I’ve posted on this before, but I’m revisiting the topic after this week’s post on the greening of Detroit garnered this comment:
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 don’t think I have to reiterate that one of the biggest solar success stories has been in cloudy Germany, and that, at least until recently, Ontario was home to the world’s largest PV array, and that solar works, basically, wherever the sun shines. It might, in fact, work better and more efficiently at cooler temperatures, informed sources tell me.
The video above is a year old – since then a second Net zero home has been built, for the right-in-the-sweet-spot price of 250,000 bucks (three bedroom, 2 bath).
For those that think dealing with our greenhouse problems means going back to a hunter gatherer existence, (yes, you Roy Spencer) – show them this. A house your local soccer mom would be proud to pull into with her electric hybrid SUV.
More video below:
I suppose that I’m honored to be the butt of this article, and I’m glad my comment stimulated this discussion. But I think that there’s a basic point here that needs to be considered: solar is not a panacea. Contrary to your statement, it doesn’t work everywhere the sun shines (well, in a technical sense, yes, but not in the economic sense that I think we all mean). Solar water heating is cost-effective over a huge range of areas, but solar PV is nowhere near so economical. These demonstration projects are great as a way to break the ice, but people have been building houses like this for decades; I think the first one I saw was in the mid-70s. With each passing year, they’ve gotten more cost-effective, but we’re not there yet.
First, we need to get contractors to start building homes like this on a routine basis. Right now, this kind of installation runs into all sorts of nasty little headaches: some building codes are so far out of date that they impede construction of net zero homes. Installation of the control equipment for the solar PV systems is still way beyond most electricians’ skills. And a lot of contractors simply have no experience with this kind of design.
These problems can all be solved with relatively simple measures: training programs, economic incentives, and so forth. However, we need to build up plenty of experience in the actual performance of these systems before we start building millions of them. We need a pilot program of a few hundred or a few thousand homes build all over the country, with standard data-collecting instrumentation, to see what the actual performance turns out to be (not the predicted performance).
The best comparison here is, ironically enough, nuclear power. These high-tech homes are the residential analogue of nuclear power plants, following at about a 50-year lag time. Just as the reporters were talking about this being “the first in Michigan”, 50 years ago (actually, earlier: in the 50s), there was a town that bragged that it was the first to get its electricity from nuclear power. Nuclear had to go through a long process of prototypes, small initial plants, slowly ramping up. Of course, nuclear developed very slowly because of safety considerations, and our net-zero houses don’t have that issue, but we still need to have performance data. We know that those solar cells will lose efficiency with time, but will the decline be slow enough to ignore? Probably… but we need performance data.
What if the owners want to plant some trees? They’ll need to site them carefully. And who’s gonna clean the leaves off the roof? I recall many years ago reading a calculation by that famous iconoclast, Petr Beckmann, showing that the number of people who died falling off roofs while washing dust off their solar collectors would be greater, per unit energy, than the number of people dying from nuclear plants. I’d like to see that calculation done with real data rather than the highly speculative numbers he used.
Anyway, I’d love to see the Feds fund a hundred homes scattered around the country with the instrumentation and record-keeping to see how these things perform over time with a normal family living in them. Only then can we provide consumers with the kind of economic numbers they need to start demanding more solar stuff.
Oh, a small technical detail: yes, solar cells do lose efficiency at higher temperatures, but the efficiency loss depends on the manufacturing process; some are less susceptible to this problem than others. In general, if you just let air circulate around them, it’s not a problem. I’ll be curious to see how well the Dow solar shingles work.
good points.
re Nuclear, the biggest problem with the nuclear industry is that they went directly from small, experimental reactors, less than 100 mw — to giant 800 and 1000 mw stations, twin reactors like 3 mile Island, without any ramping up process in between.
They basically just scaled up the early reactor designs and hoped that everything would work – like building a 747 scale airplane using the Wright Bros design. Hilarity ensued.
Obviously, the whole planet is going solar and renewable in this century. We can decide if we are going to lead or follow. It would seem rational to be moving forward with building those thousands of experimental sites.
A program of demonstration homes around the country would certainly be beneficial in terms of spreading the word. But what I think we really need to see is a pilot neighborhood in every major city, or a pilot subdivision or tract home retrofit, etc. in which a large group of homes are built or rebuilt to this standard in order to take full advantage of the economy of scale and smart grid tech.
As I was watching this video I was wondering; what’s going to happen when a neighborhood or a majority of residential housing in a small town hits this standard? How will utilities adapt if/when they’re paying homeowners to produce energy instead of buying it from a power plant? What sort of tipping points will be reached and passed, such as a neighborhood producing enough surplus to run the local school, quickie mart, and shopping center?
Will there be a need for simultaneous upgrade of our electric grid infrastructure? What will the new business models look like for utilities? What sense of empowerment will communities have as a result? Will folks begin to ponder other ways they could be resilient such as producing food instead of maintaining lawns? This has real transformative potential if it can get past the single-home pilot phase quickly into the community level.
If Japan and Germany can create net-zero neighborhoods, certainly the USA could if we tried.
I disagree with Chris Crawford’s comment about solar not being economically viable. This is a common mistake, but one our side should not be making. The problem lies in comparing a technology that has all costs in the price to an energy source that has massive external costs not in its price. If all external costs of coal and natural gas and nukes were internalized in the price of the kWh they generated, there would be a level playing field. Solar, and especially wind power, are already less expensive than those dirty and dangerous sources of energy. If you also take into account that solar corresponds with peak demand on the grid, the price difference is heavily on the side of clean energy.