Total SF and % of window area would probably be enough for me to get the standard home construction and heating/cooling costs. Dusty on August 2, 2008 at 11:06 PM

Dusty, with respect to ROI,I found some old paper and receipts from 1980…

Earthsheltered home: ~1600 sq. ft. $24K cash/savings, $40K mortgage = $64K

Glazing:~150 sq. ft., all south facing, double thermo-pane with E-glass, all doors and windows.

Sidewalls: 10 inch, poured reinforced concrete, all [east, north and south] bermed earth, with 2 inches of blue Styrofoam on outside of all buried walls. Outside insulation allows the giant mass of poured concrete to take on the temperature of the surrounding earth, approximately 55 degrees in SW Wisconsin. The mass then acts as a thermo flywheel storing internal heat gain during the summer and releasing it back into the home during the winter.

Roof:8 inch, “Spancrete” panels, terraced on two levels, with 4 inches of blue Styrofoam on outside with 6 to 12 inches of earth covering the entire structure.

Heating equipment and fuel requirements:One 30K BTU, Vermont Castings propane free standing stove, direct vented. Requires approx. 300 gallons of propane, for 6 months from October through March when it drops below zero we fire up the Vermont Castings wood burner. There’s absolutely nothing like the radiant heat from a woodstove when the “hawk is screaming” outside!

Electricity requirements:[Still on-grid] ~$85 per month for water pumping and heating, lighting, refrigeration, fan cooling etc.

We’re planning a phased approach to first reducing and eventually eliminating our reliance “on the grid”…!

We could drive the Saudis into the dust sand right now if we could just get our government out of the way.
Oldnuke on August 3, 2008 at 6:21 PM

If liberals had been in charge of the world 10,000 years ago (instead of volunteering to act as “human shields” on mastodon hunts), we’d still be huddling in caves worrying ourselves sick over the impending flint shortage and the perennially threatening global catastrophy we brought upon ourselves by offending the Earth Goddess with our greed.

And the really ironic thing is that if we’d listened to the idiots back then, they’d actually have been right – because all of their prophesies are self-fulfilling. If we don’t exploit the holy living Hell out of our resources as fast as humanly possible, then we eventually WILL run out of everything we rely on for our survival.

We could drive the Saudis into the sand right now if we could just get our government out of the way.

Oldnuke on August 3, 2008 at 6:21 PM

Amen.

Long rodent day, so just a few quick hits.
Dusty, yes, your 450sf will certainly power a normal house, even at current conversion efficiencies, unless you live in Seattle or London (constant clouds) or Manhattan (concrete clouds).
We still run into storage problems: Batteries suck, flywheels have a lot of issues ($$$), pumping water, compressing a gas, or electrolysis all involve lots of equipment and/or (as of now) pretty poor efficiency. I do hope new technology improves the whole situation.
Another storage issue is time, by which I mean max rate of conversion. I know that normal electrolysis cells have limits on the current flow before you start boiling the water, thus turning your nice pure H2 into a H2-O bomb.
Does little good to get 50KW peak for a sunny three hours, if you can only feed 1KW into your storage device.
If I had a storage device with an infinite charge rate, I’d be running a pole up into the thunderstorm overhead.

On payback time for a PV system:
Every time I run those numbers I get infinity.
If I put $20k into the bank at 3%, instead of into PVs, mounts, copper, batteries, charge controllers and inverters, the interest pays for buying the same KWH from the pole, forever.
Of course that does assume pole power stays at $0.10 KWH forever, a stunningly bad assumption today. YMMV.

profitsbeard on August 3, 2008 at 3:01 PM

All energy is a problem of storage.

I got a chuckle out of that. I’d take it a step farther though “Everything is just a problem waiting to be solved”.

Conversion and transmission and boosting and every other technical trick to coax volts to our uses is a delay, or small “storage”.

This mystified me. I read it about 4 times and still don’t get what you’re saying.

May each breakthrough be another nail in the comfy coffin of the smug, inspipid Saudis.

We could drive the Saudis into the dust sand right now if we could just get our government out of the way.

logis on August 3, 2008 at 4:28 PM

Oh yeah of little faith and scientific circumstance.

That oh bearded one, may be an advance greater than the industrial revolution, itself!
J_Gocht on August 3, 2008 at 4:15 PM

Good plan: If at people think you’re an idiot, just use more psychotic hyperbole!

That’ll show ‘em.

“…May each breakthrough be another nail in the comfy coffin of the smug, insipid Saudis. profitsbeard on August 3, 2008 at 3:01 PM

Now there after all; that’s the rub.

Never the less, the simple storage of ephemeral energy, whether in the form solar, wind or hydro has always remained the nut to be cracked.

“In a revolutionary leap that could transform solar power from a marginal, boutique alternative into a mainstream energy source, MIT researchers have overcome a major barrier to large-scale solar power: storing energy for use when the sun doesn’t shine.”

That oh bearded one, may be an advance greater than the industrial revolution, itself!

Oldnuke on August 3, 2008 at 2:06 PM

Precisely my dear Oldnuke…

That’s why the MIT breakthrough, the initial impetus for Ed’s post is so significant; both scientifically and as a practical efficient alternative to the present state of the art.

