But at least now, you'll get a decent price for the Montego.

_________________

At present there are siignificant technical and political problems with a sea of solar panels.

Apart from issues of cost and means of converting DC power to AC and and into the grid, Once its there it cant be stored, The same with generated power too - there is no storage facilities.

The political problem is the a general piece of legislation by a previosus government means that solar going into the grid has to be purchased at a higher price than the electricity concerns can sell it for.

Thats above and beyond any purchase and installation grants or rebates.

I can't understand why the Govt won't let you have batteries on a grid feed system - even as an option - easy enough to isolate then power generated on site could be used onsite. When we were on wind power for 3 years our biggest problem was starting the fridge and washing machine - rest of the time we generated more than we could use so grid feed/draw at peak time would have been useful - rest of the time use the battery storage.

_________________
David L


My greatest fear in life is that when I die my wife will sell my Mini and tools for the price I told her I paid for them!

David

Technically probably because your talking about a hybrid solar. A grid feed would pretty well suck everything you have during best solar harest and leave you with bugger all for the evening when there is no wind or sun.

It also affects the batteries. Deep cycle dont like big decharge/recharge cycles - they like to be fairly even.

Shallow cycle batteries dont hold the depth of charge needed for an overnight supply.

I think it has to be one or the dedicated grid feed or dedicated home feed.

Mike

????? thought that was the idea of DEEP cycle

_________________
David L


My greatest fear in life is that when I die my wife will sell my Mini and tools for the price I told her I paid for them!

*lol* My understanding of that is the depth of charge they can hold. IE; they will hold a bigger charge for longer underload.

We have about 20 batteries giving us about 4000 amp/hours capacity. We have constantly told not to let the charge go below 11.5 as it will dramatically shorten battery life. We are told to keep it as even as possible.

So i guess its interpretation of the meaning of the word Deep cycle.

How do you see it

This has been my understanding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_cycle_battery

_________________
David L


My greatest fear in life is that when I die my wife will sell my Mini and tools for the price I told her I paid for them!

I have saved that for discussion with our supplier, installer, advisor person.

I think cost of infrastructure is one thing, but if the government is going to waste money on people's 2nd (or 3rd) car which is hardly being used in the driveway, to be traded in, in a poorly executed program, I can think of better ways to do it.
There are trials with power companies now for hybrid power at certain companies. Large UPS charged at off peak, then running during peak. This is also the model (but using heated coolant) for solar to look after baseload (ie. 24hr coverage) power.
Everyone sees the value in the government putting in roads, trains, water, power and other grids with the return coming in later years but giving an immediate quality of life improvement. Why can't we hold this standard to solar?

Be careful, I'm thinking of bringing out my bandwagon.....

Cheers.

There's other innovative methods of storing energy as well, although they're often outside the box a little bit so seem a little hard to believe at first.
One I find fascinating is the storage of solar energy through the day in very large rotating masses spinning in a vacuum and on magnetic bearings. The windings of the motor are embedded in the mass, and return their kinetic energy to the grid on demand later on when the sun goes down or demand exceeds the solar cells output. I would like to see this on a house size scale, and was something I was deeply considering for a project this year.

There's other ideas of heat storage, although technology for electrical generation from small heat differences is about 50 years behind...

_________________
SooperDooperMiniCooperExpertEngineering

All garage work involves equal measures of enthusiasm, ingenuity and a fair degree of irresponsibility.

The best system I've seen (about 30 years ago) was on a TV documentary- almost perpetual motion. An outback cattle station had a 20KvA generator running off a turbine powered by freon - The freon was condensed into a liquid and ran down a pipe into the artesian basin where the geothermal heat vapourised it and the gas returned to the surface under pressure to drive the turbine - no pumps on the freon it circulated itself. The generator ran day and night and the lights stayed on to absorb the output !

_________________
David L


My greatest fear in life is that when I die my wife will sell my Mini and tools for the price I told her I paid for them!

As sure as taxes there will be someone who has a problem with any idea to create cheap renewable energy, but there is problems with sucking heat from the crust on a large scale, and its seen in iceland where they use the large amount of heat available sub surface from their volcanic activity to generate electricity and provide heating to homes.
The problem is like dripping water onto a red hot piece of steel where the steel represents the heat energy available in the crust, and the water represents heat taken by human activity. If you drip the water on at a slow enough rate, then the steel will not be affected and the local area around the point of water contact will stay red, drip it on at a larger rate and you see a black spot start to form where the water has sapped the energy from the steel at that spot, and the thermal conductivity is not able to keep up with the energy being sapped by the heat exchange. This happens on a geological scale as well, but stone is really a very very poor conductor of heat. They have wells go cold and geological activity changes permanently in places.

In Iceland they have to balance very carefully the amount of heat they remove from the earth or the hot spot goes cold and the well head is sapped. I don't know how you would get around this on a very large scale, Iceland is small and has very small needs, so they can manage it. I don't know how it would be managed for a energy hungry capital city.

_________________
SooperDooperMiniCooperExpertEngineering

All garage work involves equal measures of enthusiasm, ingenuity and a fair degree of irresponsibility.

That's supposedly one of the good things about the Chevy Volt, too. Plug it in, and use it as a rate buffer (i.e. discharge it during the day if you're at home to avoid paying peak rates, then charge at night).

I'd love to see non-PV Solar deployed... On a large scale, using then energy harvested to split water, when can then be turned back into electricity by fuel cells... But I know that it's not going to happen. The investment costs are too big, and the running costs are too low (simple maintenance on the solar steam turbine, and cleaning the mirrors).

Have you guys seen these guys before..? I only heard about them because they're cranky that the government won't include them in the renewable energy scheme. The Fuel Cells are running at about 60% (far better than your average power station), and then use a further 20-25% of the energy to replace your hot water system. Meaning the system runs at anywhere up to 85% efficiency - significantly lower emissions for the same captured energy.

I loved the idea of the crazy blokes from the American desert at the end of the third episode of James May's Big Ideas, too... The blokes with parabolic mirrors so good they can melt steel (if said steel is in the focal point of the mirror), and who claim to be able to make hydrocarbons (and O2) from nothing more than CO2 and H2O - both sourced from the air... And hey - if you're taking CO2 out of the air to make your fuel, effectively, you're atmospherically carbon neutral.

All that said... It doesn't really make the whole cash for clunker idea any better or worse. It's just kind of off topic.

There was a doco on TV recently about a guy in the States that has developed a method on screen printing the material for fuel cells onto double sided thin sheets then stacking them modular style to whatever capacity you like. Some big companies like IBM, Microsoft and others are trialling them out at the moment powering their head offices. The unit look like the box like substations and the commentary was say that one could be installed per residential housing estate and power the houses in that block and so cut down distribution hardware costs and they run on any fuel - cheaper the better at half the energy input of current generation.

Just read Tadhg's link - that's the company

_________________
David L


My greatest fear in life is that when I die my wife will sell my Mini and tools for the price I told her I paid for them!