On Mon, 01 Mar 2004 01:09:38 GMT, Sunworshiper
wrote:

Would you be interested in a 517 gallon solar hot water storage tank
rated at 210 degrees? . I should hold
onto it , but you never know cause storage of the storage tank comes
up about every month from the wife.

Sorry, no. Anyway I'm usually looking for the tools to flow *in*, not
out. ;-)

What kind of tracker(s) do you have? I've been trying to get into
that business , but the machining and capital learning curves are
slowing me down. I've got one investor to put up 10-15 grand , but I
could use a bit more. I figure a superior and cheaper tracker will
help others to test their own technologies on. They say you can get up
to 40% more from your PV's if tracked. I think it would be best to go
thermal to meet your heating and cooling demands which is a lot of the
energy costs living in the southern belt. If you built a passive solar
house , thermal heating/absorption cooling, PV's , generator, and the
grid you'd have it made. Its going to take time until it works all out
, but it can be done without a losing capital cost. Still that isn't a
wide spread answer , but at least its in the right direction to
develop the technology so that it can be.

We have three Wattsun trackers. They're electric. The first two are
single axis, the third is dual axis. It replaced a homemade mount that
I finally realized I might never finish. :-)

It would be tough to make a go of a new tracker biz at this point.
Most people didn't want the extra complexity of a tracker to begin
with, preferring to buy extra capacity instead. Now that module prices
have come down so much, tracker popularity is also likely to lessen.
It's a shame, because trackers not only pay but also lengthen the
charging day, which shortens battery discharge times. Now that Wattsun
makes a tracker that can hold 2000 Watts of modules, it makes for a
really tidy and low-labor installation. You can even program the
controller to stow the array horizontally overnight to lessen wind
resistance.

The political stumbling block is the worst when dealing with back
feeding the grid. They sell the power to you for say 10 cents and buy
it from you at 1 cent , oooh that's a deal ! Sure there are concerns
about being phased correctly, but double redundant and expensive
safety measures to me just shows that they are not conducive to fixing
any energy problem. I can just imagine what would happen if you could
feed a lot into the grid during peak summer AC loads. They would stop
you at any cost while the news talks about brown outs and to turn your
AC up.

Utilities must take the juice in most areas I believe. There are even
situations where you can buy it at off-peak rates, and sell it back at
peak rates. As I mentioned before, search for posts by Chris Torek in
the energy groups for details.

I have mixed feelings about the nuclear power plants. I would like to
know the true costs. They get gov't $ to build , operate, the power
co. gets the $, gov't steps in again to shut it down, clean it up ,
truck 2,500 truckloads to NV. each yr., and spends billions for Yucca
mountain. Do they calculate all those costs and I'm sure more into
the cents per KW for nuke energy? Then you have to trust the DOE that
the test site isn't leaking into ground water while at the same time
they want to pile up all this stuff in the same hole when no one knows
what kind of heat reaction its going to have to itself. Maybe they are
worried about someone blowing the waist up , but I would think storing
it out in the open desert and watching and guarding would be safer and
a lot cheaper. I'd also like to know their contingency plan for if
something does go wrong and no one can get near the hole to fix it.
Plus it will be up wind for most of the US if it got into a bad
situation. I've got a good cartoon somewhere about the Gov't saying
"trust us" on all their other bad deeds involving radiation.

I think the best solution for the waste is to leave it where it is.
There are good arguments that such is the safest solution. But more
importantly, it means that nuke users must live with their own trash.
If it's good enough for all the places they'd like to send it (which
is anybody else's backyard), then it's good enough to stay where it
was produced. If the only way they can convince the public to allow
the plants is to force Nevada (which doesn't have nukes and *really*
doesn't want the waste) to take the waste, then they shouldn't build
new plants.

Wayne