Cost of Solar Continues to Decrease

[NickW + 2,714]

8 hours ago, KeyboardWarrior said:

Right. So about 5% return annually for this farm without artificial incentives. 

Some figures on revenue from tax credits and carbon credits would be useful. 

Solar in the desert makes much more sense, since power output is 50%  greater and they're not wasting farm ground. If efficiencies could improve we might finally achieve a solar farm with a 10 year breakeven. It's going to be tough to beat combined or allam cycle though. When gas is $3 per million btu these places have a 5 year breakeven. 

Where have you got the 5% ROI from?

The post comments and article are simply about degradation rates of the panels at 0.5% per year. 

[NickW + 2,714]

20 hours ago, Jan van Eck said:

 

What to do with the wood?   The softwood I will mill into thin planks, likely 5/4 or 2-inch, then use them as foundation materials for glueing up onto laminated beams and cross-laminated decking plate.  That gets kitted into 85-foot lengths, as pre-fabricated bridge sections. Glued-up, laminated beams are incredibly strong, and make a direct substitute for steel and concrete.  I will sell those bridges to various States that need to replace their crumbling stuff which they cannot afford to do in steel and cement.  Now the big advantage of laminated wood is that it becomes impervious to being wrecked by road salt.   So the life-span is measured in centuries, not 40 years.   This little factory will end up putting over 400 men at work at decent wages,  plus make me some coin, and rejuvenate a depressed area and market segment.  What's not to like?

      

Very green proposal but how do you propose to preserve that wood? Most softwoods rot rapidly in damp climates. 

[NickW + 2,714]

On 5/1/2020 at 7:30 AM, Jay McKinsey said:

The project is expecting a 35 year life. No reason to think the panels will be failing in 20 years. The other major source of revenue is probably selling carbon offsets as part of the carbon pricing plan. Regardless, it is hard to believe that a $500M investment is being made without some rather solid certainty about an adequate rate of return.

You need to remember that on Oil Price .com the lifespan of all renewables is the length of its warranty - no arguments. It will fail the day the warranty expires😉. 

of course this isn't the case with any other manufactured product in general but on here it applies to renewables. 

Therefore repeat after me:

Wind turbines only last 20 years

Solar panels only last 20 years 

etc

etc

😁

 

[Douglas Buckland + 6,308]

2 hours ago, NickW said:

To be fair to Jay this is the renewables section hence the appropriate place to start such discussions. 

Fair enough....I tend to assume everything these days is under the geopolitical tab.

My apologies to @Jay McKinsey

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

2 hours ago, NickW said:

Very green proposal but how do you propose to preserve that wood? Most softwoods rot rapidly in damp climates. 

Aha!  Clever fellow; you picked right up on that.    Two answers:  (1)  I only sell to the "rust belt."   (2)  The bridges are sold as faux-covered bridges, with a complete weather shed over them.  The shed makes it look for all the world like an old New England covered bridge, except that the upper portion is not carrying any load; it is there to keep the rain and snow off the bridge itself  (which is exactly why they were built as covered bridges hundreds of years ago).  A covered bridge has an effectively indefinite life span.   Further, the beam material is soaked in polyurethane glue, then in polyurethane paint, makes the bridge impervious.  The Upper part is painted as traditional.

Keep in mind that such a sawmill can select its softwoods.  My personal choice is birch, which has natural oils that repel water.  The decking, for example, can be built with birch on the top and bottom layers, and the internal layers of anything else, such as pine or fir. 

The sawmill can provide lots of other products.  One interesting product is "tongue and groove" planking, specifically for use as a sub-layer building material.  Go back about 100 years and homes were built with T&G sub-floors, laid at 45 degrees to the joists.  Using that appraoch, you have thousands of "triangles," which totally resist movement.  You get a really sturdy, squeak-free house.  The T&G aspect acts as a fire flame and smoke barrier, also.   Later on, plywood became the substitute, as it was cheap and fast to lay down and you did not need skilled labor to lay plywood.  And now, US home builders are using "chipboard," a composite material of surplus wood chips soaked in glue and made into sheets, sold dimensionally as plywood but even cheaper.  The problem with cheapening up the house is that instead of a 400-year structure you have a 40-year structure, which at the end of its life span, basically the length of the mortgage, is a candidate for a tear-down. 

