California taking the lead again, in this case, for more widespread renewable energy production...

[JohnRBaker]

California becomes the first state to require new residential construction to include renewable energy sources:

California to require solar panels on most new homes

It's the first state where the renewable energy is mandatory.

https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/06/california-to-require-solar-panels-on-most-new-homes/

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[JohnRBaker]

For the record, I paid $3.395 of regular in Tustin, CA this past week.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[moltenmetal]

David: you've taken a jurisdiction with a very expensive tiered electrical price regime and then used 500 Wh/mile for an EV which likely achieves 300-350 Wh/mile- certainly my two colleagues who have Chevy Volts are getting 300-350 Wh/mile consistently. My own Spitfire achieves 260 Wh/mile on the highway, and that's from the wall not from the battery (it includes charger and battery losses). Most Wh/mile figures fail to include the charger loss.

Here are my own figures:

Local gasoline cost: $1.35/L, including all taxes
The Spitfire before conversion was about 8L/100 km (about 29 mpg)
That's $10.80/100 km

The E-Fire after conversion: 260 Wh/mile, or about 15.9 kWh/100 km
Electricity cost here, average of peak and on-peak, including all taxes and fees: $0.20/kWh
That's $3.20/100 km

Road taxes can be pretty steep before my car will anything close to as expensive to drive as an EV as it was as a gas engine car! And I will have no problem paying those road taxes when they're put in place- everybody should pay for the roads. Of course I'd like to see the freight companies pay more, because they're doing far more damage to road surfaces requiring repair than cars are.

My Prius C gets about 4.5 L/100 km, which works out to $6.08/100 km. My EV beats the pants off my Prius, and gives us all the benefit of no tailpipe emissions for free.

And Ontario's grid is 40 g CO2/kWh. 97% less CO2 from source than the car before conversion, and still over 90% better than the Prius. That's thanks to a grid which is mostly nuclear with hydro, gas and wind bringing up the rest and only about 8% natural gas.

 

[davidbeach]

It took a while to get my hands on the data, but I now have monthly MWHr totals for two PV sites. What I find is that weather seems to have more influence on the output of the PV system than does age.

Picking August as the month most likely to be like the same month in other years, one site produced
14.00, 14.59, 15.91, 16.43, 13.37, 12.52, 15.04, 15.82, 16.37 MWHr for the month (2009 - 2017) I can't see a 4% per year degradation in those numbers.

The other site produced
283, 205, 272, 228, 267, 270 (2012 - 2017) No significant trend there either.

Granted this is not a controlled experiment, but simply real world data, influenced by random weather, random unknown maintenance outages, etc. But clearly there is not the drastic reduction in capacity promised.

 

[zdas04]

Individual results may vary. Weather is a big deal and comparing an entire site in a given month in different years really says a lot more about weather patterns than it does about solar panel output. If you could compare individual panels to the other panels in the sites it might very well give you a quite different answer.

I looked at the power output of a couple thousand panels on well sites over a 15 year period and if I compared the daily output of a specific panel to rest of the field (which largely gets rid of weather impacts), I find that it is really common for a 5-year old panel to produce 80% of a new panel. The 80% number was important because that was our trigger point for replacing panels on critical loads. We budgeted replacing 1/5 of the panels (and half the batteries) every year. That was never a budget with surplus money in it.

[bold]David Simpson, PE[/bold]
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist