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 a cost effective solar refrigerator system using existing battery and photovoltaic technolgy. Granted, a breakthrough in battery design would make the system a little smaller but even 4 golf cart batteries don't take up that much room.

Pretty much all you need fopr a solar refrigerator is about 300 to 500 Watts of Photovoltics, 4 to 6 golf cart batteries, a charge controller and a 1500W or so inverter. Off the shelf total RETAIL cost, right now, about $2000. Now your home has a stand alone power system with about 5kWhrs of stored energy that is pretty much dedicated to your refrigerator.

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 going back into the grid along with all the other grid tie systems to deliver power at a time of abundance. No transmission losses from acres of PV arrays in the middle of nowhere providing electricity to loads a thousand miles away. Your producing the energy at the point source of use. Your system is efficiently matched to operate the load plus the extra needed to run the 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 refrigerator negates a small amount of necessary capacity, therefore reducing the need for more power plants. The solar refrigeration system is a micro power station that becomes part of a large decentralized energy infrastructure that maximizes the benefit of the solar infrastructure you are capitalizing.

I have built numberous solar powered refrigation system by simply cobbling together parts from various over the counter suppliers. Why can't General Electric build a couple hundred million state of the art solar refrigerators for distribution thru utility companies as part of a decentralized energy infrastructure stategy rather than a couple hundred AP1000 nuclear reactors to continue building up an inefficient centralized energy infrastructure.

Real, meaningful progress toward the reduction of carbon emmissions will have to be done from the bottom up. A top down approach trying to create centralized alternative energy infrastructure that is redistribution is far less efficient. We need to get serious about renewable energy and the best place to start is to make sure every home in America has a solar water heater and a solar refrigerator first. Then add the big fields of collector for general use later as we begin to phase out conventional energy supplies completely. The decentralize approach gives us far more return on our investment than business as usual, expanding our fundamentally inefficient centralized energy infrastructure.