The most effective way to reduce your energy bills is to build your new house with the correct orientation. So invest a little more and hire an architect next time and they will also take care of everything else to ensure your house is green
I notice no mention of the cost of building the power plant. According to this site
nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeCostOfNuclearPower
Current nuclear plants are costing around US$3500 per KW to build despite optimistic forecasts, which means the solar setup isn't actually doing to badly for the government on these 4KW systems, especially if you factor in the amount of power lost during transmission over the grid. (and how much does the grid cost to maintain?)
Anyhoo, this argument could go on and on. 
) our panels make about 1-2kwh!
I just looked at it for the block of flats we live in. There are four flats and 3 out of 4 are owner occupied.
My idea was for each of us to have a 1.5 kw system and to run them all through the house power. The strata would pay and benefit from it and as all flat owners own the strata and pay the levies we would benefit from power generated.
An installer advised me this cannot be done as a subsidy can only be claimed per electricity meter and residence. He advised we could go for a 10 kw system for about $50K or a 6kw system for about $30K. Four individual 1.5kw systems would cost about $6000 each after subsidy.
Bit of a pity as it would have been quite efficient to have one inverter and meter for four dwellings.
dirty harry, yeah I guess you're right re; taxpayer's dollars, but in the scheme of things, we pay for so much now with our tax dollars, this is a way that I can re-coup some of that coin...and at least it's going toward a god cause (not just talking about reducing my solar bill either), reducing fossil fuel usage, research into green energy etc. which IMO is better than the billions of dollars that are wasted on other expenses the government see fit to use our taxes for.
our WA power stations may be selling it for 2c , which would help to explain why Griffin went bust.
I think of it this way. the infrastructure to supply Kalgoorlie. and probably WA is already unable to do so. . building more giant power stations isnt working environmentally. so why do we keep doing it?.
The figure Ive been told is that a 1km2 solar farm here in Kal could mean that for part of each day we could be sending power back down the 700km line to Muja, and it would fit on the rooftops of the houses!
Yet we dont do it because the state is too busy thinking till the next election , rather than the next century .A couple of christmases ago the Govt gave every body a handout to the tune of $8.4B? to help boost the economy. imagine if that had been used to reopen a solar panel factory to produce parts that then get stuck on suitable roofs all over the country. apart from making people more aware of the power they consume, it might have even saved even more billions on building more power stations
Pweedas, its a bit rich to be comparing a small distributed solar system to the economics of a coal or nuclear station 500,000 x bigger. (Anyway those calcs are a wee bit low..standardised prices are more like 4c US coal, 6c US nuclear..however huge deviations in nuclear where build costs can and do double..also the cost of government indemnity insurance is not included which would effectively kill the economics of nuclear..not one state in the world has a nuclear power industry without heavy government support)
A. A household does not have access to the wholesale electrcity market and so the cost of power is significantly higher than that which u can buy from large centralized power station. Maybe 75% of retail price of power is transmission and distribution.
B. Not all power is created equal, and there is a place for many different types of generation..How much do you think peaking gas stations cost to run? Solar correlates extremely well with peak demand in Australia (according to some Californian studies with similar climate; between 60-75%).. In the WA market this fact could mean $150/kW/year if they decided to treat small-scale embedded generation fairly..
The notion that the stability of the grid requires dispatchable fossil (or nuclear) generation is the domain of the dinosaurs. Do you know that half of all outages from large coal stations in the US are unplanned.. (about 7% of the time or 600hrs a year), what do you think a sudden loss of 500,000-1000,000kW does to the grid?
Yet the grid goes on because it has been designed to cope with the loss of these colossal relics. An intermittent resource..even big bad unpredictable wind is a blip on the radar when they experience a 20%..even 50% loss in power to a wind farm..particularly with decent forecasting. Somehow those clever Danes manage to have 20% wind integration despite its unreliability..at a cost to the network less than what Australian networks charge for 2%!
Or somehow believe that running a power station at one speed suits the demand profile better, the problem with integrating more renewables in is that these old fossils are so intractable in terms of output that you can't switch them off when using wind is cheaper!! True story look it up. In NZ the company I work for has wee switching devices to automatically cut power to processes when frequency drops because of power station outages..its called Demand-side management, and hardly rocket science.
There is my rant!! Think outside of the box rather than devoting all energy to remaining within it..you might be surprised about what you find. Kudos to those people who've put those lovely shiny things on your roof. It's helped to build an industry, and force networks into thinking about it too.
) or we initiate a changeover to a power source which can reliably provide that sort of energy output without gassing the planet with its exhaust.
This puts a different perspective on nuclear.
Hybrid fusion, a blend of fission and fusion, sounds promising.
www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527505-900-hybrid-fusion-the-third-nuclear-option/?ignored=irrelevant
In the mean time, go solar and get the Gov green loan if you qualify of course, I just got a new job and will be doing it.
GT
