Blog » Renewable Energy

The nice folks from Independent Power were here yesterday installing our new inverter, after the old one was killed by lightning.  It was cloudy when they arrived, and then it started pouring.  There is something funny about solar guys working in the rain.

Our inverter is made by Solectria, and in the course of the rain yesterday, our new warranty card got all wet.  We have to let it dry out and then send it in, because it says right on there "Warranty not valid until this card is sent in". 

Really, Solectria?  Is it 1985 down in Massachusetts?  You're known for your fancy web-based solar monitoring systems; it's crazy that I have to fill out this little paper card just so someone at HQ can type my info into a database.  This is what webforms were made for!  (In fact, Solectria, please contact us if you need help setting that up).

In other news, the rain is scheduled to continue for another few days.  Good things that love the rain:  the beans, peas, carrots and other tastiness in the garden!  Bad things that love the rain:  the weeds in the garden! 

We came away unscathed last week, while large swaths of New Hampshire and Vermont were closed due ridiculously high rivers and roads sliding into the nothingness.

Or so we thought.

David Palumbo, our great solar installer from Independent Power, just left with our inverter in hand.  It turns out that one of last week's lightning strikes fried the inverter just by touching down nearby.  Amazingly enough, the panels are completely fine -- the lightning arrester on the pole didn't even trigger.

The unit is now on it's way to Solectria for repair, and we have no way to convert sunlight into energy that we can use, so hopefully we'll get it back all pretty and working.

Now for the joke:  what does a fried power inverter look like?  Exactly the same!  Except that the tiny, hard-to-read, dark display screen becomes completely black.

We look forward to There and Back Again, An Inverter's Tale.

As you can see, the little ones believe the solar panels to be a place of respite from the sun.  Or perhaps from hawks.  Either way, they hang out under there during the middle of the day.

In vaguely-related news, the New Hampshire's state legislature passed a bill recently (House Bill 1628) so that any grid-tied systems (PV, wind, or micro-hydro) can get $3/watt for their system -- up to $6000, or 50% of the system cost (whichever is less).  That is tres cool, because NH has been seriously lagging on the whole rebate front.

Alright, back to the birds.  The baby ducks have almost a full set of feathers now, though they are still only about 50% of their full-grown size.  Bruce is 85% better (still limping a little), and is again running around like a crazy goose.  The geese are growing noticeably slower than the ducks, and Spruce is only just now starting to get real feathers on her belly (the first place real feathers grow).

I am really sad that the camera focused on the near-grass instead of the far-goose, but I will show you this picture of Bruce anyway.  If you have met Bruce, you know that this is picture captures alot about his personality.  Namely, "GRASS.  GRASS FOR ME."

According to this nifty little press release, Fat Spaniel and EnerWorks have just partnered to bring great solar-monitoring software to the world of industrial solar hot water.    Fat Spaniel is a cool company -- they make software that you can hook up to your solar installation and check on your energy production on the web.  It keeps historical data and lets you do real-time monitoring of systems that are far away.

You wouldn't think that was particularly unique -- using computers to monitor your renewable energy setup -- but it really is.  We have a little auxiliary piece of equipment (the OutBack Mate) that lets us see what our system is doing, and it's connected to our charge controller via a very long ethernet cable.  Ours is strung up to the office, so we can check our battery levels and power generation from our desks.  It even has a serial port (so 1994!) so that we can plug it into our computers, but we haven't bothered (yet).

Enerworks (the other company in the above press release) focuses on solar-hot-water systems for commercial applications -- hotels, hospitals, etc.  That is totally spiffy, because solar-hot-water systems tend to pay for themselves pretty quickly and are a lot easier to understand (sun!  it makes things hot!) than photovoltaic systems.

In other news!  Xantrex also released a solar-system monitor this week!  And it's Wi-Fi!  It's pretty odd to me that the manufacturers of solar products are so slow to realize that all of their customers are geeks -- we want to know how many kilowatt-hours we produced!  We want to see our current amperage!  We want to see them both in colorful charts and graphs!

Not that we have any amperage here.  We are in the midst of yet another snowstorm.  It is the first day of spring!  As the Yarn Harlot says, "There can only be so much more snow before the rotation of the earth on it's axis makes it impossible. Hang tough."

