DR and green solutions

Here in the upper midwest, solar power for ANY form of backup power is just not a viable solution.

First, most of the times when we need backup power, there is not enough sunlight to run any form of a solar system.

Realistically, one would need battery capacity of at least 3 days, and a large enough array to be able to charge the batteries in 1 day.
Factor in only 8 hours of daylight in December and January, coupled with the shift of the suns position in the sky, and the size of an array grows geometrically.

Much as I would like a good "green power" solution, there are large areas where solar is not a viable alternative with today's technology.

While not very "green", the best renewable energy backup power option for many of these areas would be wood or corn furnaces coupled to a steam turbine powered generator.

Chas

As our summers are you're winters and vice versa. Currently Solar is growing in strength over here as the cost of connecting a properitey out of town is prohibitive and then onvce connected you are on a garantied mininum power consumption which you pay for no matter how little power that you may actually us. So Solar got a big shot in the arm here because it works out cheaper than connecting to the mains.

There are several alternatives that I've seen used in the country areas with something as simple as a solar panel driving a water pump for stock water and no batteries involved so it only pumps durring daylight hours and then more efficently when the sun is high rather than in the early morning or late afternoon.

However BP has gone int the Solar thing in a very big way and for as little as $30,000 AU it is possible to provide enough solar collectors and storage to run the farm house with lots left in reserve. Now this might sound expensive at first but when you consider that it may cost anything up to $500,000 AU to connect to the mains and then you have a $400.00 AU per quarter bill it is a very cheap alternative.

There are two aqua farms in South Australia which have chosen to go this way just for simpilicy and cost factors. One in particular was quoted somewhere near !.5 Million Dollars AU just to be connected to the mains and then have a $30,000 AU Quarter bill as well as being responsible for the overhead wires so if they where brought down they would have to pay for their repair from the Electricity supply board as it is all high Voltage stuff and not the low voltage that normal sparkies can work on. It cost them $850,000 Au to install the solar array and there are few ongoing costs involved so they are far out in front from the begining.

Currently the Solar Power industry is fairly big here in Australia and with the current products available {even Tandy sell some of this stuff although it is from the basic end of the market} there are numerious places which are solar power only as well as out telacomunication company who has small transciever stations all around the country being powered soley by solar installations.

Now with this in mind I took a look intothe feasibility of incorporating a Solar array into our current DR systems and this was brought home this last week because of what where described as severe thunder storms leaving very large areas of Brisbane without power for anything up to 3 days and in some cases even longer.

We where in a position where we couldn't get any fuel delivered for our generator and at the same time restricted in what was available for company cars so we where somewhat limited.

I can not help but wonder just how much electricity is taken for granted and just how many people are willing to even consider a large scale long durration outage and it's consquences. Even the homes which use natural gass would be affected as electricity is required to pump this gas through the distribution grid at a sufficent preasure to be usefull to the end user. The same applies to water as at first the resoveriors would carry the load requirments but without electricity to refill these stations there would be a rapid decrease in both water preasure and quality.

Now whith the above in mind I did some investigation on what would be required to have a solar installation that was at least equial to our current diesel system which is sufficent to run the computers and lighting but not much of the other buildings requirments like lifts and AC.

Our current Diesel system is nearing the end of its useful life and will soon require replacing and then there are the constant maintance requirments that are involved as well as the cost of fuel and storing a sufficent quantie to fill our needs for at least 1 week. this will require new fuel tanks and a complete new installation to be installed as well as some form of pumping station to raise the fuel from the underground tanks to the generators so it can be used. Overall it is a very large item in both space and money involved. We are also having a problem of water contamination of the fuel so new underground tanks are a first requirment.

Our current system supplies 15 KVA and is capable of running our computers and lighting as well as security, fire alarm and fire suspresion systems. We have been given an estimation of a 6 month requirment to replace the entire unit and all the associated components.

Not a very effective way of having a decent DR plan in place while this work is being performed and while we could be lucky and not require any of this while the work is being performed I for one am not willing to stake my life on this happening. Currently the diesel keeps stopping owing to fuel contamination by water or more precisely starts running roughly as well as a loss of effeciency and once stoped requires a lot of mantance time to get running again.

Now the Solar installation that we have been quoted on is about 3/4 of the price of a new diesel system will require about 60 square meters of solar pannels on the roof facing north and the storage batteries and inverteres will fit into a Seacontainer with the added advantage of installation time being something like 8 weeks with no disruption to our current existing system. The time delay and inconvenience has been the main factor in nothing being done to correct the existing problems.

There is also the added advantage of all the Solar arrays being low voltage so no special wiring is required and the only specalised equipment necessary is the frame that the solar pannels will sit on which has to be designed to suit our current building.

