Solar Power

Archive for June, 2009

i stay in karwar (karnataka, india) where it have heavy rain for 4 months (with almost cloudy throught day).

solar hot water is generated from the heat of the sun (solar electricity is generated from light). you would need to make sure that you had an alternative way to heat the water in the less sunny times. if you have a fuel stove (gas, oil or wood for example) it is possible to have the water plumbed through the stove to use that heat to boost the water temperature when needed. I lived for a while with solar electricity and solar hot water channeled through the wood stove, but if you have to have electric boosters it can become quite expensive and usually the solar heaters are more expensive than other options. I dont know what makes and model you have available there, but make sure that the release valves are readily available because they fail every five to ten years and you will need to replace it.

I've search the internet extensively and haven't found an answer to this question.

I just wanted to play with solar panels and human powered generators and couldn't figure out the simplest and cheapest way to hook it into my house to get some benefit out of it.

I.E. can i just have my panel hooked into a charge controller and a single battery to act as a float and then an inverter and hook the output from the inverter into a standard power plug in the house? can i push power into a power outlet or is there some system so that power can only come out of the plug?

anyone have any ideas on the easiest simplest way to hook up a panel or a car alternator? I was going to turn my indoor bicycle into a generator by hooking up a car alternator to it… how could i most simply hook this into the house?

you can put power into a plug, just be sure to shut your main breaker off first. and shut off breakers for high draw appliances like AC oven microwave waterheater etc.. When my power goes out I unplug my dryer and plug in a whip that I made that plugs into my generator. If you want to power the whole house you will need to use a 240v recept like for an electric dryer, if you use a standard 120v recept you will only power up one bus bar / half your house.

yes 12v with an inverter will work, yes you can put an inverter on your car battery and power your house with your running car I suggest getting a deep cycle gel type battery in your vehicle if you want to do that, you should also upgrade to a 200a alternator if you're going with an inverter larger than 2500watts, a car won't be near as fuel efficient as a standard generator though, and it won't put out near the wattage. but like I said before, if it's only a 120v inverter you're only going to power up half the house

So I would like you to give me the cost, the time to build the KW/h it produces and the space a nuclear reactor requires. As well as the same for any single Solar Power plant.
(All the stats of each have to be from a any, but all have to be from the same one)

It's self-directed homework that's due in today, but I just wanted to know the answer in the end.

This is a loaded question with many right answers. I'll take a stab at it though.

The largest proposed photovoltaic power station in the world is in Victoria, Australia and is estimated to produce 154 megawatts. It will utilize 2,000 acres of land.

Conversely, the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear station in Japan is the largest nuclear power station in the world. It produces a little over 8,000 megawatts and utilizes 1,037 acres of land.

Using these two extreme examples, nuclear power produces roughly 100 times more energy per acre than solar energy. Arguably, nuclear power stations are still cheaper to construct than solar energy stations. The cost of photovoltaic cells is still high as technology hasn't improved enough to reduce their cost.

There are many other factors that come into play that complicate the decision between which is ultimately the cheaper solution for energy production. There are factors like cost of land, environmental impact of land use, longevity of the facilities, long-term environment effects, and so on.

I can't answer how much each costs to build and the time for construction. Let us know what you came up with.