The old planked homes you find built out of "wide-board" planks of 12 inches and wider, after 100 years the planks have dried and shrunk and warped, so that you have these large gaps between the boards.  Where there is no sub-floor, the cold from the cellar comes wafting up into the house.  To fix that, you can pull up the planks, lay T&G at 45 degrees and screw that down, then mill the planks to flatten and square, to re-lay.  You end up with a nice tight house that is a pleasure to live in and looks great. with a nice tight floor.  Is there a market for that product?  Of course there is; lots of those old houses out there ready for a re-do, and could be done by a handy home-owner.  As US society becomes poorer  (which it is doing in leaps and bounds today), rebuilding these older houses with warped and sagging floors is a lot cheaper than doing a tear-down.   So, the market is out there, just a question of finding it and supplying it.  But it can be done.  How big is that market?  Probably $6.5 billion.  Always nice.   (And best of all, I can get into that market with only one little sawmill for less than $25,000!) 😀

The point I leave you with is that what will make America great again is not government bureaucrats, which is the approach in say Canada, but private entrepreneurs using imagination and capital.  I point out that this is how America got started in the oil business.  You have that one fellow in Pennsylvania who drilled his first well and started making kerosine for lamp fuel, and set off a huge, huge business.  Entrepreneurs kept finding new uses for the material, and it led to gasoline, originally a waste product.  Money from waste is classically entrepreneurial.  For example, the sawdust from a sawmill is considered "waste."  I have found a machine manufactured in Germany that compresses that sawdust into a solid the shape of a hockey puck.  It makes a great wood-stove fuel!  You can buy a fully automated production machine for about $35,000  (depends on the exchange rate) and go convert all the sawdust lying around, just haul it off and run it through your machine.  If you get paid to remove it then you pick up cash at both ends of the project. Always nice. 😀

I am nobody special in the business department; anybody can do what I do.  Just dream up a new product or a new use for an existing material and go for it, watch the coin roll in.  America; ya gotta love the place.  What a great country!

Edited May 2, 2020 by Jan van Eck

[NickW + 2,714]

21 minutes ago, Jan van Eck said:

Aha!  Clever fellow; you picked right up on that.    Two answers:  (1)  I only sell to the "rust belt."   (2)  The bridges are sold as faux-covered bridges, with a complete weather shed over them.  The shed makes it look for all the world like an old New England covered bridge, except that the upper portion is not carrying any load; it is there to keep the rain and snow off the bridge itself  (which is exactly why they were built as covered bridges hundreds of years ago).  A covered bridge has an effectively indefinite life span.   Further, the beam material is soaked in polyurethane glue, then in polyurethane paint, makes the bridge impervious.  The Upper part is painted as traditional.

Keep in mind that such a sawmill can select its softwoods.  My personal choice is birch, which has natural oils that repel water.  The decking, for example, can be built with birch on the top and bottom layers, and the internal layers of anything else, such as pine or fir. 

Birch is not a softwood, nor is it durable in untreated form. 

Softwoods by definition are gymnosperms - ie confiers and similar species. 

https://www.woodworkersuk.co.uk/timber-durability/

Edited May 2, 2020 by NickW

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

Just now, NickW said:

Birch is not a softwood, nor is it durable in untreated form. 

Softwoods by definition are gymnosperms - ie confiers and similar species. 

OK, OK, but they sell it priced that way in Vermont.   At this point there is no market for the stuff.  Making the market is where it is interesting.  Fine, I will hire a forester to deal with the technical aspects.  Remember, I am a finance guy, not a lumberjack!

[Douglas Buckland + 6,308]

2 minutes ago, NickW said:

Birch is not a softwood, nor is it durable in untreated form. 

Softwoods by definition are gymnosperms - ie confiers and similar species. 

....and balsa wood, don’t forget the balsa wood!😂

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

1 minute ago, Douglas Buckland said:

....and balsa wood, don’t forget the balsa wood!😂

I have a use for that, also.  A special parallel bridge for motorcycles!

[NickW + 2,714]

6 minutes ago, Jan van Eck said:

I have a use for that, also.  A special parallel bridge for motorcycles!

You are forgetting your favourite - wind turbine blades

On that subject - Sweden has just developed large sprucewood laminate WT towers. 

https://www.energylivenews.com/2020/05/01/sweden-launches-its-first-wooden-wind-power-tower/

Get the licence and you can then build these in your mill for Vermont's next generation of wind turbines. 😁

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

2 minutes ago, NickW said:

Get the licence and you can then build these in your mill for Vermont's next generation of wind turbines. 😁

Vermont has now banned wind turbines.  All done, never again. 

[NickW + 2,714]

3 minutes ago, Jan van Eck said:

Vermont has now banned wind turbines.  All done, never again. 

Large scale projects - yes however smaller scale projects supporting on farm / rural industries are still permissible 

No such thing as never again. I'm certain Gov Scott doesn't have the power to make legislation / policy guidance perpetual. 