On the up side other than the ocasional clean of the solar pannels and an occasional look see that there is no corrosion forming on any of the battery terminals it is virtually maintance free and with the charge limiters the battery banks can never be overcharged so the batteries should have a mininum life of somewhere between 6 - 8 years before any replacment may be required. There is also a redundant system built in for any batteries tha may fail and everything in this area to the invereters is only 12 volt DC so it is as safe as possible.

The inverteres are to be mounted high up on the inside of the container and feed directly into the existing power grid and become active in exactly the same way as the old diesel system did so there should be no problems there the equipment required is nothing new and has all been tried and proven over many years as it isolates the building from the mains when the incoming voltage drops below a certian predetirmined level and will swithc back to the mains when the voltage rised above a set level. All pretty standard stuff for any emergency power plant with the exception of other than the actual switches involved there are no moving parts involved in the entire system.

I then asked just how reliable this form of installation would be and was supprised to find out that what we required was nothing more than a bigger version of a domestic solar power plant which this company was already delivering Australia wide but mainly to outback areas for the above mentioned reasons about the costs involved in connecting to the mains. They have been selling these units for 15 years now and while there have been improvments in both the Solar collectors and storage batteries the idea remains basicly the same with the added advantage of no recuring costs involved once the installation is setup. There is no fuel required and other than the occasional check up that only requires someone looking at a pannel of lights to tell you if anything has gone astray like a faulty battey or failed solar charger or whatever all of which is displayed on a pannel on the outside of the container in a conventional fuse box type arragment. Tis display pannel monitors everything from the incoming feed to the working of the inverters and displays any malfuctions.

Then there is the fact that the Solar collectors are almost indestructible in normal use and they carry a Life time warrantie so unless a plane or something similar falls on them thay should remain functioning and because of their position they are unlikely to suffer any accidential damage as they are in a place where any heavy equipment just can not reach like you can not accidently back a car over them unless you first get a crane in to lift the car up to the top of the building and then attempt to drive it around up there. The batteries are jell filled sealed items and have a proven track record and other than the actual charge controllers and inverters which are all solid state these should remain working long after this installation has been written off as a tax deduction and depreciated to zero cost.

Now the reasoning behind all of this was to increase our available power which will be about double our present capacity no interference while installing and minimal costs involved in running & mantainance.

The initial costs will be about 3/4 of the replacment cost of the diesel unit and associated components no interference to the work place or at best minimal interferance, virtually no maintance or running costs involved once setup, and a small setup time involved.

We already use the standard home installations on our remote sites for backup power and while they are still realitively new as they have only been in place for about 3 years they have so far proved trouble free. I feel certian that this conversion will prove a smoth transisition and far more importantly far more cost effective that our present alternative which showed it's very weekness last week when we started to run low on available fuel and that was only after about a 2 days of off and on power than 3 days without any mains power at all. While we managed to keep the core network running the units on the prefifery had to be turned off to save available fuel and this did adversly impact on our ability to perform business but at least we where still fuctional which is a lot better than can be said about some of our competitors.

In the regional sites the Solar Installations have already paid for themselves and so far have proved to be a very sucessful altenative to costly diesel generated power and with the added advantage that a diesel mechanic isn't required to be on site or on call 24/7. We have had these Solar Arrays pounded by hail stones up to golf ball size {and bigger} without any problems other than the bending of some solar cells which in no way impacts on their function. Covered by dust storms and in the last few weeks flooded and the units just go in working without any problems. Although if one of these units was submerged under 10 feet or more of water for several weeks I'm sure that there would be some maintance required but soi far other than hosing out all the mud that was washed into the containers that has been the linit of any required maintance.

Col

Yes, Colin is quite correct about Australia having an advantage because of much more sunlight in general, and more daylight hours in winter (about 8 hours).

Unlike certain parts of the US, where spring and fall are very short, the four seasons in Australia
are fairly even in length, and follow pretty closely to the following months:

Summer: December to February
Autumn: March to May
Winter: June to August
Spring: September to November.

I'm not at all concerned by the "Green" tag I only added the extra post to point out that wasn't our primary objective but a very nice by product of the installation when it goes ahead.

Col

In a recent post.

I converted several of the office computers from power hungry AMD XP and P4 to cool running, low power VIA Epia C3 based systems (www.viatech.com.tw), consuming only 30 watts of power from a 12v battery. Using a TFT screen also only consuming about 36w from a 12v DC supply, means a total loading of some 66 watts (5.5A) from a 12v leisure battery. This is trickle charged using a wind generator I acquired (second hand) from a small pleasure boat and mounted on the corner of the office roof. With the machines running 24/7, but with all the power management options turned on, I have not yet had to resort to mains power to charge the batteries. Running a standard IDE hard disk, 256Mb of ram and a 933MHz cpu, the machines are every bit as productive as any other, but cost nothing to run.