Tate pointed us to this article in the San Jose Mercury News and asked what we thought of it.  Well, here's what I think of it: man o man, people are so dumb.

Here's the story:

1. Between 1997 and 1999, a couple in Sunnyvale planted a bunch of redwood trees in their backyard.  Looking at the overhead photo, it is pretty clear that they did this so that their neighbors did not have a direct view into their living room.
2. In 2001, one of those neighbors installed 10kW worth of solar panels on his house. 
3. Now the trees are tall, and they shade a bunch of his solar panels.
4. He invoked the little-known California Solar Shade Control Act, which is now levying stiff fines on the tree-owners for not cutting down trees that shade solar panels.
5. The court found against the tree-owners, but they are appealing the ruling.

This is dumb on so many levels.  

• Did solar-panel-guy think that trees weren't going to grow?  If there are trees almost shading your site, then within a few years they will shade your site.  By definition, that makes it a bad site for solar panels. 
• For the amount of money that 10kW of solar panels cost, you'd think he could buy some common sense. 
• The law says that trees that were there before the panels were installed are OK, except that it also says that if they grow to cover solar panels, then they're subject to removal/fines.  So... trees are ok, as long as they don't grow?  The law really should have some sort of "reasonable growth" clause.

Personally, I'm totally with the tree-owners on this one.  Mr. Solar Panel was dumb to put his panels under baby redwood trees, and I'm pretty sure it's not fair to fine your neighbors for your stubbornness.

OK, so I know that I just linked to Glen over at The Wind Blog, but holy synchronicity, Batman! He's been at a wind conference, and the talks he went to on the third day were all about the manufacturing supply chain for wind turbines (both in the US and Canada). He says:

I recall a comment from Fred Gallagher, a former President of the CanWEA. He made this comment in about 2002. He said political support for wind will never be strong or sustainable until Canada develops a supply chain, that has many jobs dependent on the industry. In Germany, 10’s of thousands of wind industry employees marched on the Bundestadt when the government talked about changing its pro wind policies. The policies did not change.

I hadn't actually thought about that when I posted last week about where our solar system parts come from. But Mr. Gallagher is exactly right -- when American jobs are supporting the wind and solar industries, then politicians will actually have to care about the clout of renewable energy companies and supporters.  So, um... Buy American (Solar)(And Wind)(And MicroHydro)!

We were talking about our solar setup the other day, and realized that almost all of its components were made in the USA.   That's kind of interesting, given how often high-tech stuff comes from overseas, and especially given that Europe's adoption of solar technology is so far ahead of the US's. 

• Evergreen Solar Panels -- Made in Massachusetts, only 3 hours from us.  These were shipped straight from the warehouse, and we actually received them before  we even had a shipping confirmation.
• Outback MX60 Charge Controller -- Outback is creme-de-la-creme in the solar world, and they're headquartered in Arlington, WA.  A call to customer service confirmed that they manufacture their products in WA, as well.
• Trojan T-105 Batteries --  These are good "starter" batteries that can handle the sometimes-crazy learning curve of new solar users.   The company is headquartered near LA, but I think our batteries were made in the Atlanta, GA plant.
• SquareD and Bussmann -- These companies make some of the nitty-gritty parts of the system:  fuses, fuse boxes, etc.  They both have manufacturing plants in and out of the US, but the parts we have happen to be made in the US.  (According to the SquareD website, you can special-request "domestically-made" for any of their products.) (Special bonus facts!  Bussmann fuses are used in Disneyworld's monorail! And the Mars lander!)
• Xantrex Inverter-- Who knows where this was made!  Xantrex is headquartered in Vancouver, and has facilities in WA, CA, IN, and Barcelona.  I'm guessing that our little inverter was made somewhere in the US, but I have no proof.

I think it's pretty cool that you can build an entire solar system without leaving the country.   One of the buzz-phrases about alternative (read:  non-oil-based)  energy is that it can reduce the US's dependence on foreign oil sources.  Well, voila!  Solar Power:  Made in the USA (and in space.  By the sun).