Solar Power

I’ve often wanted to try out solar power to offset electricity consumption, but prices and the power output of these systems makes it impractical. Recently, prices have dropped, solar panels have become more efficient and home “plug-and-play” kits are becoming available. For the most part, solar power is still in the realm of environmental enthusiasts and eco-hippies, but I think that it will become more and more mainstream in a few years. Here are a few interesting sites, some informative, some offering commecial products

After a quick, non-scientific survey of the internet, the four most common manufacturers that I see listed for photovoltaic solar panels are Sharp, Shell, Kyocera and Xantrex. I’m not trying to be biased, so please comment if you’d like to list other companies. The panels aren’t the major cost, however. It seems that storage batteries, inverters, and the power control system makes up most of the cost. For a (nearly) self-reliant system, you probably need about 3 kW per household. A complete system will run between $10k and $20k.
For the full fledged solar enthusiast, the decision will be whether to go completely “off-grid” and rely solely on solar power with battery storage or “grid-tie” (with or without battery backup) and essentially sell power back to the electric company. At the moment it’s not clear to me how selling power works in Canada (or more specifically, Toronto), but the principle is that the hydro meter would run backwards when your power consumption is smaller than your power generation (e.g. during the day).
Solar power makes a lot of sense at the residential level. For the most part roof tops are under-utilized space, so adding solar panels doesn’t take up a lot of useful real-estate. Secondly, most people are out of the house during the day when solar energy could be collected and stored in batteries for evening use.
I think that I will try to get my hands on a small system (maybe a 100-200 W solar panel) to try things out.