Why doesn't every house have solar installed?

[Waldorf]

@Endymio
just because it doesnt match peak demand for every location doesnt mean much.
yeah, lets just not do anything because we dont get it at 100%, just lol.

a friend with a large roof (equal to family home + roof of say carport) produces more power over a whole year than he uses, and thats in germany, and it includes a few rooms that have AC, a heated outdoor pool, and lots of lights on property/house, and a kid that "games" etc, that will use about 1-5kw every day by himself, plus daily charging his ecar, and anyone that visits.

without solar, this would (at least partially) come from plants using fossile/nuclear fuels.
so if using solar that reduces fossile fuel consumption and the produced emissions, inconvients a few ppl because they now pay 1 cent more for their power, so be it.

 

[Endymio]

@Endymio
just because it doesnt match peak demand for every location doesnt mean much.

It means that energy storage is required, which vastly increases costs ... costs which are hidden by net-metering. And net-metering only works at all when a small fraction of the population is doing it.

so if using solar that reduces fossile fuel consumption and the produced emissions, inconvients a few ppl because they now pay 1 cent more for their power, so be it.

One cent more? Germany's "green energy" push took it from the cheapest electricity in Europe to one of the most expensive ... triple what we pay here in the USA. Facts matter.

 

[mechtech]

"Why doesn't every house have solar installed"

Because when the sun is at 20 degrees above the horizon, and it's -20C, and the panels are buried under 3ft of snow they don't work, and that's when I need 10kw to work.

Probably work good in the summer, but that's about 3 months of the year here......................

 

[Shrek]

Would vertical cells stay clear in Winter?

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

Would vertical cells stay clear in Winter?

In (Central) Canada I wouldn't bet on it. They would just cause a drift to build up unless they were at billboard altitude.

 

[Steevo]

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378778823004899#s0030

Maybe car parks are the best place for them.

 

[mechtech]

Would vertical cells stay clear in Winter?

We have some of these, and I'd guess the solar panel is about 60 degrees up from the horizontal (so more vertical than horizontal) and faces due south, and most of November, all of December and most of January it's black lol. But ya typically no snow on it.

 

[WonkoTheSaneUK]

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378778823004899#s0030

Maybe car parks are the best place for them.

It's now French law that all open-air car parks over 80 spaces* be at least 50% covered with solar canopies.

• Those with 80-400 spaces have until 2028 to comply
• Those over 400 spaces have until 2026 to comply
• Disneyland Paris has already covered their 11,200 car park spaces, making them 36GWh/yr in free power for the park.

* - Obviously, this only applies to multi-story car parks with over 80 spaces on an open roof level.

 

[Outback Bronze]

Looks like the state I live in here in Australia is leading the way in Solar.

Elon Musk highlights major milestone in Australia​

Musk highlighted the rapid growth of rooftop solar in Western Australia, which accounted for an impressive 80.5 per cent of the state's electricity generation on Monday.

Elon Musk highlights major milestone in Australia

 

[Space Lynx]

Looks like the state I live in here in Australia is leading the way in Solar.

Elon Musk highlights major milestone in Australia​

Musk highlighted the rapid growth of rooftop solar in Western Australia, which accounted for an impressive 80.5 per cent of the state's electricity generation on Monday.

Elon Musk highlights major milestone in Australia

it just makes so much sense, especially when you set out with the goal of volume production and installation for geographically strategic regions.

I hope the trend continues with solar. I hope to someday put solar panels on my roof, hopefully prices keep coming down year over year.

edit: I am also hoping to have some portable Jackery power banks and solar panels someday, just to have for emergency use case and/or small side trips.

 

[Ruru]

Personally I don't know anyone who has solar panels here in Finland.

Good idea though, but takes a long time that they'll pay themselves back.

 

[Caring1]

Looks like the state I live in here in Australia is leading the way in Solar.

Elon Musk highlights major milestone in Australia​

Musk highlighted the rapid growth of rooftop solar in Western Australia, which accounted for an impressive 80.5 per cent of the state's electricity generation on Monday.

Elon Musk highlights major milestone in Australia

More like they have to lead the way due to the lack of state wide power grid and infrastructure.
There's also a lot of remote installations that rely on generating their own power with solar as a back up.
If we're talking just about established homes and newly built homes, it's more likely the established homes are retro fitted by their owners as a report states two thirds of newly built homes don't have solar in Australia in general.

Two-thirds of new-build homes don’t have solar: Report calls to plug holes, double rooftop PV capacity

Australia could double its rooftop solar by 2030, but to do so will require new homes to be built with solar, solar on social housing, and businesses to start installing.

reneweconomy.com.au

 

[Endymio]

We have some of these, and I'd guess the solar panel is about 60 degrees up from the horizontal (so more vertical than horizontal) and faces due south, and most of November, all of December and most of January it's black lol. But ya typically no snow on it.
View attachment 367887

Those roadway signs use about 3 watts of power; they can afford the efficiency losses of a non-optimal orientation. For home usage, you really don't want to give up as much as 50% of your power generation.

