Feasibility of Solar Refrigeration

Domestic refrigeration accounts for something like 5% of the total electricity consumed in the United States. With recent advancements and price drops in inverter technology, it is now possible to assemble cost effective solar refrigeration systems. Continued improvements will make future systems even better and less expensive.

Pretty much all you need for a solar refrigerator is about  500-1000 Watts of Photovoltics, 8 golf cart batteries, a charge controller and a 1500W or so inverter. Off the shelf total RETAIL cost, right now, about $3000. Now your home has a stand alone power system with about 10kWhrs of stored energy that is dedicated to maintaining 24/7/365 refrigeration without being on the grid.

By targeting the refrigerator as your primary load for this micro power system you get several advantages.

First, the most important appliance in your house now has it's own power system.

Second, you absolutely maximize the energy collected by your photovoltaic array. No transmission losses from acres of PV arrays in the middle of nowhere providing electricity to loads a hundred miles away. Your producing and using the the electricity you need at the source of its consumption.  Your system is efficiently matched to operate the load it was intended to displace and provide stored energy to run that load when the sun goes down. With a little oversizing you can add an auxillary circuit big enough to run your TV as well. Now you the two most important appliances in your home running on solar power, lol.

Finally, you have effectively used solar energy to reduce "base load". Each solar refrigerator negates a small amount of necessary base load capacity, therefore reducing the need for more power plants. The solar refrigeration system is a micro power plant that becomes part of a large decentralized energy infrastructure that maximizes the benefit of the solar infrastructure you are capitalizing.

Why can't General Electric build a couple hundred million state of the art solar refrigerators as part of a decentralized energy infrastructure stategy rather than a couple hundred AP1000 nuclear reactors to continue adding to an inefficient centralized energy infrastructure. This strategy also puts a lot more people to work and the energy savings goes into consumers pockets to help stimulate local economies.

Signicant progress toward the reduction of carbon emmissions will have to be done from the bottom up. A top down approach that produces solar electricity with centralized fields of photovoltaic arrays and then redistribution the electricity is far less efficient. We need to get serious about reducing carbon emmisions and the most cost effective place to start is by displace conventional energy consumption with renewable, point of use production technology. More negaWatts not megawatts!