HERE COMES THE SUN

Here comes the sun

Here comes the sun, and I say

It's all right

It's all right

–––The Beatles

Solar! The black clip on the sharp left corner is to keep humans–or cows–from head injuries

Did I mention how much sun shines on our land?  Before we lived here I don’t think I was ever so aware of sunlight unless I was at the beach.  I open the front door at, say 2 in the afternoon on a bright June day, and wham!  I’ve got to reach for my sunglasses just to see.  (Remember the Seinfeld episode when Kramer’s apartment was blasted by the hellish beam of the neon sign from the chicken restaurant?*  It’s like that. Almost.)  We face directly west, our back to the east where the slopes rise to Buck Mountain, delaying our morning light noticeably in the winter but not a whit this time of year, woods on the north side, and nothing whatever to impede the sun from the south.  Energy, wild, unharnessed. 

Well, now it’s harnessed, at least modestly. 

In Vermont, in our field, a big dig begins; making holes for the sona tubes that will hold solar panels

I guess we were solar-ready in a way.   In Masssachusetts, where we lived until 2010, there was a fleeting period of energy-consciousness in the early 1980’s––most likely emanating from the time of the Carter administration and latent memories of the gas crisis of the 1970’s––when sizeable rebates were available to anyone who installed solar panels.  We had two panels to heat water placed on the roof of the more-or-less south-facing garage of our house in Lexington.  (We’re talking about solar water heating.  Photovoltaics were out of the question; they were too expensive and far less efficient than they are today.)  On brilliant sunny days I liked thinking that the water we showered in was heated by the sun.  But we never got a clear picture of the energy we saved.  The temperature dial on the solar tank fizzled after a couple of years.  We tended to forget what the reading were supposed to mean anyway.  Only a slight gurgling noise from the tank suggested our water was actually getting sun-warmed.  Over time the trees around the back yard grew larger, and before long the panels were in a veritable hole of sunshine.  When the possibility of replacing the solar water tank loomed for the second time, we had the panels removed. 

Our first solar romance was over.

Some pretty much VT-type sentiments
(car of one of our solar installers)

There were never very many solar installations in Lexington.  A handful, maybe.  A few I’d noticed in the 1980’s and 90’s had, like ours, tended to disappear by 2000.  But then I never thought to see much in the way of solar panels on homes in any state in the Northeast. (Boston averages about 200 days of sunshine per year.  That sounds optimistic, but it’s a fact.  Really.)  In 2008 we happened to be driving around Las Vegas, a city with nearly 300 days of sunshine a year (292, counting partial), and got lost in a suburban landscape of endless spanking new housing communities, raw and still mostly unoccupied.  (A condition in which they would remain, given the recession just around the corner.)  Not a single roof bore solar panels.  Not one.  I’m sure there must have been housing elsewhere with solar panels that we happened not to see, but you would expect solar to be a no-brainer anywhere in the state of Nevada.  The thing is, there are few incentives for homeowners in that state.   According to a site tracking solar progress in Nevada http://solarpowerrocks.com/nevada/ incentives are "geared toward industrial size installations for businesses or power companies with eyes on creating horizons of silicon in the desert."

  

A small Nevada town whose name I forgot, where the sun shines without hitting a  panel

Here in Vermont we have half that average number of days with sunshine (a mere 159, counting partial), yet we live five miles from a solar array, and other solar is not terribly hard to find.  There is a move to get more homeowners onto solar, concentrating for the moment on our county.

Suncommon is the Vermont agent for SunPower 

During the winter we read in our local paper about a new concept to encourage people in this area to go solar.  Leasing.  Sure, if you want to spend some $20,000 or so you can buy a solar system and never pay another penny for electricity.  On the face of it, if your electrical costs were, say, $1,500 a year, you would break even in well under twenty years.  If you lease, you don’t own the system, and you continue to pay your $l,500 or so for electricity.  Still, why bother?

The sona tube goes down about 6 feet and will be filled with concrete.
This is necessary as the panels will be like sails in the wind.

The trench from panel 3 brings the power to the electrical panel in the basement.
(Where did all those rocks come from? All the soil is pure clay.)

One reason, of course is that it feels like the right thing to do.  We are helping in a small way to save energy.  But that’s not really enough.  There is a sweetener.  Whether you own or lease, if your system produces more kilowatt hours than you use, our electric company, Green Mountain Power, will buy back the electricity at a “guaranteed fixed rate” of $0.20 per kilowatt hour, $0.21 by year four.  (Our most recent bill from Green Mountain Power charged us only $0.147 per kilowatt hour.)   The three panels installed in our sunny meadow are set to produce a “guaranteed range of annual production” of 14,704 to 16,252 kilowatt hours in year one.  Our actual electricity usage in 2012 was 9,388 kilowatt hours, in 2011 roughly the same.  Assuming we continue to use power at the same pace, we should be able to claim a rebate from Green Mountain Power for the difference between 9,000-plus kilowatt hours and somewhere between 14,000 and 16,000 kilowatt hours.  Because our system was more expensive to install than a roof system (our roof faces east-west), and we have three panels rather than the two that may have sufficed to cover our current electrical needs, we will have a higher monthly electrical bill (aka lease payment) before figuring in rebates for over-generation of power.   Will we come out ahead, or behind?

The panels are fitted into the frames

The inner workings on post #3

Electrical connections are made

A robin has already laid two eggs in a niche on post #3

After twenty years the kilowatt hours our system will produce is projected to decrease to a range of 14,021 to 15,497.  All solar panels lose power over time, but we noted that manufacturing defects in the industry have recently come to light.  According to a May 28, 2013 New York Times article:

“The solar panels covering a vast warehouse roof in the sun-soaked Inland Empire region east of Los Angeles were only two years into their expected 25-year life span when they began to fail.  Coatings that protect the panels disintegrated while other defects caused two fires that took the system offline for two years, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenues.  It was not an isolated incident. Worldwide, testing labs, developers, financiers and insurers are reporting similar problems and say the $77 billion solar industry is facing a quality crisis just as solar panels are on the verge of widespread adoption.”

Most of the problems, according to the Times, were with panels made in China, the largest manufacturer of solar panels, but some American-made panels were defective as well.  Our panels (we asked) are among those manufactured in the US.   One of the installers commented they were "really good" panels.  In any case, we don’t own them.

The solar array, and visitor information, above, at the edge of Vergennes center

Our system is not officially operational; it awaits an exchange of paperwork and stamps of approval that signify we have a functioning system.  Suncommon, the company that makes presentations about solar power and installed our system, serves as the Vermont agent for SunPower, the company based in California that actually owns our panels.  We have no responsibility for upkeep (if there is any) or anything else for that matter.  (Except that it falls upon us to ask the power company for the rebate.)   A computer site will monitor the energy our system is producing.  So far the system was “on” only for limited testing purposes.  It was 4 o’clock in the afternoon, the sun was still high in the sky, and it was producing energy.  No fuzzy picture this time.  Those few minutes (was it a half hour?) of production, according to our monitoring site, gave the equivalent of  “not driving 16 miles in a standard car.”   Wham!

Nearly complete, with panel #3 before electrical work

*This was "The Chicken Roaster" episode, the 142nd episode of the sitcom Seinfeld, the eighth episode of the eighth season. It aired on November 14, 1996.  You can look it up.