

Is this Seattle Entrepreneur Edison or Don Quixote? - flashinfremont
http://www.seattle20.com/blog/Is-this-Seattle-Entrepreneur-Edison-or-Don-Quixote.aspx

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robotrout
"Just plug into a wall outlet", it says.

Hmmm...

I have to say, this doesn't smell correct. If this is safe, than it's useless.
If it provides enough power to be useful, than it's unsafe.

1) You have to sync to the grid, and if you go out of sync by more than x%,
you have to automatically disconnect to protect the grid. Are they doing this?
If they're not, it's because their power output is so miniscule that nobody
cares.

2) You have to provide ability for line workers to guarantee that you aren't
back feeding power onto a line they had turned off and so thought was safe to
work on. Are they doing this, or, again, is it a don't care because they're
only producing 5 watts or some equally silly power.

I imagine these devices to be so ridiculously low power, that items 1 and 2
are don't cares. However, are they so low powered that we don't even care
about risk to the house itself? Plugging into a wall outlet bypasses the
breaker-box in the house, Say that you're producing 10A of current with your
little device. If your breakers are 15A breakers, now they won't trip until
25A of current is running through that circuit.

My gut feel is that the answer to all these questions is, nobody cares,
because they produce embarrassingly low amounts of power which means they're
just a way to get rich off of environmental guilt.... Thinking about it that
way, I'm all for it.

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robotrout
Another thing is that the grid power is 3 phase. Your wall outlets are single
phase or, at best two phase (for your dryer and oven). So, even if all other
considerations were ignored, you're feeding unbalanced power back onto the
grid, by not adding power to all three phases.

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coryrc
1\. Nearly every house in the US is on a single 240V phase with a center-tap
to create 120V. Any load is already unbalancing the three-phase transmission
lines. Luckily, throwing a similar number of houses on each phase balances
out. But if all the houses on one phase turned on their electric heaters and
ovens and the houses on the other phases turned off everything, you'd have one
unbalanced transformer, but the grid would still remain within tolerance. Now,
if you picked a good 10,000 houses all on a single phase spread across a
service area, maybe you'd begin to have a detectable problem.

2\. Your outlets are spread semi-randomly around to each half, so if you only
plugged things in one half, you could only draw half the rated power before
blowing the breaker.

So it's not a problem, as you seem to imply.

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robotrout
1\. I'd be interested in where your number of 10,000 houses comes from.

2\. The breakers I was referring to were your circuit breakers in your breaker
box. My concern being with their ability to do their assigned task of
protection.

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tlb
At the macro scale, home windmills are a stupid idea. Anything can be done
more economically at scale. Wind farms leverage economies of scale that don't
work at home, so they can easily make more power per unit labor with the same
hardware. If Jellyfish were efficient, they would be more efficiently used in
wind farms.

At the micro scale, some people will buy them despite the economic
inefficiency as a fell-good hobby project, but they'll never become widespread
without being economical.

Also: small wind turbines make a fairly annoying constant noise. I'd vote to
ban them from my neighborhood.

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lionheart
Yes, and no I think.

There are some serious advantages of building this kind of system one house a
time instead of in large scale wind or solar farms.

The transmission costs, for one. If you generate the electricity in the same
location it is used it is more efficient.

Also, this way the new grid can be created slowly using many small investments
made by individuals instead of having to make one huge investment immediately.

~~~
tlb
It doesn't reduce the capital cost of transmission lines: you still need thick
enough wire to power everyone's house when the wind isn't blowing.

If you're talking about the power loss in wires, it's only a few percent.
Losses may be higher with power generated at the leaf nodes, because when my
house is idle during the day it has to send power into the grid through the
relatively inefficient local network while a wind farm is plugged right into
the grid.

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pingswept
Here's the website of the company described in the linked article:
<http://www.clariantechnologies.com/>

I don't think either component (wind or solar on a commodity scale in
residential locations) is a good idea. Small wind turbines and solar panels
are barely worth the money, even in the best locations. Most backyards (or
whereever you have in mind that isn't a carefully chosen site for the
technology in question) are terrible for wind and solar. It's not true
everywhere-- there's a lot of wind in North Dakota, and plenty of sun in
places like Arizona, but those are rarities. The vast majority of houses don't
have many renewable resources available.

Just to be clear: I'm a strong proponent of large scale renewable energy; I
work full-time in the solar industry. I just don't think that these products
will pay back nearly as much as they will cost, even counting the carbon
dioxide emissions they will save.

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ShabbyDoo
I talked to a guy at a party who sells rooftop solar systems here in Ohio
(supposedly 75% of San Diego's sun). For up to a eight kilowatt system, 80%
will be reimbursed via grants from a combination of the state and federal
government. So, instead of paying $50K, I'd only pay $10K up front for a
system that might last 20 years.

He said that it would generate 10,000 kwh of power per year on my roof. At
about ten cents/kwh, that's about a grand. So, a 10% ROI doesn't sound too bad
although I question the maintenance cost stream over the product's lifetime.

However, it's not so rosy. The power company (at least in Ohio) only must pay
about three cents per kwh to the homeowner for putting power back onto the
grid. So, at least some percentage of that 10% ROI gets turned into a three
percent ROI.

Even at 80% off, it's still a bad deal at current pricing levels!

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zzzmarcus
Yeah, and the other 40k has to come from somewhere. From what you've
described, it seems like it'd never be a net win for either for you or for tax
payers, even under the best conditions. Not unless the price comes way, way
down anyway.

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joshu
Does it seem realistic that you can just plug it in and push power to the
house?

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pingswept
It's probably prohibitively expensive, but from a technical perspective, you
can do it.

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viggity
[http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/alternative_energy_revolution.jp...](http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/alternative_energy_revolution.jpg)

