Oct
10
Farm Electricity On Your Roof
October 10, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Photovoltaic solar panels might well be in for a dramatic drop in price. The contributor “Engineer-Poet” posted an article on The Oil Drum Monday October 8th 2007 titled Photovoltaics: From Waste to Energy-maker.
The article starts off considering the course of waste from doing one thing becoming the tool of something later. Its refreshing to see that it took 54 years to get from Drake’s fist oil well to production of Ford model ‘Ts’ and other technologies that took up slowly.
Then Engineer-Poet really gets going with a quick overview of the photovoltaic market today, which is dependant on silicon for the cell that produces the electricity from sunlight.
Next is a look at where there is a huge deposit of silicon for making solar cells. See:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3047#more
With the consideration of the existing supply of silicon and the new processes for making photocells there looks to be a sea change coming for the industry and for roof owners.
The thing I love about The Oil Drum is that the articles are almost always complete enough to get a full story. In this article the raw calculations are provided that form up the “napkin” numbers and when you read through there will be a substantial – “how about that!” come to mind. And this article attracted a lot of high quality comments and I’ll add one, too.
On the other hand even as the cost that Engineer-Poet is projecting might get close to shingles there remains the installation expense and the wiring and hardware to get the electricity to line voltage and the issue of being in a location where the local utility will pay or adjust a billing to reflect what your installation puts back on the grid. For lots of us that is a sure deal stopper. But the wiring and gear should last through several lifetimes of panels, wind, hail and weather damage. With cost projections so low this method may well have a much more certain future if we can get past differentiating the costs of the cells, installation and current carrying hardware.
I haven’t seen anything that is so encouraging about solar voltaic in a long time. Let’s hope that the information in this article gets widely distributed.
