[SGVLUG] Off-topic - home guerrilla solar systems

[Munjal Thakkar]

Forgive me for I'm the youngest one here and don't know as much of
electrical theory as everyone else? but 100watt AC solar system ? I didn't
know they made solar panels (or systems?) that ran on A/C.....
Have you considered using panels to a peak power tracker and batteries to an
inverter? that solution would cost anywhere from $800 to $1,500 for about
two 400 watt (400 watts of course noon peak output) panels and a decently
sized inverter and some batteries, peak power tracker prices range all over
the place. Keep this discussion updated!


On 2/20/07, Dustin Laurence <dustin at laurences.net> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Feb 20, 2007 at 12:25:05AM -0800, David Lawyer wrote:
> >
> > Are you sure that it actually saves energy?  It takes a lot of energy
> > to make solar-voltaics and no one knows how much.  That's partly
> > because we don't know how to account for human energy.  I don't mean
> > just metabolic energy but all the fuel energy to provide food,
> > clothing, shelter, education, and recreation to workers and enable
> > them to reproduce.  It all needs to be sustainable.
>
> Why do I even reply to these things?  I don't know.
>
> I've said this before, but one more time--this obsession of yours with
> human energetic costs is nonsense for the purpose it is applied to,
> energetic costs of goods (this time) or means of transportation (last
> time).  The quantity being calculated is not relevant to that desired.
> Your idea amounts to the assumption that new people are manufactured to
> create solar cells, and therefore must be debited to that account.
> "Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in
> barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more
> valuable than they?"
>
> In fact the people exist, will work at other jobs if not making solar
> cells, will consume roughly the same amount of food no matter which job
> they are in (most of it is to maintain body temperature and feed glucose
> to an energetically ravenous brain).  None of that changes based on
> whether or not someone uses solar cells.  "The Sabbath was made for man,
> and not man for the Sabbath."  In fact solar cells are made for people,
> people are not made for solar cells.
>
> In fact people have an energetic cost and an environmental impact--but
> it has to be credited to a different account.  It is the cost of
> population, independent of what they are doing.  Given the same
> lifestyle, their impact is roughly the same no matter what they do--it
> is their *existence* and lifestyle that cost.  If you count the inherent
> cost of the population, then counting it as part of labor is
> double-counting.  If you do not count the cost of labor, then you are
> fallaciously counting their cost of maintaining body temperature,
> structure maintance and repair, and brain activity as part of the goods
> they produce.  By that logic people who do not work do not impact the
> environment (because the energetic cost of their existence isn't being
> counted toward any good or service).
>
> Since you like to miss the point and get lost in details, I will note
> explicitly that all of the above is true to the accuracy that can be
> achieved in such calculations, and assumes jobs typical of the
> overwhelming majority of the population.  It would not be true of highly
> trained professional athletes, who *can* consume significantly more than
> they would if they were not employed as athletes.  And notice that this
> cost can't be attributed to any good which they produce, as they produce
> no goods (but could be said to provide a service).  It still would not
> apply to amateur athletes as any additional energetic cost is properly
> part of their *lifestyle*, not their job.
>
> For an amusing reductio ad absurdum consider a teenage boy during his
> growth spurt who is part of a paid study on how various TV shows appeal
> to varioud demographics.  He has, in effect, a Saturday job watching
> television.  Your logic would debit the enormous cost of feeding a
> growing teenage to watching television, which is in point of fact just
> about the least energetically costly thing anyone can do.
>
> > It would take many more paragraphs to explain all this and I'm still
> > not sure about some aspects.  Anyone willing to read over my article
> > on this when I get it done?
>
> Absolutely not, unless it says "the energetic costs of human labor are
> not significant for evaluating the environmental impact of goods."
>
> Dustin
>
> --
> The small binary attachment on every message I send is my PGP digital
> signature, not a virus.  If you don't know what that is, you can ignore
> it.
> If you do, my keyserver is pgp.mit.edu.
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.sgvlug.net/pipermail/sgvlug/attachments/20070220/c943694b/attachment.html