Meadow Musings: Renewable Energy

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."

You're reading this blog, so you know that we build websites using solar power. Well our blazing new news is that we just upped the ante: we now we offer solar web-hosting! That means that in addition to creating websites using solar power, we can serve websites up to visitors on the web using the power of the sun.

Who was our first client for this total solar-powered web solution? Ourselves. We moved the hosting of webmeadow.com away from a conventionally-powered host to our current digs. So webmeadow.com is now powered by the sun!

Why does solar hosting matter? Serving up web pages takes a lot of energy, just like building them.

To put servers into perspective: when I worked with the Internet Archive, they had a server room chock-a-block full of computers (around 600 I think) to serve up their data. All those computers produce lots of heat, so in addition to all the server power, it took a huge amount of air conditioning power just to keep things running.

The company that we've partnered with powers their servers AND their air conditioning with solar panels. And they've even designed their server room so that it needs less air conditioning than traditional designs (complete with a living roof of drought resistant plants -- it reduces their cooling and heating requirements by over 50%).

A smart choice all around, and we're excited to be part of it!

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.

A beep and a click. That's how it happened. We were finishing up the layout of a site that twill be launching this week, we heard a beep and a click, and then we had no power.

We haven't yet talked about the components of our solar setup, but I'll jumpstart the conversation by saying we knew what we were looking for in batteries, panels, charge controller, etc., but not so much with an inverter.

Inverters are the part of the system that converts the DC power (what solar panels spit out) into 110V AC power (what your computer eats). There are basically two types of AC inverters out there: pure sine wave and modified sine wave. Pure sine wave inverters have more even, steady power than modified, but they cost about 3 to 5 times more than comparable modified sine wave inverters.

Easily the most important pieces of our office equipment are our computers and servers, and experts can be divided on which type of inverters are best for computer equipment. So we went with a cheaper modified sine wave inverter, figuring that if we tried the cheaper option, we could always upgrade.

Eileen's computers and servers worked quite well with the modified sine wave inverter, but from the beginning, my setup buzzed constantly. It fell under the category of "oh, we'll have to get a pure sine wave inverter at some point" irritating, but otherwise everything was great.

Well, after 6 weeks of use, the loss of power from the inverter has settled the case quite clearly:

If you have computers, get a pure sine wave inverter.  Avoiding that buzzing noise is reason enough.

It's Halloween!  Let's talk about phantom loads!!

Phantom loads are secret energy-sucking vampires in your house.  There are two main types of phantom loads:  1) devices you're not using but are still using power, and 2) devices that look like they're off, but they're really not.

Things in category one may include: the battery recharger for your cordless drill,  your modem/router (at night), your printer, etc.  You probably only use your printer once or twice a day, and if it's a home model, it probably doesn't take very long to warm up.  And recharging batteries only take a few hours, but the charger is using power as long as it's plugged in. 

In category two we have items like:  your TV and DVD player, stereo, and pretty much any piece of computer equipment.  These things all have "off" buttons, but when you turn them off they're still really on.  If you can turn your TV on with your remote, it's sucking up a ton of power just waiting for you to press that button.  Computer equipment pretty much always takes power, even if it's in "sleep" mode.

In our house, these two categories would add up to about 200 watts, all day long! That is crazy-talk, people.  For most people, that doesn't amount to much money -- a few dollars a month, maybe -- but that's not really the point, is it?

So what to do?  It's pretty easy: use powerstrips.  You're probably using them anyway (who has enough plugs in their house?), so when you're done with something for the day, cut power to the whole shebang by turning off its powerstrip.   

For example:  when we're done with our computers for the day, we turn off the powerstrip that feeds the computers, monitors, modem, and router.  There's no point in powering any of those things at night.  Similarly, the printer and some other peripherals are on their own power strip, and we don't turn them on unless we actually need them.  

(If you want to go extra-bonus fancy-pants, you can use plug-timers as well.  You know these things; people use them around the holidays to tell their decorative lights to turn on at 7pm (then off at 10pm).   If you have something rechargable, like a toothbrush, razor, or drill battery, plug it into a timer and set the timer to turn on for only a few hours each day.  That's plenty of time to recharge, without the extra waste.)

So have a great Halloween, and go kill yourself some power vampires!   (Also, don't forget to eat way too much candy and get a tummy ache.  Good times, good times.)

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).

One of the blogs I read is called The Wind Blog.   It's written by Glen Estill, who (among other things) runs a wind farm in Ontario.  We're talking megawatts of electricity generated by wind turbines*!  He had a great post the other day about a local school district holding a conference all about environmental awareness, and also about potential careers in green fields.   It sounded totally awesome, and like something I would have loved in high school.

*  When we were driving across NY state last month, we stopped at a little picnic area just in time to see a single GIANT wind turbine blade go by us on a semi truck.  It was so big that it was really hard to comprehend what exactly we were looking at, and how big its tower would be.  It was like looking at Megatron's head, or the huge toes of those Argonath statues in Lord of the Rings.  (Argonaths!  You know, those big statues of the old kings of Gondor along the River Anduin.  Right?  Right.)

Here is a little secret:  Aaron and I are not particularly skilled in the realm of 'electricity'.  We are not the type to solder in our spare time. And yet, we just installed our own solar panels!  Here is what it involved:  472 trips to Home Depot.  (By "Home Depot", we mean "Home Depot and Lowe's and our local Electrician's supply store, because none of them ever had all of the things we needed, and they all thought we were loons.")

We wanted to do the work ourselves because we are stubborn that way.  That, and there are very few solar installers in our area.   Also, if something starts acting oddly or shooting out sparks, we know what to do (RUN!!!).   We read a bunch of books, talked to some experts, then took a deep breath and flipped the switch.   Then:  power!  It's kind of a giddy feeling, like picking the first tomatos of the season in your garden. 

There is, of course, a learning curve. 

• First lesson:  charge your batteries fully before using them.  
  
• Second lesson:  pouting will not make the morning fog clear any more quickly.    

We will learn more lessons, and we'll share them with you here when we do.