Meeting With Delegate Yancey

I don't often post in the blog, but every once in awhile I have something I think worthy of sharing.

I am not sure how it happened, but delegate David Yancey (my actual delegate in the Virginia legislature)  contacted me to get my opinion on what he was trying to do for solar. My guess is either they got around to finally reading the emails I sent him last year or more likely I had mentioned to someone when I was doing poll watching this last Tuesday that I had received no replies to my emails and person had said they knew him and Yancey had a new staff, so maybe that triggered it. In either case...

We met at Panera Bread on Warwick (across from CNU) and had a good discussion. The delegate and his aide were there for about 30 minutes. The delegate had some stuff come up mid-way through, but came back to finish up the 30 minutes before taking off for his next appointment.

Topics discussed included
1. He is working on a proposal to get private enterprises (such as Bay Electric and Dominion) to invest in solar for schools. He is hoping to arrange it to ultimately save the schools money so they can use it to better pay teachers and get the students more modern books and equipment. He didn't have a lot of details at this time, but the overall goal sounded like it was a good one. As a side note, since education is one of Yancey's things I suspect the effort is more towards the schools and less towards the solar, but I am good with it either way. So if you have some reasonable suggestions on how this might be set up, feel free to send to me or if one of his constituents send directly to him or his staff.

2. We discussed some of the issues with residential and small business arrays and especially my support for roof-top distributed solar PV. Also a couple minutes on mandatory RPS and SRECs. One thing of note, the delegate recently flew into Philadelphia and he commented on how many solar arrays he saw on roof-tops there, so it tied in nicely with my SREC discussion.

3. I mentioned my personal number one goal for the legislature, which is make it mandatory that power companies have to buy their renewable credits to qualify for the RPS bonus from Virginia. I also mentioned a 20 year limit, although only to the aide.

4. Also covered the Dominion rate tariff plan a little bit pointing out that it really is not a benefit to residential home owners and since I could pointing out I get the equivalent of 40-41 cents per kWh, while Dominion's plan would only net be 4 cents per kWh if I were to accept it.  BTW: You all might want to check out the latest on the PUE-2012-00064 proposal. at least I finally see something in writing that existing customers can keep net metering. Although the SCC bought into Dominions aggregate numbers for the offset of solar on the grid, which is false math.

 5. Finally a touch of unrelated discussion on toll roads (hate them, but am okay if they are new roads that add capacity and not on old ones); on privatizing Virginia Ports (my concern is that Virginia should not give up the revenue stream for a one time bonus) ; and on taxes for transportation (the lockbox concept)

That about covers all I can remember, but if you have some ideas sent them in

IREC Solar Market Trends Report - 9/5/12

Although the data covered in the original report is for 2011, it is updated on this page where you can watch a webinar about trends in 2012. Click Here.

Comments Sought On Solar Incentives

The Virginia State Corporation Commission (SCC) is seeking public comment on Dominion Virginia's solar-powered incentive program.

Here's a WAVY article about the request: 
http://www.wavy.com/dpp/news/virginia/comments-sought-on-solar-incentives

Leave comments about 

PUE-2011-00117 - Application of Dominion Virginia Power for approval of a Community Solar Power Program and for certification of proposed distributed solar generation facilities, 

or

PUE-2012-00064 - Petition of Dominion Virginia Power for approval of a special tariff to facilitate customer-owned distributed solar generation

Click Here

White Roof Reduces Cooling Load

Today, as we have for the last 3 years, we put into practice our "green building" commitment by coating our Organic Food Depot grocery store roof white in Virginia Beach.

It is a fairly well established fact that having a white roof reduces heat load by 30% - 40% http://www.gizmag.com/white-roof-heat-island/21758/, and I know on our own house which has a white roof, it's what makes the difference between whether our undersized A/C system works or not.

For our grocery stores, the internal equipment heat load plus the external solar load can overwhelm an A/C unit, leading to premature failure, an expensive replacement I can tell you from experience.  Therefore, anything we can do to lessen the summer heat load in a cost effective manner, is something we look for, and coating our roof white certainly makes a huge difference.

However, we don't "paint" our roof white, both because runoff might affect nearby wetlands, and because we actually want the coating to wash off by Winter.
So we use Kool Ray Liquid Shade from Continental Products.

It's made for greenhouses, is non-toxic and is designed to wash off over time. http://www.continentalprod.com/greenhouse/kool/kool.htm

As you can see from this first photo, after a winter, most of the previous year's coating has been removed by rain.  This gives us radiant absorption during the winter. The roof, being back to black, acts like a solar collector.  We get the best of both worlds - cooling in the summer, heat in the winter.

It took 4 of us about half a day to roll on the new coating. The roof is a black, 8,000 sq. ft. EPDM rubber membrane.  We used three 5-gallon pails, mixed 1:1 with water, and a small amount of "extra stick" for longer adhesion. Cost was minimal, around $500.

The result is bright white and reflects sunlight well. The A/C units on the roof which had been running when we started, stopped during the installation, and only ran sporadically the rest of the day, so clearly the coating had an immediate effect.

We know it works, though we haven't tried to quantified it precisely.

