from the Solar Ypsi website
The number of solar installations continues to grow in Ypsilanti. Independent of SolarYpsi, in the summer of 2011 a house on South Huron, with three apartment units installed 55 solar panels. The installer of the system was Oak Electric and included the building of a carport to house many of the panels. The fall of 2011 also saw the Corner Brewery win approval from the Ypsilanti Historic Commission to install 144 panels on their brewery on Norris Street. They hope to have that project completed by December of 2011. SolarYpsi is working with both these locations to put information about these installations on the website and track their power generation, consumption, and exportation in real time.
Google picked up the story for the video below:
Dammit, why do people do demonstration projects in lousy environments? Ypsilanti is a lousy place to deploy solar PV. Its latitude and cloudiness ruin the economics. I tried to decipher the graphs on their sites and came up with crazy numbers. The problem is that their graphs show kW-hrs on the Y-Axis. That makes no sense — what they must mean is something like “kW-hrs per hour” or “kW-hrs per day”. If their annual graph is showing kW-hrs per day, then they seem to have generated an average of about 25 kW-hrs per day. The typical retail price of electricity nationwide is about $0.12 per kW-hr, so they generated maybe $3.00 per day, or about $1,000 for the course of the year — which implies a six-year payback time, which is quite good. However, there’s a huge uncertainty in analyzing their results: the unincluded costs of installation and control equipment. Their description suggests that they hacked their own electronics, which could cause big-time trouble if they violated code. They also said that the stuff that they did themselves would have cost thousands of dollars. So what was the true cost of the project, and its net payback time? It’s impossible to say; all we have are the absolute minimum.
Projects like this should be in the southern states, especially the Southwest, where they have many clear days and very strong sunlight in the summer when air conditioning creates very high peak loads. The economics there will be the best in the country, and would act as poster children for solar PV.
I don’t know. If an Ypsilanti group wants to do this despite not being as economical as Phoenix or Austin, bully for them.
Well, yes, it is intrinsically not a bad thing, but I worry that their work could become a case study against the use of solar PV. It was difficult to figure out exactly what their performance figures were, but I know that I could have built a case that the system was a loser in economic terms. I don’t believe that — I think that they just didn’t present the right numbers. But somebody did a study of Danish wind turbine performance that concluded that the system was a money-loser. Again, I don’t buy their conclusions, but studies like that hurt.