SmartPower & SmartHomes

Monday, April 27, 2015

The Smart Money is on Renewables

Summer is just around the corner and the heat is on! For some middle-income American households it's a dreadful time of high utility bills. For others it's time to relax on the front porch with a glass of lemonade, without a worry or fear of sky-high electric bills. Why the disparity when solar system installation costs have fallen, and financing options and incentives are on the rise? Regardless of the choice for or against solar, in a recent forward-looking report, the United States Energy Information Administration forecasts renewable energy will be the fastest-growing power source through 2040. Residential solar is on the rise and has become commonplace in communities across the USA. Commercial and residential solar capacity is on pace to increase internationally as well. International renewable energy statistics can be viewed at the following link US EIA for North America, Central and South America including the Caribbean, Europe, Eurasia, Middle East, Africa, Asia & Oceania.

MidAmerican Energy, a company that business magnate Warren Buffett is affiliated with, has put more than $15 billion into renewable energy projects, largely without loan guarantees. It's also notable that utility companies in the USA are in large numbers investing in solar generation facilities.

To help you on your journey, no matter which country you live in, here's a handy tool to get your started that's Free to use. NREL's PVWatts^® Calculator estimates the energy production and cost of energy of grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) energy systems throughout the world. It allows homeowners, small building owners, installers and manufacturers to easily develop estimates of the performance of potential PV installations.

So take the time to review and implement energy saving measures prior to purchasing a solar electric system for your home. Here's a handy link to "Home Advisor". With the ENERGY STAR^® Home Advisor, you can create a profile of your home's energy efficiency features and get a prioritized list of energy-saving recommendations customized to your home. As illustrated below, we can see the impact a solar initiative can have when progressive programs are in place. Solar electric is indeed a very smart choice for your money!

1 comment:

UnknownSeptember 12, 2017 at 2:38 AM
Solar power system will play a big roll in reduction of carbon dioxide and cost saving from high power bill.There people never depend on public electricity.
Residential Solar Energy
Solar Albuquerque
Home Solar Installation
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Solar kWh Costs - News Archive

Having recently seen single module PV prices dropping to a low of $0.60/Watt, it's no surprise to also see associated solar electric kWh costs plummet.

Searching through online archives we find a related article posted February 12, 2014 on www.Energy.Gov, by Erin R. Pierce, "The U.S. solar industry is growing at a record-breaking pace, while becoming more affordable and accessible than ever before. The industry’s forward progress comes in part thanks to support from the Energy Department’s SunShot Initiative.

Set up in 2011 to re-establish U.S. leadership in the solar marketplace, SunShot partners with industry, universities, local communities and the Department’s National Laboratories to aggressively drive down the cost of solar-powered electricity generation across America.

To achieve this goal, SunShot works to lower the price of solar electricity to $0.06 per kilowatt hour (KWh) -- a cost target that will make solar-generated power to be fully cost-competitive with traditional energy sources by the end of the decade."

Fast forward to 2015 and we read of a recent study by the Berlin-based Agora Energiewende, a leading German think tank. The lead author, and renewable energy specialist Daniel Fuerstenwerth says that one of the reasons for the study was the lack of recognition among policy makers and advisors about future cost falls in solar PV, and official forecasts which continued to downplay the potential role of the technology.

He goes on to say that "the cost reduction potential of large scale solar is still misunderstood, and predicts that solar PV will be the cheapest form of power within a decade, and cost less than $US0.02/kWh by 2050."

Originally published in RenewEconomy, we further read from the Angora report that “Our results indicate that solar power will become the cheapest source of electricity in many regions of the world, reaching costs of between Euro 1.6 and 3.7c/kWh in India and the Mena region (Middle East and North Africa) by 2050.

Cost competitiveness, we're told, with large scale conventional power plants will be reached in these regions already within the next decade, at a cost for solar power by 2025 ranging between 3.3 and 5.4 ct/kWh.

The article places emphasis on the fact that, "in UAE for instance, solar is already cost competitive, with a tender for 200MW of solar going at less than $US0.06/kWh, less than the prevailing cost of gas-fired generation at $US0.09/kwh."