If all the businesses and even homeowners in Tidewater were to adopt white roofs, the savings in cooling costs would be substantial, not to mention the fact that we would no longer need to build new power plants.

Getting homeowners to make their roof white is probably not going to happen. It has no aesthetic appeal.  Businesses, however, are another story, and the payback could be calculated.

Amory Lovins TED Talk, "Reinventing Fire"

In an talk filmed at TED's offices, Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mt. Institute talks about his new book, "Reinventing Fire" and gives a well reasoned proposal for switching the U.S. from oil, gas and nuclear to Renewable Energy by 2050 without it costing the U.S. anything - in fact, saving literally trillions that we're going to spend following the "business as usual" route.

It's well worth the 27 minutes running time.

http://www.ted.com/talks/amory_lovins_a_50_year_plan_for_energy.html

US wind energy rose 1.6GW in Q1 2012

U.S. Wind is now equal to about 48 Nuclear Power Plants

UNITED STATES: Wind energy rose in the US 1,695MW during the first quarter of 2012, taking the country's overall capacity to 48,611MW according to figures from AWEA.

The quarterly increase represented a rise of 52% compared to the same period in 2011, proving the looming expiry of the PTC is giving a late-minute boost to the industry. There is currently over 8GW under construction.

California saw the biggest increase in installations over Q1, with 370MW. It was followed by Oregon and Texas, which added 308MW and 254MW respectively.

According to the report, 788 turbines were installed over the three months with an average capacity of 2.15MW. The GE was the largest supplier with over 325MW, followed by Gamesa 252MW, Clipper Windpower with 240MW and Vestas with 223MW.

Chinese suppliers have also contributed over 121MW to the US wind power in Q1. The majority of this came from the completion of Goldwind's 109MW Shady Oaks project in Illinois. However, Guodian United Power also brought online the 9MW Harbor Wind project in Texas.

Story From Wind Power Monthly.

Benefits Of A Solar Tracker

I wanted to answer the question,  "How much does a solar PV tracker produce - theory vs. real world measurement as compared to a static mount system?"

I found lots of advertisements with numbers, such this one from Zomeworks:

     "Track Racks being 25% - 45% more efficient means either you get 25% - 45% more power or you can buy 25% less panels for your system and still receive the same amount of power had you chosen fixed racks. Either way you get more for the same amount of money."

   Zomeworks statement made sense, but I like to measure for myself. A few years back

I had my windows replaced. The advertised savings was 35%. Silly me, I did not measure and compare the new and old performance factors. However, they really needed to be replaced anyway, as the old aluminum frames were very cold in the winter.  There was a benefit, but since I didn't measure, I can't quantify it.

   The cost of a Zomeworks model Utrf - 120 (144" X 160" tracker, fits @ 8 panels) is about $2,400 from altE, an online store, and that did not include shipping. I like the Zomeworks tracker design. It has no motors, uses fluid transfer and balance. The drawbacks are size and this is hurricane country, so a solidly designed static mount has the survivability edge. 

  Back in Dec of 2011, I was l part of a Solar Coop.  We made a group buy of 66 solar panels and that gave us a little purchasing power. I purchased 8, 230 watt panels with Enpase micro inverters. The Enphase models logs solar production through a separate unit called an Envoy, so I could see my investment working on my computer. I was so impressed by the performance that I bought 8 more panels and microinverters, two of which were used in this Solar tracker experiment.

   My experimental  budget was $50.  I used scrap wood for both frames, bought 4 male/female MC-4 connectors from Solar Services and a few parts from Home depot. The grand total: $33.

  The Static frame was the easiest. I started there. 

   The Solar equinox was 20 March, so elevation was @ 36 degrees, azimuth: 180 degrees. Due solar South was checked at solar noon with a triangle, (11:03 on the 15 of Apr).  If the shadow didn't lie within itself, I was out of alignment. I adjusted the frame until it was aligned. If you want to find out about solar noon, NOAA has a geo-location solar calculator that is really easy to use http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/grad/solcalc/.

  The Enphase Envoy unit does the data logging, so that make measurement and tracking performance info accurate. 

  The Tracker rotated on a 68" x 1/2" conduit pipe. The bearings were three 3/4" PVC pipes strapped to a wooden frame that held the panel. It pivoted with ease and was adjusted once an hour by two 24" opposing  ratcheting bar clamps. On the day of the test it was a bit windy, so I rigged a damping system using a 5 gallon water bucket and bungee cord attached to one side.  

Because of the distance from the test rigs to the Enphase microinverters (which were on the roof), I used a 100 ft. extension cord and MC-4 connectors plugged into the correct connections.  

  The test results for the static mount showed the 1.0 KW produced a bell curve graph. 

The tracking mount produced a 1.3 KW mesa shaped graph, and a 30% gain over the static mount. 

The test was not perfect, it had location shading and connection losses, but the results were positive. 

My test results show that a tracking system will have a gain of approximately 30% more measured power, as  the advertised Zomeworks statement suggests, than a static mount system.

If you want to conduct your own experiment, contact me for further details.

Beau Gillis

beaujuno60@aol.com