over a year and as low as 1% for a day or so.

In Australia for example, the maximum electricity demand occurs at about 6.30 pm in mid-winter in the big southern cities. The maximum solar power is generated at noon in mid-summer in clear northern deserts. If the nightly solar curfew is to be covered by solar power alone, this necessitates a vast area of collectors to provide grid power as well as charge a storage backup during the day and run it down at night. The scattered solar collectors also need a huge new transmission network. Such a system is inefficient and very costly.

More likely, however, is that the solar farms will be backed up by gas or coal power stations running on idle and wasting fuel and capital until they are needed to supply power during the nightly solar blackouts.

Solar energy has useful applications, but supplying the power grid is NOT one of them. Solar power can never supply the reliable low cost electricity needed for cities and industries. In that application, it can only exist as a subsidised and troublesome appendage propped up by serious power sources such as coal, gas, nuclear or hydro.

 

SOLAR POWER REALITIES
From an article by Peter Lang

Characteristics of solar power

The key characteristics of solar power are:
1. Power output is zero from sunset to sunrise.
2. Power output versus time is a parabolic distribution on a clear day: zero at sunrise and sunset, and maximum at midday.
3. Energy output varies from summer to winter (less in winter than summer).
4. Energy output varies from day to day depending on weather conditions.
5. Maximum daily energy output is on a clear sunny day in summer.
6. Minimum daily energy output is on a heavily overcast day in winter.

As an example, the Queanbeyan Solar Farm in Australia has an installed power capacity of 55 kW. The average power output over 2 years was 7.58 kW. The average capacity factor over this period was 13.7%. The total energy output and capacity factor are:

Date         Energy Output (kWh)        Capacity Factor
29/07/02   (lowest winter 2002) 10.0      0.8%
13/08/03   (lowest winter 2003) 10.5      0.8%
22/06/02   (highest winter) 212             16.0%
29/02/04   (highest summer) 288          21.9%
Average daily for June, July, August = 131.9kWh = 9%

Conclusions

1. Solar power is uneconomic.
2. The capital cost of solar power would be 25 times more than nuclear power.
3. The minimum power output, not the peak or average, is the main factor governing solar power’s economic viability.
4. The least cost solar option would emit 20 times more CO2 (over the full life cycle) and use at least 400 times more land area compared with nuclear.
5. Government mandates and subsidies hide the true cost of renewable energy but these additional costs must be carried by others.

SOLAR ENERGY COSTS & ECONOMICS
From John in Maryland, USA June 6th, 2009

As an interesting fact on solar, I had a quote done for my house in Florida for a 2.5kW array (not enough to power the whole house, about 1/3 of the average requirement). The cost benefit worked out as follows:

Cost to purchase and install: $25,000 - this yielded a return of less than 1% on investment (about 0.7%)
Federal tax credit of $7,500
State rebate of about $9,600
Yield after subsidies (if qualified) - a total net cost of $7,900 with a return on my investment of just over 6%.

In other words the state and federal governments (taxpayers) would pay $17,100 in subsidies to support an overall yield on the total investment (theirs and mine) of 0.7%.

Every scrap of the product installed is of foreign manufacture sending the bulk of the taxpayer money overseas.

As a business person, if my company invested in 0.7% return projects, I would be out of business. I wonder if that applies to the Feds and States?

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HOMEOWNERS WHO UNDERTAKE "GREEN" INITIATIVES TO SAVE ENERGY, COULD BE WASTING THEIR MONEY AND WILL SEE LITTLE BENEFIT, LEADING EXPERTS WARN.
By Harry Wallop, Consumer Affairs Correspondent
Published: 11:59AM BST 02 Sep 2008

Installing solar panels on the roof, which can cost up to £5,000, would take as long as 208 years to pay back the cost.

However, owners of a terraced house who installed cavity wall protection would see a return on their investment in as little as three years.

The sums have been calculated by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, which has published a 'Greener Homes Price Guide'. The guide warns that many homeowners are being duped into making radical changes to their home that will not save them money and will do little to reduce their carbon footprint.

The guide is being published to help families save money after all the major energy companies increased their gas prices by up to 35 per cent, leading to customers' paying £1,400 for their annual gas and electricity bills.

Joe Martin, from RICS, said: "We all have a role to play in helping to reduce our carbon footprint, be it through changes to our behavior or by choosing greener alternatives. The reality is, however, that most people struggle with the cost, time, and effort it takes to make these changes.

