Under 10 Watt Solar Panels

Here's a new blog seeing as how I'm gaining experience in the realm of solar panel and battery systems. God bless anybody interested.

Recently I went online and wanted a cheap way to get into solar energy. There are stories of people in Africa soaking up these small panels that give off less than 10 Watts for lanterns and other low powered electronics. I think that's awesome as infrastructure might not always be available for some places and people and relying on some 10 year return on investment on a big solar installation that can sell power back to the grid, cuts out a lot of us from even being interested in renewable.

One of the main reasons we back away from renewable energy is storage. Presently storage is expensive and has a limited lifespan. The Tesla Powerwall might be the best indicator of how much energy-dense and long-lasting storage costs: $7K for a 13 kWh battery (approximately $500 per kWh). To give you an idea of how much a kWh is worth... you could dry your clothes in a typical household laundry dryer for about 3 kWhs.

Many have projected that the cost of battery storage will come down to $100 per kWh and if that happens, that will make home and small solar systems competitive with the most popular forms of grid scale electric generation (coal, gas, and even nuclear).

The average U.S. home consumes 30 kWhs per day (including heat and hot water across all seasons). What if we could begin to work our way to that 30 kWh systems instead of taking out a loan or coughing up a bunch of money up front? That's the approach I'll be taking throughout this blog. We want to see what size system we need to perform specific things such as watching TV or charging phones and laptops... maybe it's just a light in a shed that you don't want to run a power line to... maybe you want to stop worrying about how many loads of laundry your children are doing.

Or let's say you live in a small private community and want to create a micro-grid and go into business selling your neighbors electricity. For many places around the world these micro-grids would be a welcome occupation, as many places only have electricity for certain hours of the day with long blackout periods if one of the nodes goes down.

But this blog won't be limited to solar. Wind of course is a great way to sweep up the electricity missed when the sun isn't shining. There's also micro-hydro generators and any number of other ways to generate electricity. But then there's bio-fuels to get into. I've at least tried growing algae for oil and these systems can all work together on a small scale. Hopefully we'll get into all that in this blog.