It seems I am gaining a lot of interest in solar. The topic has always facinated me, mainly because it seems so simple, yet so difficult and foreign. How come something as simple as putting some cells on the rooftops will lower our killer power bill.
Living in a hot land, things like A/C are vital to our living standards. I’m used to sleep with A/C on all night, internet, and computers running 24/7, as a coder, they run specially during the night.
My family house used around 2.5 kw/h own a rather medium sized pool and also had up to 5 vehiecles. I imagined our carboon footprint was a large as it could be. No we didn’t had a private jet or travel every other week, but we did had a great deal of vacationing, a large office, and a large payroll.
And no is not to brag, but to actually make sense how can this or other families could afford to mantain their lifestyle entirely on the sun.
Sure we did had land, unocuppied land and even a ranch and with some great creditline we could have foster our own little power plant that could not only be enough for us but for maybe even the whole block.
We might have not have had the engineering expertise but being a civil engineer, this knowledge could have been acquired rather easily. Not just that, but it could have been good for business, generating hydropower was one way we were already making money, a solar plant could have been something unique that could have made us even more money.
But let’s do the math? How exactly is solar affordable not just now but back in the 80s/90s?
Right now the math goes like this:
400dls x 1kw/day panel plus inverter and wiring. To get our solar juice around 2 panels would have been an 800 dls investment.
I would love to get into the economics of it all, but I think this vary greatly because of the lack of knowledge for building such things nationally. Having to import everything put a high tax on the implementation, and this makes it hard to be able to get things straighten up.
Researching solar, I have come across facinating things. One of the experiments I remember well is how to harvest energy even from a light post many miles away enough to at least spin a small wheel.
Another was about the way it was rather easy to build solar panels from garbage.
Finally I learn how the history of the world could have greatly changed to a solar reality if some experiments would have gone well back in the early 1900s.
So now, thanks to random events I am getting back into solar once again and I hope this time I would be able to get things finalized into true solar benefit.
Ideas, thoughts and Free Software 