Grid-tied solar

buickanddeere · Jun 22, 2015

Canada uses more NG because the country has larger homes ,longer and colder winters than Germany. LP provides gas in Germany and Canada where NG service is lacking.
Ontario in particular built electric everything homes and businesses through the 60's, 70's , 80's and into the 90's when nuclear and hydro electric provided abundant cheap electricity .
Then corporate raiders found a way to mine the assets from public owned crown corporations with the split up of Ontario Hydro. Now Hydro One is being raided by the liberal governent to pay for social programs.
10,000 years of NG, oh really.

Redneck in training · Jun 22, 2015

houstonscott said:
NG is how the world will get their electricity. It's clean, very clean, and there is estimates as high as 10,000 years of supply. NG for heat is a no brainier, wish I had it here, electric heat is a big energy waste. HS

Electric heat is waste of money if you have to buy the electric energy. So we make our own. We live in the sticks so closest consumer NG is 12 miles away. I doubt there is 10000 year NG supply and even if it was and we burned it we would have air composed mostly from CO2. In 2010 world burned about 112 trillion cubic feet of NG. That is a lot of carbon added to and oxygen removed from air. The planet would be fine but without us.
Next available source of methane is hydrate on the bottom of the ocean. There is possibly lot of it but it will be expensive to get. I saw already study of a project with processing plant and compressor station on the bottom of the ocean. I didn't ask how much it will cost but I am sure it will be many and I mean many billion per location.

ultrarunner · Jun 22, 2015

When I was living in Bavaria Germany and Salzburg Austria no one used gas... natural or propane.

The fuel of choice is wood with heating oil for backup... the wood and oil boilers are very efficient...

Just about every living room had a Kacheloffen ceramic, air tight brick ovens... which are wonderful for heating and I built one in my home there....

A few a my friends lived in smaller apartments... these had two electric meters... they used electricity to heat a large tank during off peak hours and it would carry them through the day... in summer... it could last several days...

dave1949 · Jun 22, 2015

The Yale Environmental Performance Index ranks the USA 33rd out of 178 nations. We have some excellent results and some that suck. Click on the gray > at the right of each category line for more info.
United States of America | Environmental Performance Index

This Harvard Business School environmental performance ranking of countries includes Billions of energy btu's consumed per $Million of GDP. The USA ranks 28th. See pdf page 4 for rankings.
</title> </head> <body> <form name="aspnetForm" method="post" action="download.aspx?name=GCR_20012002_Environment.pdf" id="aspnetForm"> <input type="hidden" name="MSOWebPartPage_PostbackSource" id="MSOWebPartPage_PostbackSource" value="" /> <input typ

houstonscott · Jun 25, 2015

39.213kwh's was previous one day's record, I may beat that today. A few clouds are screwing things up. We'll see. HS

KiwiBro · Jun 25, 2015

dave1949 said:
The Yale Environmental Performance Index ranks the USA 33rd out of 178 nations. We have some excellent results and some that suck. Click on the gray > at the right of each category line for more info.
United States of America | Environmental Performance Index

Thanks. That NZ can hit 16th in that list of 178 means they studied the wrong countries, the figures themselves are screwed up or out of date, or the world is even more environmentally abusive than I first thought.

dave1949 · Jun 25, 2015

KiwiBro said:
Thanks. That NZ can hit 16th in that list of 178 means they studied the wrong countries, the figures themselves are screwed up or out of date, or the world is even more environmentally abusive than I first thought.

Country Rankings | Environmental Performance Index

This page shows how close some of countries are in rank. That makes a difference if #16 is really not much different than the five counties above and five below it. In any case, congratulations!

Jim Nelson · Jun 25, 2015

We finished our first year of net metering on 6-23-15 and our final balance is -$9.85. It would have been even better but in Dec. and Jan. we were hurt by shading from a neighbors little clump of oak trees at the southwest corner of our property.I'm pretty tickled as it is,we no longer wait til it's miserable before turning on the air just set it and forget it.
The power companies are busy buying politicians and plotting how to change the billing so this probably won't last long but the first year sure was nice.

houstonscott · Jun 25, 2015

Jim Nelson said:
We finished our first year of net metering on 6-23-15 and our final balance is -$9.85. It would have been even better but in Dec. and Jan. we were hurt by shading from a neighbors little clump of oak trees at the southwest corner of our property.I'm pretty tickled as it is,we no longer wait til it's miserable before turning on the air just set it and forget it. The power companies are busy buying politicians and plotting how to change the billing so this probably won't last long but the first year sure was nice.

I'm worried net metering will go away here too, if solar gets to popular. HS

Redneck in training · Jun 25, 2015

Our utility (electric COOP) was hostile to PV since beginning. Out of blue (surprisingly) they started talking about utility owned PV system recently.
Here is a forecast of future PV development:
ITC is scheduled to step down from its current 30% on January 1, 2017

Once some reliable, long lasting and reasonable priced energy storage technology becomes available solar will take over the world. It is inevitable.