 Quote:
Originally Posted by DallasGuy
I haven't priced out home solar systems at all. I was just curious, at what point will home solar systems be mass produced and marketed at an affordable price?...and there would be companies available to install them for the average consumer? (say, $10,000 or less for a system that would create enough electricity to run the average house and cover most of their electricity usage, assuming an area of the country that is fairly sunny) Are systems like this available now? At what cost?
|
Well, here's a bit of info:
On Grid Calculator at the Alternative Energy Store
From that, if we assume $.12/KWH in CA, the guys $90/month electric usage is ~ 750KW. And that site says you need ~ 6KW of panels to provide that. ~ $25,000 for the panels on that site, plus inverter, installation, etc. Over $4/watt. IIRC, Nords cut that almost in half, but that included a lot of scrounging and sweat equity.
It takes over 9KW of panels for that power in the Chicago area. Even at the promises of $1/watt solar panels 'real soon now', it's not exactly a no-brainer.
These guys always ignore the fact that a solar panel takes a lot of energy to manufacture. It takes about 2 years of full solar production to offset the energy to manufacture it. So for two years, these guys are still burning fossils fuel. And since solar requires so much energy to produce, I imagine the prices will be rising along with fuel costs.
-ERD50
|