Your Questions About Whole Home Solar Panels

Henry Dover answers:

It’s not really the solar panels that power the house, they charge a battery bank and there’s an inverter that jumps the battery power up to household current level. If you start getting into more expensive systems, they can sense when the batteries are full and start diverting power into the local electric grid. Some places the electric company is required to pay you for generating current, other places tell you tough luck. I suggest looking on Ebay or something at some of the home solar kits on sale there and look at how large a house they are rated for to get an idea of how big a system you’re going to need. I don’t know if you have access to the power bill history of the house you’re getting in Dubai, but the power company there might be able to provide you with a history of average kW hours the house consumes. A 2400 sqft house with a gas stove and a gas water heater and wood heat is going to consume far less electricity than a house with all electric appliances and the consumption history of an individual house should reflect that so you can buy appropriately.

Henry Dover answers:

The land under the wind turbines when it is possible to be used for farming is already used for farming, the crop itself is irrelevant. Wind turbines are quite some distance apart and even if they were not, putting them over solar panels would create shade and ice falling of them would not be welcome either.

Power from wind turbines is going to be interesting, when there is a lot of wind they are able to generate power at lower prices then gas (the cheapest fossil fuel) This will make the gas fired plants less economic as there is no sense in generating power at a loss, one would hope that those savings are passed onto the consumer. When the wind is not blowing they will pass on this extra cost onto the consumer. This would make the building of more wind turbines cost effective. Assuming there is a free market without subsidies…

My guess is that if nothing else changes, in the long term the result will be that there will be more power outages unless there is going to be government regulation and/or subsidies for hydro/(bio)gas/nuclear/coal plants to run on standby.

Edit:

So the short answer to your question is yes, you can do as you suggested, but there are better options available. The best place for solar is on buildings, not only is the energy close to the end user, the grid infrastructure is already in place, reducing the connection costs. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that wind and solar can not go together, but it seems wasteful to take up useful land while there is otherwise unused space available.

The next development I hope to see is solar panels that take up the whole roof, doing away with the need for any other forms of roofing. Current prices for solar panels is about 12 dollars per square foot and dropping about 20% every year. Still far more expensive then tar shingles, but tar shingles don’t give you electrical energy and the solar panels do increase the resell value of the home.

Now there are other considerations as well, the challenge I believe will be economics. It already makes sense to install solar on the roof as you do get the money invested back when you sell the home and you do benefit from relatively cheap energy in the mean time. However the problem is going to be for the utility companies, if we remain connected to the grid (which is currently the cheapest option in urban area’s, this will complicate their business model. Those who remain “on grid” will likely see price increases when battery cost drop . (They will still have to pay for the infrastructure maintenance.) Battery cost is what prevents me personally from putting solar on my roof and the local utility company does not like their customers to go “grid tie”. If I was living in a rural area, then even the currently high cost of the batteries, might well be cheaper then paying for the connection cost.

If you are really interested in the economic side have a look at the wikipedia entry [1] and this daily finance article[2]. It will be obvious things are going to change away from fossil fuels regardless what the energy companies do or don’t do. No doubt there will be serious hiccups along the way but in a “free market” solar and/or wind combined with storage will “win”