We supply solar power sets to run camera systems. Simple, if not dirt cheap. Suggest a 120 watt panel, a charge controller, and a decent marine battery. An inverter to supply 120vac. Panels can go on the roof. Solar cells produce power even on cloudy days, but not at night, of course. These can all be sourced through Amazon..
The energy revolution will happen when someone puts up a million to fully develop the Organic Ranking Cycle turbo-generator. Nothing new, just optimize the multi-stage turbine design for some type of freon (whatever is not "bad" today), add magnets and a coil internally, and design it to be cheap to manufacture. A lousy million dollars to make the whole world energy independent and it doesn't get done. But we do blow a trillion (a thousand thousand million dollars, or one million million dollars) so bankers can get bonuses every year, so WTF.
jere, setting up my panels is on my list. I have those 3 plus 2 of the HF 45 watt kits and a HF 1.5/3KW inverter. I need some Romex stuff to run down from the roof and some batteries and that should be about all of it. Just don't have the time right now. Europas, you know.
madmallard wrote:mad_machine wrote: If you think solar is not there yet.....solar will only be closer to 'there yet' imo when solar returns alot more power closer to whats needed to manufacture a panel. thats when an exciting energy revolution will be close... ^_^
Can you define what you mean by "a lot"?
My understanding is that solar panel manufacturing has gotten more efficient in recent years. The efficiency of panels is also increasing. The figures I got when I asked about this 5-years-ago was that panels on average will generate enough power to offset the energy to manufacture in about 6 years. The panels usually last is 15 to 20 years. I expect efficiencies have continued to improve since.
Dr. Hess wrote: The energy revolution will happen when someone puts up a million to fully develop the Organic Ranking Cycle turbo-generator.
No it won't. Cause for a measly million dollars, the company I work for would have looked into it by now.
A million dollars, what is this, 1990?? 
In reply to rebelgtp:
If you want to build something you could upside something like this and light a fire under it:http://www.ehow.com/way_5435385_diy-steam-generator.html
Then hook up a generator to the output shaft. Voila!
Of course it could blow up too...
One benefit would be you could use it to make moon shine in your back yard when you aren't camping
The problem is that you would have to put the million up and walk away from it. That is, develop it, perfect the design, then release it to the public domain for the betterment of the world. No one is willing to do that, not even a government. If you can't "get rich" off the idea, berkeley it. And the LAST thing any government wants is individual power generation.
In reply to paranoid_android74:
Ok that little steam generator is cool 
Shhh my family already gets watched when it comes to shine around here. My uncle was famous in the area for it.
Type Q wrote:madmallard wrote:Can you define what you mean by "a lot"? My understanding is that solar panel manufacturing has gotten more efficient in recent years. The efficiency of panels is also increasing. The figures I got when I asked about this 5-years-ago was that panels on average will generate enough power to offset the energy to manufacture in about 6 years. The panels usually last is 15 to 20 years. I expect efficiencies have continued to improve since.mad_machine wrote: If you think solar is not there yet.....solar will only be closer to 'there yet' imo when solar returns alot more power closer to whats needed to manufacture a panel. thats when an exciting energy revolution will be close... ^_^
You will never get a solar panel to output the same amount of energy needed to build it. That sounds like it is approaching perpetual motion, or at least 100% efficency, which will never happen. However, long term solar use will offset the energy needed to produce it.
mm, I don't think you are understanding the issue there. How much energy does it take to make a solar panel? How much energy can said panel product over it's 15-20 year service life? Which is greater? If it will produce more power than it took to create, that is not perpetual motion. It is like this: I make a wood stove. It takes, say, 1 megawatt hour of power to make that stove, from mining the iron ore, smelting, pouring, shipping, etc. That stove has a life of, say, 50 years. I can put a lot of wood through that stove and it will make me more than 1 megawatt hour of power. That's not perpetual motion, as the energy is from the wood (or sun in the solar panel case) and the stove (or solar panel) is only the conduit through which the energy flows as it is transformed from solid carbon in the form of wood (or photons for the solar panel) into CO2 plus heat (or electromotive force). Energy is only transformed in the tool and the question is can we make a solar panel that is capable of transforming more energy over its service life than it takes to make it? I don't see why not. I didn't realize that that current panels were not capable of doing that. That makes them stoopid from a monetary standpoint, unless you just want an off the grid backup power source, like me, and are willing to accept the higher costs (dollars and energy).
Steam generators are very cool- I've always wanted to build one.
Darn auto complete- I meant to type in tea 
rebelgtp wrote: In reply to paranoid_android74: Ok that little steam generator is cool
Just to complete the thought: Perpetual motion would be if 1KWH of photon energy (sunlight) landed on the solar panel and you got 2KWH of power out of it. That's perpetual motion. Or if you put in 1KWH worth of wood in the stove and got 1.2 KWH of heat out of it.
I lived in a solar powered house for a few months... our water supply was rain water... this was down in Panama so we had fairly consistent supply of both rain and sun... as I recall it was a $20k-30k solar system... it let us run 2 small (normal sized) fridge/freezers, a small CFL bulb per room, a small fan shelf fan 8" maybe?) and the water was run by a 12v pump from an RV.
the owners would run a washing machine and gas dryer on occasion, same with a microwave... we were permitted to charge laptops, phones and other electronics only mid day for a few hrs or else the battery bank would get to run down before the following day (basically we could only charge when the panels were supplying 100% of the power to everything plus charging the batteries)... we had to shut lights off every time you walk out of a room etc... on some very stormy/cloudy days we ended up having to run the diesel generator just to charge the battery bank and have power for everything else we needed.
as mentioned an a/c system would be just out of the question without a HUGE (ie VERY VERY VERY expensive system)... for something like that you'll need a generator...
Something else which will cut way down on power consumption is LED's. The replacements for incandescent bulbs are a lot more energy efficient but they still use dropping resistors and rectifiers to get the voltage to what the LED needs, this generates heat. If you wire your cabin or camper or whatever to use 12V LEDs then you save that energy.
Sorry Hess, the way it was worded it sounded the poster was saying that solar will not be efficent enough until it can supply enough power to run the plant that makes it.
I agree with going 12v on the cabin. No need to do 120v
yes 12v is the way to go... if you need a fridge look into a small Chest freezer... a few minor mods will get it working as a fridge and supposed to be much more efficient.
Type Q wrote: Can you define what you mean by "a lot"?
sure~
when it is closer to the energy return on the amount of fossil fuel used to produce it now.
I wasnt placing an unrealistic expectation, like Mad mighta thought, just the level of practical feasibility.
but can you imagine if a solar panel was able to produce a volume to cost of materials of energy close to fossil fuel now? thats an energy revolution in the making, right there~~ It doesn't really need to be any more efficient than that before the earth's energy paradigm changes radically.
In reply to madmallard:
That will simply take time. We've been refining fossil fuels for over 100 years. They've gotten the process down to a reasonable level of efficiency. It'll take time before we learn how to produce other energy sources and storage systems with similar efficiency.
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