January 2011 power generation (edited)

Wow, I have to recheck this when I get home, but I'm pretty sure the meter said I'd generated a total of 12.3mWh. That'd only be 100kWh generated this last month. I know I'm not generating much because my meter keeps going up, but damn I was hoping it was more than that.

I was generating 100W this morning when I left. Doesn't seem like much, but it's only 1.5 hours after sunrise AND there was 4" of snow on the panels. Now that's impressive.

I re-checked this later and it was 12.8MWhs not 12.3MWhs. That's much more reasonable.

December 2010 solar generation

500 kwhs this month. Should be the lowest month each year both because of the tilt of the planet and because December is generally kind of cloudy here. Still quite respectable. 12.2 MWHs generated total this year, and I'm pretty sure I'll never have to pay for electricity again. I generated 110kwhs more this december than I did last december, possibly because I managed to get the tree cut back. It's still not cut back far enough, but to do that I'd pretty much have to top it and cut it down. I really don't want to have to cut down my tree, and it doesn't obscure more than a panel at a time in the winter, so I think I'll leave it.

May 2010 power generation and some solar data

5.9mwhs total so far. Max generated was 7750 although I'm really wondering about that, because I've never seen that large of a number on the monitor and I've seen it at noon on some pretty clear days. Who knows though. I only generated 1170kwh last month. That seems much too low. I wish I had the money to put a good monitor on the system.

So some things about solar panels that weren't clear to me initially:
When the grid power is out, the power to your house is out regardless of what the solar panels could be generating. The stated reason for this is for the safety of work crews as the house could be putting power into a grid that is believed to be dead and a worker could accidentally electrocute themselves. This is blatantly bullshit since no assumption of that sort should ever be made by professionals. In addition, it would be a trivial tech solution to make it so that power didn't leave the house if power wasn't coming form the grid. It is, in fact, one of the simplest electronic gates made.

Another is that I'm not allowed to have any sort of storage device because then I wouldn't be generating enough electricity for the grid to make up for what they paid for my installation. Really the reason is that they want to be able to charge me for some power when it's dark. See they charge more than they pay. Maybe someday I'll be able to buy my way out of the contract and install a nice big whole house UPS. It'd be great to get one of the new power cell UPS systems that uses the new catalyst to make it more efficient to store power in water.

April 2010 solar generation

Total on the meter is 4.73Mwh for a total of 1.07mwh I generated this month. Since I didn't use any more than I generated last month, and the meter has been rolling back slowly all month, I'm sure I generated much more than I used. This is awesome.

Another goal reached! 0 total electricity used from the grid!

I generated more electricity than I used this month. That's much earlier in the year than I expected that to happen. This is a big goal, finally generating more than I'm using, and what I am using is supposed to be from wind sources, although I know that's at least partially bullshit. And once I've had a chance to do some more insulating and whatnot, I should generate more than I use all but 2 or 3 months out of the year except on the coldest winters. Woohoo!

This is how my brain works though....I have signed up for, and pay a premium for, electricity that is 100% generated by wind. But I pull from the grid just like everybody else, so the likelihood of the electrons I'm pulling actually coming from a wind source are pretty minimal since it's all mixed in with the much more predominate source of coal. Well fine, as long as wind is generating sufficient power to cover my usage, it's at least in the system so I'm helping cut down on the amount that has to be generated by coal by subsidizing the wind sources. Except I have no way of knowing that, and I'm positive that Xcel would gladly double dip on anything they thought they could get away with. So while I know they have a shitload of turbines around here, and I have heard they generate a lot of wind energy, there is no real way for me to know if my needs are covered by that source or not. For all I know there are 2000 of us all slotted for that one allotment of wind generated energy, all paying the premium for it, but since it can't really be separated out of the general grid, we're all double booked for it.

But now...now I know where the majority of my electricity is generated. Right on top of my own fucking house, that's where. And if I had the money, I'd buy one of those Phillips house grade UPSs and install that fucker and know that every bit of the electricity I used I generated without ever touching any of Xcels energy. But...I'd have to pay my way out of the contract with Xcel to do that...so it'd cost me something like $23,000 on top of the cost of the UPS and the installation.

So...we'll save that for a day shortly after I win the powerball. Which I don't play, because I understand math too well.

February Solar generation

Generated another 630 kwh this month for a total of 2.66gwh. Surprisingly the maximum has also gone up, not only wouldn't I have expected that in February, but it went up to 7460 which is quite a bit above the 6.72 for which the system is rated. I'm not sure what that means, but I'm damned glad it's working as well as it is.

11/7/09-12/7/09 power generated

510 KWH, still haven't passed the max generated amount of 6686W, but that's not surprising. In theory, I'll generate about the same amount from 12/7/09-1/7/09 as I did this month, because I have the trees cut back more and intend to cut them back further on 12/21/09 which should be the day the most branches shade the roof as the day the sun is lowest in the sky. All of course depending on me keeping the snow off the roof. I need to go buy some implements to make that easier.

I'm missing a lot of statistics here, just getting the bare minimum because otherwise I'd have to take the readings daily just before sundown and I can't reasonably do that. I really wish REC had included a monitor with this system like I asked, even if I had to pay for it. I tried several times to get a monitor put in, but it failed.

So far I've generated 1.13MWH of electricity in 2 months during the winter. I can't wait to see what it generates during the summer.