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

1 minute ago, NickW said:

Large scale projects - yes however smaller scale projects supporting on farm / rural industries are still permissible 

No such thing as never again. I'm certain Gov Scott doesn't have the power to make legislation / policy guidance perpetual. 

The last project that got nixed was for two towers on a guy's farm.  

I suppose you could still figure out a way to pass some small tower, say below 60 feet high.  Vermont has gotten fed up  (and that includes me) with these New York hustlers showing up and installing these big sets of towers on ridgelines in order to milk the Federal subsidies and tax credits.  In order to do that, they heedlessly blast away a road the width of an Interstate to make an access road with a grade of no more than 2.5%.  Those ridgelines are way up there, at say 3,000 feet, so you have this seven-mile road blasted through the mountain just to get the cement trucks and the extended flatebeds with the towers and blades up there.  then you have to move these giant cranes up and down.  the destruction to the fragile mountainside habitat is so massive that Vermonters have revolted.  So, never again.  All done.  And that is a posture that I heartily agree with.  Those machines are monsters, terrifying destroyers, "Imperial Walkers"  straight out of Star Wars.  All so some New Yorker can put eleven million dollars of free cash into his pocket.  A plague on those guys. Poisonous exploitative jerks.

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

9 minutes ago, NickW said:

I'm certain Gov Scott doesn't have the power to make legislation / policy guidance perpetual.

OK, eventually he will leave office.  That said, now in order to install anything like that the developer has to also install a synchronous condenser, and that machine will set him back a quick $25 million.  Makes it financially unattractive. Lots of ways to skin the cat!  😁

[NickW + 2,714]

4 minutes ago, Jan van Eck said:

The last project that got nixed was for two towers on a guy's farm.  

I suppose you could still figure out a way to pass some small tower, say below 60 feet high.  Vermont has gotten fed up  (and that includes me) with these New York hustlers showing up and installing these big sets of towers on ridgelines in order to milk the Federal subsidies and tax credits.  In order to do that, they heedlessly blast away a road the width of an Interstate to make an access road with a grade of no more than 2.5%.  Those ridgelines are way up there, at say 3,000 feet, so you have this seven-mile road blasted through the mountain just to get the cement trucks and the extended flatebeds with the towers and blades up there.  then you have to move these giant cranes up and down.  the destruction to the fragile mountainside habitat is so massive that Vermonters have revolted.  So, never again.  All done.  And that is a posture that I heartily agree with.  Those machines are monsters, terrifying destroyers, "Imperial Walkers"  straight out of Star Wars.  All so some New Yorker can put eleven million dollars of free cash into his pocket.  A plague on those guys. Poisonous exploitative jerks.

I agree with in regard to ridgeline development. In any case the industry has moved on and open plains / offshore will be the new territory for wind due to the turbines getting so much larger. 

However small - medium scale turbines (and other renewable technologies) can be quite supportive to rural industries that are already struggling financially. The power is used directly on site. 

Edited May 2, 2020 by NickW

[NickW + 2,714]

48 minutes ago, Jan van Eck said:

OK, OK, but they sell it priced that way in Vermont.   At this point there is no market for the stuff.  Making the market is where it is interesting.  Fine, I will hire a forester to deal with the technical aspects.  Remember, I am a finance guy, not a lumberjack!

Violin making? Play a tune or two for the Oil Industry? 

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

16 minutes ago, NickW said:

Violin making?

Ha, Ha, Nick!   I recognize that dry Brit humour, remember my wife was British!   Hey, this is rural Vermont, not Austria, we have no violin makers here, none that can consume several million board feet of swamill lumber.   Gotta go where the market is!

And again, dear readers, this is what I emphasize:  what makes America so great is not the deadwood politicians and bureaucrat hacks sucking off the taxpayer cash in Washington, it is the entrepreneurs out in the country, dreaming up new and clever ways to make things.  America is, at its essence, a society of entrepreneurs.  Some are big players, such as Jeff Bezos and his Amazon Corp; some are small players, like me.  But we all "go for it," instead of sitting back and waiting for The Crown to provide. 

Right now, the USA is in a mental pit, a malaise of the mind, rent apart by ideologues  (the worst kind of people).  B ut be of good cheer;  the Americans will pull out of it and march on.  They always do.  It is the essence of the American character, and why I like the place so much. Cheers.

Edited May 2, 2020 by Jan van Eck
typing error

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

4 minutes ago, Jan van Eck said:

what makes America so great is not the deadwood politicians and bureaucrat hacks sucking off the taxpayer cash

To illustrate the mental difference between America and its neighbour Canada, I point to the "emergency non-assembly law" in Ontario, prohibiting gatherings of more than five people.  In Burlington, a tony suburb of Toronto, the locals have been doing "car caravans" and driving around with signs attached to the doors, wishing Happy Birthday to the old folks, that sort of thing.  In response, the Mayor put the kabosh on it all.  To quote: 

The city released a statement on Thursday, citing provincial emergency orders that say people can't gather in groups of more than five.