"Consumers need innovation and enhanced technology to help in the fight against climate change, not just a guilt trip about living in the world we have created."

Installing a condensing boiler – frequently cited as one of the best ways to improve the energy efficiency of a home – can take 18 years to make a pay back.

The average cost of installing one of these modern boilers is £1,720, but saves on average just £95 off people's gas bills.

Insulation is the most efficient form of "greening" a home, according the guide. Improving the insulation in a loft costs just £325 and saves £60 a year.

The cost of installing cavity wall insulation in external walls varies enormously, depending on whether the house is part of a terrace or detached. For those living in a terrace the cost is just £440 on average and should knock £145 off the homeowner's annual heating bill.

 

HOW MANY SOLAR CELLS WOULD I NEED IN ORDER TO PROVIDE ALL OF THE ELECTRICITY THAT MY HOUSE NEEDS?

The average solar panel contains 4 cells, and each of them can produce 0.45 volts and 100 milliamps, or 45 milliwatts. Each cell measures 2 inches by 0.5 inches. In other words, with these solar cells you can generate 45 milliwatts in one square inch (6.45 square cm). For the sake of discussion, let's be generous and assume that a panel can generate 70 milliwatts per square inch.

To calculate how many square inches of solar panel you need for a house, you need to know:

1. How much power the house consumes on average.
2. Where the house is located (so you can calculate mean solar days, average rainfall, etc.). This question is impossible to answer unless you have a specific location in mind. We'll assume that on an average day the solar panels generate their maximum power for 5 hours.

The first question is actually pretty interesting, so let's work on it.

A "typical home" in can use either oil, electricity or gas to provide heat -- heat for the house, the hot water, the clothes dryer and the stove/oven. If you were to power a house with solar electricity, you would certainly use oil or gas appliances because solar electricity is so expensive.

This means that what you would be powering with solar electricity are things like the refrigerator, the lights, the computer, the TV, stereo equipment, motors in things like furnace fans and the washer, etc. Let's say that all of those things average out to 600 watts on average. Over the course of 24 hours, you need 600 watts x 24 hours = 14,400 watt-hours per day.

From our calculations and assumptions above, we know that a solar panel can generate 70 milliwatts per square inch x 5 hours = 350 milliwatt hours per day. Therefore you need about 41,000 square inches of solar panel for the house. That's a solar panel that measures about 285 square feet (about 26 square meters). That would cost around £20,000 right now. Then, because the sun only shines part of the time, you would need to purchase a battery bank, an inverter, etc., and that often doubles the cost of the installation.

If you want to have a small room air conditioner anywhere in your home then double everything.

Because solar electricity is so expensive, you would normally go to great lengths to reduce your electricity consumption. Instead of a desktop computer and a monitor you would use a laptop computer. You would use fluorescent lights instead of incandescent. You would use a small B&W TV instead of a large color set. You would get a small, extremely efficient refrigerator. By doing these things you might be able to reduce your average power consumption to 100 watts. This would cut the size of your solar panel and its cost by a factor of 6, and this might bring it into the realm of possibility.

The thing to remember, however, is that 100 watts per hour purchased from the power grid would only cost about 29p a day right now, or £106 a year. That's why you don't see many solar houses unless they are in very remote locations. When it only costs about £106 a year to purchase power from the grid, it is hard to justify spending thousands of pounds on a solar system. 

 

The Energy Saving Trust is a non-profit organisation jointly funded by the British Government and the private sector in order to help fight climate change by promoting the sustainable use of energy, energy conservation and to cut carbon dioxide emissions in the United Kingdom.

Solar electricity - http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/Generate-your-own-energy/Solar-electricity

Costs for installing a solar electricity system vary a lot - an average system costs between £8,000 and £14,000, depending on its size and type.
In general:
• the more electricity the system can generate, the more it costs but the more it could save.
• solar tiles cost more than conventional panels.
• panels built into a roof are more expensive than those that sit on top but,
• if you need major roof repairs, PV tiles can offset the cost of roof tiles

Savings can be considerable - almost 1 tonne of CO2 a year, and around £200 off your electricity bill*. A 2 kWp system could provide around 40% of a household's yearly electricity needs.

Maintenance is generally small - you'll need to keep the panels relatively clean and make sure trees don't begin to overshadow them.

Payback period = 8000 / 200 = 40 years
£8000 for 40 years @ 4% = £31518.95 interest and you’ve still got your original capital sum.

 

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