Keep a stiff upper lip and anything else that’s appropriate, Oldnuke!

Drive on!

at 3:01 PM-
… of course, I meant “…insipid Saudis.”

Not inspipid.

(They don’t deserve even a free neologism.)

Conversion and transmission and boosting and every other technical trick to coax volts to our uses is a delay, or small “storage”.

This MIT breakthrough sounds as simply brilliant as the equation-changing work going for over a year at Penn State, where their researchers have developed a unique, creative bacteria which excretes hydrogen [digestive waste] after devouring any organic material (corn cobs, sawdust, brewery dregs, municipal muck, etc.).

A similar technique for “storing power” (the hydrogen latent in garbage) more efficiently (which always translates as savings) by removing the (currently-expensive and energy-wasting) H2O “cracking” step done by electrolysis.

And primordial hydrogen the key in both fields.

May each breakthrough be another nail in the comfy coffin of the smug, inspipid Saudis.

J_Gocht on August 3, 2008 at 12:39 PM

Thanks for the link J_, I used it. What it showed me is that solar is not a good idea for me and most homeowners in the U.S. To take care of one half of my electrical needs I’d need 1000 sqft of solar panels, which would cost me about 1/3 of my home value. It would pay for itself in about 40 years though. Given that the site is pushing solar I’d say that those estimates are slightly overstated and I’d end up with much less production than they claim and it’d cost more and take longer to break even. Maybe someday but today solar is not viable for most folks.

Your govmint tax dollars at work.

…Takes some planning and ingenuity…

J_Gocht on August 3, 2008 at 10:24 AM

And isn’t that really what the government is best at?

Need a solar calculator even you can use, try this.

freevillage on August 3, 2008 at 10:30 AM

Hey freevil_, you ought a spend a little more time listening to the Lumbering Leviathan from Palm Beach.

You need an attitude adjustment…He’d “buck you up”!

I think that’s a safe bet. Only we “evil conservatives” are opposed to cheap, clean energy.

College students and their professors know where their bread is buttered. This 10,000th Discovery of the Century may or may not be of any practical application whatsoever, but that is of no concern to the government. The school put the word “solar power” in their press release. That means they’re going to get funding – even though their experiment had no more to actually do with solar power than with Arctic Tern nesting habits.

Agreed. If only all scientific journals weren’t controlled by the jooosBlack Racists, you could write a peer-reviewed paper debunking their science.

Hydrogen

Wind and hydro

Solar

The secret to alternate energy is to hybridize, combine all the various elements to make a complete integrated system.

Takes some planning and ingenuity…

electric-rascal on August 3, 2008 at 5:12 AM

Hey rascal, could you check the “link” you posted. [http://tinyurl.com/5jhgpw]
It doesn’t work for me?
Maybe that’s the point you were trying to make?

There’s only one criterion that can be used to know if these “MIT scientists” are any good. If Al Gore agrees with it, we KNOW it’s garbage.
freevillage on August 3, 2008 at 1:51 AM

I think that’s a safe bet. Only we “evil conservatives” are opposed to cheap, clean energy.

College students and their professors know where their bread is buttered. This 10,000th Discovery of the Century may or may not be of any practical application whatsoever, but that is of no concern to the government. The school put the word “solar power” in their press release. That means they’re going to get funding – even though their experiment had no more to actually do with solar power than with Arctic Tern nesting habits.

There is some progress with “backyard experimenters” doing this (improves fuel mileage, but doesn’t replace gasoline), but the above site is just a ripoff… build it as shown and you have a nice potential bomb!

See http://tinyurl.com/5jhgpw for a start if you really want some free & reliable info – you can even download (for free) the worthless plans sold at sites like the one above.

Note: Unless you’re the tinkerer/builder/experimenter/amateur scientist type, this “booster” stuff isn’t for you.

That looks to be about 1.5 kwh/month/sf. Of course that’s based on optimum clear skies which is just a little better than what we get here in Western NY. :-)

Thanks for running the numbers for me.

Logis, I sympathize with your POV, but it hardly helps your case or mine when you write in a manner that denies everything in furtherance of your preferences. Solar power is not cold fusion and your using the comparison makes you sound grumpy that someone doesn’t express himself exactly to your liking.

As for your view of conservation, I know you are speaking wrt to government purposely creating a burden via artificial increasing energy costs. So I won’t bore you with an optimistic take on conservation since the dawn of history that shows it to be a considerable boon to mankind and the constant search for making things more efficient is just as important to making energy cheaper as just producing more of that which provides the energy we use.

I’m not sure why you seem to feel society is, or I am, concentrating on just one side of the equation or, maybe, just solar or just efficiency. I talk about nuclear a lot, and have advocated drilling for oil everywhere. I happen to be talking about solar here for the reason I’ve stated a few times already. I’m talking about efficiency because that is one of the critical issues wrt solar. This is just one post on one announcement on a specific subject. There will be another on a different subject tomorrow or the next day. In fact, there is a post on oil here too today, where, I talked about another side of the many faceted equation you mention.