David in Spain

On Monday the weather was blizzard conditions and since then we have had no electric, no phones and no internet. There is a possibility that the electric might come back today but I will not be holding my breath waiting.

It is amazing how much we depend on the electric. My neighbour was lucky enough to have a generator available but for the rest of us mere mortals we have to survive on batteries. I do have an inverter but it just gives me light to be able to see where I am going in the evening and to be able to read without messing up my eyes.

The news said there were about 30 or 40 pylons blown down with the wind on Monday. I think it will take ages to get back to the way things were before. If I had internet through the phone line then I could have internet before that but mine comes in through Wimax and that needs the electric power to work.

I have had an interest in solar electric power generation for some time and I am quite keen to actually do something about it. I had looked before and it seemed that you had to buy big expensive batteries to be able to store the power for use later on. Now that is a great thing if you are then disconnect from the grid totally. But it looks so much easier to use a grid tie system.
With a grid tie system you can feed the power back into the system that you generate over capacity and it is possible to get a contract to sell it to the power company.It looks like we use about 16 kWh of electric per day and I wonder how much I could generate with a couple of panels.

Little by little
What would be nice is to able to start with a couple of panels and add to them as time goes by using the savings off the electric bill to buy new panels. I wonder how long it would take to pay back the initial investment. I wonder if it could be a money making scheme in the long run. Super idea to have the sun working for us, and being here in Spain there is no shortage of sun for much of the year.

Time for me to break out the calculator and look for some prices for some panels and a Grid tie unit. More on the subject when I have some numbers worked out. The Electric bill is between 80 and 90 Euro per month so that is the maximum that a solar electric system can save until you get to the point where the output is more than the input. It is unlikely that the first system in place could do much more than save 30-40% off the bill. If it saved a 3rd off thats only about 30 euro going towards paying back the investment. If 900 was spent initially it would take 30 months to recoup the outlay. It really is a long term project.

There is a solar power farm near here, it is on the road to the Girona Airport, there are hundreds of solar panels. It must have cost a fortune to set it all up.

Back to to the number crunching….