Hiking in Solar Photovoltaics Territory
Sundays are normally hiking day for me. Last weekend, a friend and I walked from our little town (Santa Ynez, CA) over the mountains to the south of us and down to the beach, a total of 10.8 miles, with a decent (~1200 foot) altitude gain.
The point? As I captured here with my phone, there are a whole bunch of people up in those hills who are off the grid. This guy, I’m guessing, has a PV array of at least 1500 square feet, probably more, with batteries to provide power to his house around the clock.
Some people object to the aesthetics of having something like this installed in the side of a mountain. Needless to say, I’m not one of them.
Craig, if that’s 139 m2, how big is this guy’s house? Even if we assume only 18% cf (clearly no tracking), and a 20% efficiency (looks like polysilicon panels, not thin-film panels… i could be wrong)…. at 139 m2 that would be ~43.8 MWh/year (!!!). That’s a lot of electricity for an off-grid single dwelling, even if the electricity is cycled through an 80% efficiency battery cycle. That would be ~3000 kWh/month of consumption… That’s got to be a MASSIVE house.
It’s that guy’s prerogative, he’s clearly made himself carbon neutral, so whatever… but that’s a lot of energy usage.
🙂
I thought so too, but it really WAS a fairly large house. Also, I couldn’t get close enough to the array to measure it accurately; I may have over-estimated.