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.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Monday, August 17, 2009
This is my second attempt at blogging and I'm still working on figuring out the workings of the editor but I'm just going to splat these ideas against the wall of the web and see what happens. I'll work on uploading some pictures and graphs later.
My goal is to articulate the feasibility and advantages of a decentralized energy infrastructure.
Take for example nuclear power verses solar water heating in Florida. Progress Energy has manipulated the state government to allow it to bill Florida ratepayer in advance to build a new 2.2 GigaWatt nuclear power facility for the "ESTIMATED" cost of about $28 billion dollars. This plant will increase Florida's base load capacity by about 4%, cost ratepayers thousands of dollars each to build, and result in a 50% increase in the cost of electricity.
Now almost every one of those ratepayers has a water heater and collectively those water heaters use approximately 10% of the electricity consumed in Florida each day. Solar water heating could eliminate that demand on the electric power grid for a fraction of the cost it will take to increase the grid capacity to meet growing demands.
If consumers where given the choice between spending $5000 dollars of their money on building a new nuclear power plant that will increase their electric bill by 50% or investing $3500 dollars into building a statewide decentralized energy infrastructure that would decrease their electric bills 20% by eliminating the need for that nuclear power plant, what do you think they would choose?
Ratepayers need to be given the choice, it's their money and they don't appreciate or understand how it is being spent by others and what some of the real alternatives are. It won't happen easily because the decision to persue a decentralized energy infrastructure where every home has a solar water heater and micro power system big enough to supply 1 kWD per household will represent a huge transfer of wealth from a small minority of power brokers to all the people of Florida. But this approach is better for the ratepayers, better for the economy, and better for the environment.
The choice of a decentralized energy infrastructure will not eliminate the need for our current centralized electric distibution system but could eliminate the need for it to grow and even require it to contract a little. This is going to cost some people with a lot of power a lot of money. The current business model of investor owned utilities is in direct contradiction to the goal of reducing carbon emmissions and global warming. Nuclear is not the best solution but it is certainly the most profitable solution for the electric energy industry. Just because it has low CO2 emmissions does not make Nuclear "Green".
We need to make it a goal to displace conventional energy consumption with renewable energy technology at the point of use where it is most effective cost efficient. And we need a mechanism to capitalize this technolgy transfer using ratepayers money.
It's a lot easier and more profitable for utilities to build more capacity to meet growing electric demand but it is a much better approach to reduce that demand with alternative energy resource develepment at the grass roots level. We need to solve the global warming problem the bottom up because it's not going to happen from the top down!
My goal is to articulate the feasibility and advantages of a decentralized energy infrastructure.
Take for example nuclear power verses solar water heating in Florida. Progress Energy has manipulated the state government to allow it to bill Florida ratepayer in advance to build a new 2.2 GigaWatt nuclear power facility for the "ESTIMATED" cost of about $28 billion dollars. This plant will increase Florida's base load capacity by about 4%, cost ratepayers thousands of dollars each to build, and result in a 50% increase in the cost of electricity.
Now almost every one of those ratepayers has a water heater and collectively those water heaters use approximately 10% of the electricity consumed in Florida each day. Solar water heating could eliminate that demand on the electric power grid for a fraction of the cost it will take to increase the grid capacity to meet growing demands.
If consumers where given the choice between spending $5000 dollars of their money on building a new nuclear power plant that will increase their electric bill by 50% or investing $3500 dollars into building a statewide decentralized energy infrastructure that would decrease their electric bills 20% by eliminating the need for that nuclear power plant, what do you think they would choose?
Ratepayers need to be given the choice, it's their money and they don't appreciate or understand how it is being spent by others and what some of the real alternatives are. It won't happen easily because the decision to persue a decentralized energy infrastructure where every home has a solar water heater and micro power system big enough to supply 1 kWD per household will represent a huge transfer of wealth from a small minority of power brokers to all the people of Florida. But this approach is better for the ratepayers, better for the economy, and better for the environment.
The choice of a decentralized energy infrastructure will not eliminate the need for our current centralized electric distibution system but could eliminate the need for it to grow and even require it to contract a little. This is going to cost some people with a lot of power a lot of money. The current business model of investor owned utilities is in direct contradiction to the goal of reducing carbon emmissions and global warming. Nuclear is not the best solution but it is certainly the most profitable solution for the electric energy industry. Just because it has low CO2 emmissions does not make Nuclear "Green".
We need to make it a goal to displace conventional energy consumption with renewable energy technology at the point of use where it is most effective cost efficient. And we need a mechanism to capitalize this technolgy transfer using ratepayers money.
It's a lot easier and more profitable for utilities to build more capacity to meet growing electric demand but it is a much better approach to reduce that demand with alternative energy resource develepment at the grass roots level. We need to solve the global warming problem the bottom up because it's not going to happen from the top down!
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