 

[mechtech]

Those roadway signs use about 3 watts of power; they can afford the efficiency losses of a non-optimal orientation. For home usage, you really don't want to give up as much as 50% of your power generation.

The solar panel is at optimal orientation for the winter and it still can't survive the worst 3 months of the year..........here at least.

 

[9087125]

The panels in the northern hemisphere face south towards the sun, and in the southern hemisphere face north towards the sun.
The optimum tilt angle for a module is:
- Tilt angle in Winter = Latitude * 0.9 + 29 degrees.
- Tilt angle in Summer =Latitude * 0.9 - 23.5
- Tilt angle for Autumn & Spring = Latitude - 2.5 degrees.
The formula is:
=Latitude - (23.45 * cos ((360/365) * (day of year + 10)))

S-Mono modules have a conversion eff of ~21% at 25C degrees, however as the panel warms up its output drops. Current the cell provides = illuminated current minus reverse saturation current.
As the panel heats up the reverse sat current increases due to the fact that the majority carriers on the Nside of the diode now have enough kinetic energy to diffuse back against the built-in E field and recombine with the holes there instead of going through the load doing work. This is diffusion current and is the same current that powers LEDs and supply's ions to the electrodes inside a lead acid battery. In temperate climates during summer, panels easily get up to 70C, and so to determine the drop in conversion eff:
For example a rated 20% panel now at 70 degrees C, that is: 70-25 = 45*0.45%(~temp coefficient)=20% reduction in efficiency or 16% conversion efficiency.

The major losses in Solar output are:
- In typical cloud cover, panels output is reduced to just 5-20%.

- Shading.
Shading cripples output because they literally put the bare minimum internal bypass diodes in a module to save costs. The current a solar cell produces is proportional to the amount of photons it receives or the illuminated area of the cell. And a module is actually made up of a handful of strings all in series, and the law of series circuits says the entire string's output is determined by the cell with the weakest current. So any kind of long shadows can reduced a panel to ~10-20% output even if the total area covered is very very small. Shadows that cut across the substrings are the worst.

- Lite clouds or Smog ~ 40-50%. Due to the curvature of the earth the affect can become dramatic when the sun is lower in the sky.
- Dirt and soiling ~5%. Panels need frequent cleaning.
- Reflectance ~5%. AR coatings fix this loss but are more delicate and difficult to clean.

- The angle the sunlight strikes the panel, this is known as the Cosine law of illumination. The output on a clear blue sky is:
Panel wattage= [ irradiance of the direct beam * cosine(angle between sun's rays and panel's normal) ] + [ Diffused irradiance * (180 - angle between panel's back and the ground / 180) ] * conversion eff.

- The airmass. As per the beer lambert law: Reduced irradiance = starting irradiance . e^(absorption coefficient * length of medium). Due to the Earth's curvature, higher latitudes have more air the sunlight has to pass through and the reduction with increasing airmass is logarithmic.

So here to calc the output on clear blue sky, you fist need the Airmass number, which is simply AM= 1 / cos (angle from zenith). At very low angles (~75degrees from zenith) this formula becomes unusable and another longer one is used. So most temperate climates range from AM 1.5-3
So once the AM is known you use this equation:
Panel output= 1361 * 0.7^(AM^0.678) * 1.1 (for diffuse) * panel conversion eff.

This is just the basics to get a feel of how the losses work. With the declination angle, Lat and Long, time of day, day of year, hour angle, which all gives you the sun elevation angle, you can calculate the airmass and then output anywhere on earth factoring in above loss factors.

So when you factor all this basic science, places closer to the equator have big losses due to heat, places up north negate much of this due to the colder ambient but also have less sun-hours and less light intensity. Ignoring the fact that many places in the higher latitude regions have alot of cloud cover due to the mid and polar cells which are driven by the inequality of sunlight and the coriolis effect. Its the lower latitude regions that win out because the effects of shading, limited surface area and tilt, trees, mountains, are not as bad when the sun is higher up in the sky. When its lower, shadows become a much bigger problem (more longer), the chances of obstructions from mountains and buildings become much greater.

I like the brute force approach, size your caravan panels so large that they can re-charge your battery even in complete rainy cloudy days.

 

[D007]

My reasoning is that the government tends to be very sneaky with this stuff. Like for example, you had tax break tax break for owning an electric car in some states and now all of a sudden they’re starting to pass laws that tax road usage for electric vehicles because they can’t get you for a gas tax…
And I’ve been seeing some sneaky ways that the government has been screwing people that own solar panels recently.
So it’s in my experience that the government likes to feed people stuff like this until they get a whole bunch of people to go in a certain direction and then they start taxing the crap out of it. So my reason is almost solely based on the fact that I don’t trust the government.