Where is the low cost Solar panels I keep reading about but never see?
Question:
Answer:
Not enough manufactured to keep up with the demand.
Because the cost to manufacture is so high that the return on investment doesn't make sense. In short, if the things were cheap and turned out good amounts of energy relative to the dollar invested, then people would buy them, the cost to mfg. them would go down, people would find new and novel uses for them because they were cheap to engineer in to new products (like the cool Citizen Eco Drive watch for example) and they would start to be much more common.
Here they are!
$834.12, 18 VDC, 190 W, $4.39/watt
http://store.altenergystore.com/solar-el...
Compared to
"Porter Cables 20 Hp Honda Powered
10,000 Watt Generator has all the power you need to get you through Hurricanes, Ice Storms, or power your job site. For only $2,449.99 Porter Cable gives a you tons of power & dependability for the money." ($0.25/watt)
1/[(7.5KW)(5.4 hr)/((7 gal.)($3.00/gal)] = $0.52/KWH
It takes only 40 solar panels to match the 7.5KW rated output of the generator. At $834.12 per panel, that's only $33,364.80. That's a difference of a mere $30,914.81 which , at the $3.89 / hr operating cost of the generator, yeinds a payout in only 7,950 hours, which, divided by 12 gives 662.46 days, or 1.81 years. Onlly the maximum possible average power that the solar panels can deliver in a day is 0.6366 rated, moving outr payout out to 2.85 years. But commercial power is less than 20% as expensive as portable generator power, so the payout is 14.25 years if installed in a desert region in the tropics, say the Sahara, where very few people live.
The real goal is not cheap cells, but efficient cells. If they were free, by the time you installed them, made some AC, hooked them into grid, and all that, you are money in the hole at the current efficiency rate. Researchers have come to understand that and are moving to get the percentage conversion rate up, with some encouraging results. Stay tuned, our kids will have it.
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