Yes there is an ongoing cost with replacement batteries and maintenance cost for the wind generator, but these are negligible compared to the 250 watt-hours of electricity required to power a full size computer every day from mains power!

Now in the UK, electricity is charged by the unit. 1 unit is 1kw/h. A typical computer requiring 250 watts of continuous power an hour will use one electricity unit in 4 hours, or 6 units a day. This equates to some 24p a day (US 40 cents). In a month, that is US$12....in a year $144...per computer. $576 per annum for the 4 computers.

Total outlay was ?11 ($17) per battery, and about ?40 ($65) for the generator which can charge 4 batteries simultaneously. Total outlay to run 4 computers is $133 which is less than the cost of powering one standard computer for a year. The batteries in trickle charge mode have a guaranteed life of three years before requiring replacement, and the generator perhaps needs maintaining every 2 or 3 years.

How green is that?!!! Of course, I do have a mains 12v charger just in case the wind does die down for too long (not likely on the south coast of England!), and I'm looking at adding a solar panel for the summer (England....not much point, right?!!!) but so far (4 months into the experiment) I have not needed to use a penny in mains power.

Oddly enough, the use of solar power to heat water in 'modern' times can be found in places like Southern California. I seem to recall seeing pictures of old style solar heaters that date to 1908 and 1910. These pictures were in books from the green power revolution of the mid 1970's.

As fossil fuel prices go up and supplies go down, solar and other technologies will start to gain ground again, at least as far as heating is concerned. And as electric prices go up, more people may look into using solar, wind and assorted storage technologies, combined with conservation and low voltage equipment, to cut back their usage.

Their usage could accelerate if there are more blackouts like the one that affected North America last year. Whether the blackouts are caused by lack of communication or terrorist action, more frequent occurrances will have people seeking non-grid alternatives.

At the same time there will also be some flack as people put up solar arrays and windmills that are noisy or look like eyesores.

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"There are ominous signs that the Earth?s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production? with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas ? parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia ? where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon."

"The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively"...(has begun to accumulate so massively??????)..."that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it."

"To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. 'A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,' warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century."

"A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop"....(A DROP????)..."of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968."

From Newsweek Article, April 28, 1975, titled...............The Cooling World.

My, Oh my, the world is cooling, the world is cooling....................fast forward 25 years....................the world is warming, the world is warming....................fast forward 25 years....................????????????????????????

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Whichever you want.

typos'...gotta' love em'

Yes Max, I see what you're gettnig at and I fully agree. The whole Global Warming stand is getting as overdone as being Politically Correct.

In the same sense though, I feel both of these concepts must be taken seomwhat seriously even though they are somewhat dramatized.

Seasons have changed (somewhere in another thread I was talking about that.)air quality (in major cities)has been reduced, although not where I live now. To turn a blind eye to this as a reality is to ignore fate.

I understand that these things are blown WAY out of proportion but the underlynig truth is there, humans and our products are reducing the quality of the atmosphere, without ANY doubt whatsoever, this MUST be impacting our lives.

When in my sixth year in Auto College, I was learning all about California emissions and how Air Care is implemented in Canada for the purpose of reducing emmissions. People complain that big trucks blow black smoke and their car FAILED Air Care. the difference is, hydrocarbons are harmless to the atmosphere as they break down as they hit high altitude. CO emissions from cars is CO in the atmosphere and it kills people from inducing carboxyhemogloben causing people to virtually suffocate.

So while is see Global Warming as a natural phenomenon that will happen with or without us, I also understand the real effects of our pollutants in the atmosphere and how we are interrupting the natural warming and cooling process. I disagree with all the global warming 'HYPE' but I think we should strive to better our emissions or we will face the repercussions of impurity in our air.

It is a VERY seriOUs issue in my eyes, yet is so easily degraded due to the maniacle way that global warming is whined about.
We need to be concerned, but for the right reasons, if that makes more sense.

Well I indeed went out of my way to spell SeriOUsly correctly, you know I don't pay attention to spelling in posts.

I am happy to see however, I had made at least one spelling mistake in almost every other paragraph, I mean pargasaph.

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"Britain is likely to be plunged into an ice age within our lifetime by global warming, new research suggests. A study, which is being taken seriously by top government scientists, has uncovered a change "of remarkable amplitude" in the circulation of the waters of the North Atlantic. Britain and northern Europe are expected to switch abruptly to the climate of Labrador, bringing a nightmare scenario where farmland turns to tundra and winter temperatures drop below -20C (-7F)."

