Your Questions About Solar Generators Hawaii

admin answers:

You have solar panels? Soalr thermal or Solar PV? Have you performed the math to dertermine how long it will take to get your money back or are you wealthy enough not to care?

Some areas solar PV can pay well. It depnds (HIGHLY) on you local electric rates and government rebates. Example Puerto Rico and Hawaii both have VERY HIGH electric rates ($0.30 – $0.40 / kWh). Solar PV pays realtively well even without utility incentives mostly because they have to import the fuel needed to run their generators and this is costly.

US Midwest with electric rates of $0.05 – $0.10 / kWh have a simple payback of around 30 years to install solar PV without including incentives.

Soalr thermal is a different story. Solar thermal can often offer positive economic return.

Wind can be good if you have a good resource. Not for all areas…

Best renewable resources are still hydroelectric and direct geothermal. Additionally you should look into ground source heat pumps. Long ROI (10ish years) but the base system (wells) have a service life of 200 years.

I am an Energy Manager. I design, install and manage these types of systems.
I have yet to be sold on the idea of AGW.

Climate change? Well, it changes all the time. I do not see the imperical evidence that it is happening in my region of the world. Yes, we use weather data in all of our designs as your systems will NOT function properly without it being included in your calculations. Data is upated annually and there is no discernable trend for the past several decades, hot or cold.

admin answers:

1) You have to figure it out. If it’s in Hawaii, you probably don’t need heat, and can get by without A/C, too. In other places, more would be typical.

2) Your choice!

3) Since utilities are allowed, just to be minimized, I’d go with grid-tied solar electricity. The panels can generate 100% of average usage over time (unless this is Alaska or something). The grid is assumed to be reliable, but if there are doubts, I would go with a gas-powered generator for emergencies before I went with batteries to store electricity. The cost and upkeep of batteries would not be worth it unless they were going to be used all the time – typically, and off-grid arrangement.

Our house is 1900 square feet, single story. You can look at my profile and find out web page, with details on how much our system cost, which provides essentially 100% of our electrical needs. The link is called “Our Solar Panel Project” on that page. But we have gas heat. And prices have come down since we had ours installed, so you need to research current pricing.