My solar installation

With the introduction I've now given to some nitty gritty solar cell details, I expect you're breathlessly waiting to see my own personal solar installation at home. So I've included a photo of my somewhat funky looking house. In the pic you'll notice the more or less red clay tiles on the roof and the gray-white asbestos "eternit" tiles that make up the siding of the house. Not visible, of course, is the insulation in the walls, which is nearly non-existant in my 1910 house. Also not visible are the solar panels. That's s right - I don't have any! Despite a 25+ year career making a better solar cell, I have never actually owned my own. It's not for lack of interest - solar cell research has always been a passion and never just a job. I suppose I could blame it partly on my nomadic lifestyle, always expecting to pick up and move to some new town, some new country. But that's not a good reason. I've actually been in Sweden for 10 years and before that in Bologna, Italy for 11.

Another reason would seem to be that I live in Sweden, SWEDEN!! Solar in Sweden?? But the reality is that Sweden gets about 30% as much of the sun's energy as does Sahara, even if it does mostly arrive in those incredibly long summer days. Being fairly certain that the lack of solar panels isn't entirely due to my love of procrastination, I'd say that the reason (blame) lies elsewhere. Ultimately I'm just another solar inspired consumer looking for market incentives and a reasonable payback time to buy and install a system. And for this, Sweden is not another Germany or Japan or even the U.S. where solar incentives abound.

So what do these countries, Germany in particular, offer that Sweden doesn't? The list is long, but the one that's most important is the ability of the home energy producer to sell energy back to "the grid". To date, Swedish power companies are not required to buy any electricity from their wanna-be-suppliers aka customers and some have even issued declarations to indicate they will refuse any such requests. Not good news for the poor home producer whose solar installation merrily provides electricity for free all day long to the power companies, and, who, on returning home in the evening from a day's work at the office, discovers the need to buy electricity from the same power company because the sun is low or gone. This is the current situation in Sweden. Talk about a disincentive! And while the occasional political mumble has been heard to address this issue, so far it's been about as effective as a horse's snort. On an aside, I might say the horses have made more headway, having recently snorted effectively about their rights to socialize such that it is now written into law that they must have the company of at least one other horse.

However, the power companies have started to acquiesce: they will now buy electricity once a number of prohibitely expensive conditions have been met and the electricity producer makes enough noise about it. In a report issued by Elforsk http://www.elforsk.se/solel/ (in Swedish, of course!), an organization that researches electricity issues and is owned by the governmentally owned Svenska Kraftnät http://www.svk.se/, the company that controls Swedish electricity (phew, that was a long intro), it would require about 45 square meters of solar panels to reach "break even". The costs involve metering measurements and reporting - one of the requirements is that energy production be reported hourly!

Well, let's see - back to my solar installation. The roof of my house in the pic is facing west - I'd better choose one of my sheds that has both southern exposure and isn't shaded. A quick measurement reveals that the shed in the picture - it once was the goat house under a former owner - has a roof length of 8 meters and is about 3 meters wide. Covering it entirely, that would give me 24 square meters, or about half the area needed for break even. So I can forget about selling electricity! And, darn it, I'm not at home during the day when the electricity is being produced, thus leaving me no choice but to give it away for free or to sell it at a loss. I could, of course, get very expensive batteries to store it, but that defeats the whole purpose or being grid connected. Or I could get inventive about consuming electricity while not at home. Hmmm... maybe I could get an electric car, which is expensive, leave it at home to charge during the day, then drive around with it all night. Or not.