".....trigger changes with catastrophic consequences"

http://www.greenhousenet.org/news/Jan-2004/warmingplunge.html

REMOVE SPACES blah blah

Dang, Guru (Dang - some yankee lingo meaning Gawd Blimey), you better stock up on the firewood, the hot toddies, and some arctic parkas. This global warming thing is about to get bloody cold.

I too find it interesting that we suddenly went from global cooling to global warming.

However, I do see a cause and effect relationship there.

In the late 70's, the environmental movement in the US made major strides in reducing visible particulate emissions.
This had a major impact on air quality throughout the US.

With fewer particulates in the air, fewer clouds form, and fewer rain droplets are created.

One could make a case that the air quality improvements from the 70's went too far and triggered global warming.

That said, regardless of your personal views on global warming, it makes economic sense to do many simple things that reduce energy consumption.

White and light colored roofs reduce cooling costs with very little impact on heating costs.

Many choices related to transportation can reduce your costs and impact on the environment without restricting your lifestyle.

My point is that if we all make a few minor adjustments to our energy habits, we can negate the global warming arguments.

Chas

While pollution caused by hydrocarbons may break up at high altitudes, there are conditions that can keep that from happening. The big valleys of the Los Angeles area and their inversion layers are prime examples of those conditions.

Long time natives of the LA area can say that all the air quality controls have made a big difference in air quality, despite the fact that there is still smog. My wife spent the first forty years of her life in the San Gabriel Valley and remembers times when it hurt to breathe the air and kids were restricted from going outside to play.

Nowadays, while there are still smog alerts and smog, the intensity and frequency has decreased from the bad old days despite a huge increase in the number of vehicles. So the air quality controls work to a degree.

Oddly enough, the LA basin had a ?smog? problem long before Europeans came to the area. Smoke from camp fires would hit the inversion layer and create a ceiling of crud in the air. Of course, the population was much smaller then.

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Wouldn't it be great if we had a national goal to be totally independent from foreign oil imports in, say, 25 to 50 years? I would love to see that challenge made in a serious and realistic way. I don't like to be dependent on foreign oil, and I don't like to see the brown clouds over our cities. But I also don't like to see all the scare tactics used by radical environmental groups. The "global warming" scare is one such tactic. And I also don't like misleading and unsubstantiated charges that are purely political in nature. Attacking the "oil hungry" Bush/Cheney team is one such charge. And the Kyoto treaty is a joke, and it's no more than a way to allow foreign governments to stifle American business and fill their own coffers at our expense.

It is certainly true that our nation is quite dependent on foreign oil, and it's not just a Republican dependency. The Democrats have only adopted the issue to demagogue, but real solutions haven't been offered by any party, major or minor. A realistic 25 to 50 year plan to phase out oil burning technology and phase in alternative energy sources would suit me just fine. Hydrogen for cars, nuclear for power plants, and so on. Democrats are great at "owning a problem", but why is it that their solutions are always either evasive or socialistic in nature?

Science behind Kyoto Treaty unsound, experts say: "A report, published by the European Science and Environment Forum (ESEF) said the science used to justify future government action to curb carbon dioxide emissions was leading politicians to take flawed actions which could actually be harmful or counter-productive. Politicians were being urged to solve a problem that might not exist."

Link: http://tinyurl.com/2yyb5

Sure, you could find scores of apparently reliable sources that appear to give merit to "global warming" claims. But as time goes on, you can find more and more equally reliable sources that give reason to question such claims.

But what I find most telling is this. All of the solutions to this so-called "problem" presented by the left (both the American left and global left, by the way), all involve the expansion of their socialistic agenda. If there is a problem, and I'm not conceding that there is, let's see some capitalist solutions suggested and implemented instead. Then, at least, people like me would be less skeptical of their true intentions, and real solutions would have a better chance of success.

There are people in the world (and in America itself) who absolutely despise capitalism, and they are trying to hide their socialistic "wolf" agenda using the global warming "sheep's clothing". Be real. Be honest. Be genuine. That's all I ask, and expect, of them. But it's all too obvious to me, they're being none of those things.

While you could no doubt talk clients into installing windmills on thier roof-tops; the neighbours may not be so convinced.

Also. A major issue with roof-based systems is they tend to turn the house into a large AMP. This of course would have you fired quite shortly after insatallation. :(

I have come across this product that claims to remedy the sistuation:

http://www.juiced.ca/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=525

@ Juiced.ca We Squeeze Our Own!

Since we all know it is impossible for something heavier then air to become airborne, the word "green" associated with energy might just get you drawn and quartered these days.

I think we just need to be very carefull about Geothermal sources...

Also, I would like to see the term "Soft Energy" grow in use... It might be a little more exceptable.. :p

www.juiced.ca