Vehicle parades are also limited to just a single household or immediate family.

My comment:  nothing like a Canadian bureaucrat to order people around and run  their lives.   Amazing the public puts up with that. Now you can't even sit in your car!  

[NickW + 2,714]

32 minutes ago, Jan van Eck said:

To illustrate the mental difference between America and its neighbour Canada, I point to the "emergency non-assembly law" in Ontario, prohibiting gatherings of more than five people.  In Burlington, a tony suburb of Toronto, the locals have been doing "car caravans" and driving around with signs attached to the doors, wishing Happy Birthday to the old folks, that sort of thing.  In response, the Mayor put the kabosh on it all.  To quote: 

The city released a statement on Thursday, citing provincial emergency orders that say people can't gather in groups of more than five.

Vehicle parades are also limited to just a single household or immediate family.

My comment:  nothing like a Canadian bureaucrat to order people around and run  their lives.   Amazing the public puts up with that. Now you can't even sit in your car!  

Burlington is in the USA or has Trudeau ordered an Invasion?

 

 

[NickW + 2,714]

46 minutes ago, Jan van Eck said:

Ha, Ha, Nick!   I recognize that dry Brit humour, remember my wife was British!   Hey, this is rural Vermont, not Austria, we have no violin makers here, none that can consume several million board feet of swamill lumber.   Gotta go where the market is!

And again, dear readers, this is what I emphasize:  what makes America so great is not the deadwood politicians and bureaucrat hacks sucking off the taxpayer cash in Washington, it is the entrepreneurs out in the country, dreaming up new and clever ways to make things.  America is, at its essence, a society of entrepreneurs.  Some are big players, such as Jeff Bezos and his Amazon Corp; some are small players, like me.  But we all "go for it," instead of sitting back and waiting for The Crown to provide. 

Right now, the USA is in a mental pit, a malaise of the mind, rent apart by ideologues  (the worst kind of people).  B ut be of good cheer;  the Americans will pull out of it and march on.  They always do.  It is the essence of the American character, and why I like the place so much. Cheers.

Plywood. My preference sheet material every time over the Devils excrement - chipboard*

That said I boarded my loft with a load I bought 2nd hand from a warehousing company. Extra thick and 1/3rd the price of what id pay at the lumber yard. 

[NickW + 2,714]

4 hours ago, Jan van Eck said:

Aha!  Clever fellow; you picked right up on that.    Two answers:  (1)  I only sell to the "rust belt."   (2)  The bridges are sold as faux-covered bridges, with a complete weather shed over them. 

On the subject of projects (real ones) I used the Easter week we should have been in Madeira to install this. So far we had an 11 day stretch in April with no gas used - all our water from the solar. Today we should be gas free after a couple of days of rainy weather. 

ROI 13.93% gross (tax free) per annum. My labour was free but then I would have only wasted it chatting on OP.COM and all that ladder work good for a bit of exercise!

 

[KeyboardWarrior + 527]

8 hours ago, NickW said:

Where have you got the 5% ROI from?

The post comments and article are simply about degradation rates of the panels at 0.5% per year. 

Just demonstrating that these systems still have no rational basis in reality. 

Edited May 2, 2020 by KeyboardWarrior

[NickW + 2,714]

1 hour ago, KeyboardWarrior said:

Just demonstrating that these systems still have no rational basis in reality. 

With a figure you made up? 

[footeab@yahoo.com + 2,190]

3 hours ago, NickW said:

On the subject of projects (real ones) I used the Easter week we should have been in Madeira to install this. So far we had an 11 day stretch in April with no gas used - all our water from the solar. Today we should be gas free after a couple of days of rainy weather. 

ROI 13.93% gross (tax free) per annum. My labour was free but then I would have only wasted it chatting on OP.COM and all that ladder work good for a bit of exercise!

 

Put a 3rd & 4th one up ASAP.  For those winter heating bills which is where most of our energy goes when we live up north. 

[NickW + 2,714]

Just now, footeab@yahoo.com said:

Put a 3rd & 4th one up ASAP.  For those winter heating bills which is where most of our energy goes when we live up north. 

I already have a heat dump in the loft which has activated a few times . I don't want the tank above 65 degrees C for safety reasons and also you get rapid scaling above that. More panels would mean more heat to dump in the summer months

Better to shell out the money on other items

1. New condensing boiler being delivered on Monday

2. When COVID lockdown over  over Cavity walls being insulated