Solar Powered, Um...

Q: We caught an Earth Day fair downtown yesterday, lots of electric vehicles on display, many of them conversions (including a darling vintage VW Squareback Wagon) to electric. There were various booths offering sustainable this and recyclable that, and a lot of kids activities like making bird feeders from pine cones, seeds and peanut butter. And live music, mostly bands playing covers of much-loved 70s tunes. I liked it all. Near the band was a large solar panel, perhaps 8'x5', and an associated electronics package, all mounted on a trailer. A thick extension cord ran from the panel to the band. So I was curious. It looked like a good way to get a small amount of silent power out to a remote location. It turns out I had no idea how small an amount of power until I started chatting the guy up. It turns out that the panel puts out 800 watts in the direct, cloudless AZ sunshine. Well, wattage is a useless number without either the amerage or the voltage. In this case the battery-backed inverter system can put out 20 amps at 120 volts, but the panel itself delivers a maximum of 800W at 50VDC. Assuming lossless conversion, that yields about 330W at 120V, or about 2.75 amps. That 2.75A was probably enough to run the mixing board and some wahwah pedals, but not much more than that, certainly not enough to run the PA. The inverter was showing a load of 12amps, so the solar panel was providing at best 1/6 of the power draw. Yes, they probably park the trailer someplace for the rest of the week to recharge the battery, but still... We've a long way to go before we'll be powering the current lifestype with alternative energy.

A: Rather than considering the solar power aspect, the setup might have been intended to impress people with that battery. A battery that can supply 5/6ths of 20 amps at 120 volts for several hours might well be a good choice of power supply for an electric car. Do you know how many hours the band played, and how heavy the battery was? Funny you should bring this up - just this weekend we were talking about the same things. The garbageman arsonist was over this weekend, and he has a severe case of "Sour grapes" going on which has bred a new and rather odd attitude of Earth Friendliness within his dark dog burning soul. See, the riches that he thought he would gain by burning down his house never did materiallize - he thought that the insured value of his house was $350,000, but that was just the limit of his liability coverage, not replacement coverage. This resulted in him paring down his dream and resulted in his buying a plot of land waaaaaaayyyyyy outside of town. He bought the plot of land before checking into what it was going to cost him to actually get power to the property - and he doesn't have enough money to pay the electric company the money they want to bring in the 6 or 7 poles he needs to get electricity. So - now he comes over here announcing that he's "just going to get solar". But the way he announces it is what bothers me - it's not "Fuck! I don't have 20K to get power to my land, my only option is solar", no, he does it like "I want to go GREEN man, GREEN is the way to go! Save the TREES - and the whales! Stay off the grid! Don't waste power!" Which is hilarious, since it's coming from someone who is driving around in a brand new 4 X 4 monster truck (he had enough money for THAT, and this is probably the reason he can't afford power poles). And one of the funniest parts of all this is all the things he ran out and bought in anticipation of setting up house in the woods on his property that he never did check if he could get power to. He bought a 52 inch flat screen HDTV, a brand new deep chest freezer and a computer (the one at Wal Mart that takes your picture every 30 seconds. HA!) And now the guy is "going green" and will be trying to run everything off of this "Solar kit" he wants Paul to install for him. Paul is trying to explain to the guy that he's going to need solar panels from his damned house all the way back to Malone if he wants to be running a 52 inch flat screen HDTV, a washer and dryer, a deep chest freezer, a computer, an outdoor wood burning stove - along with a hot water tank, a stove and a refrigerator. Garbageman/arsonist seems to think that no, he'll be JUST FINE with the three solar panels and the one battery that come in the kit, since none of the stuff he'll have plugged in runs all the time. Paul was trying to explain to the guy about "storage capacity" and watts and volts and amps and sunlight hours and all kinds of shit I didn't understand but Paul knows about, and Paul tried explaining to the guy that unless he gets a huge honking generator, or an entire bank of batteries, he's going to find himself without any power the majority of the time. But the garbageman arsonist isn't exactly a "listener". Paul tried to tell the guy *before* he bought the property that it might be a good idea to go check out how much it was going to cost to bring power to the site before he bought it, but garbagemena arsonist was under the deluded idea that it wouldn't cost anything. But I'm looking for him to be selling the brand new HDTV real cheap any day now, as soon as he realizes the solar won't run it real well, and I'm going to offer to buy it for half price *and* throw in a little 10 inch one he might be able to power a couple hours a day with the solar.

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