DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Our photovoltaic array went online Friday, a day of overcast gray skies and rain. Our shiny new solar electric system produced an underwhelming 5 watts… enough, as a coworker said, to pop a bag full of popcorn, so long as you don’t mind waiting three years.

If you have any control over the timing, I recommend you schedule your PV install for a day without rain, because you’ll want to see your investment go to work immediately. (You probably wouldn’t buy a new car during a hailstorm, either.)

I begin to get a sense of the scope of this project when I think that these panels will be here for the next 30 years, enduring hot summer sun and cold winter squalls repeatedly while everything else about the house, and about our lives, changes underneath. We’ll probably even need to get a new roof at some point in the next 30 years. That will be “interesting,” in the American sense of the word, i.e. “difficult and/or unpleasant.”

The panels are impressively solid-state; they just lie there, stoically, working when they can.

The magic happens in the inverter, which converts generated DC to AC, and which keeps track of the amount of power coming out of the array. Sunday’s peak was just shy of 2kw, enough to spin my electrical meter backwards at an impressive rate.

That was the moment of epiphany: solar power is smart. I’d worked the numbers, read the articles, talked to the salespeople… but once I had a system on my roof, generating electricity from sunlight, I realized that every empty roof is a waste of energy. If there’s enough sunlight falling on my roof on a winter afternoon to power my house and my neighbor’s too, why the heck are we still burning oil for power?

Critics will point to the high initial investment. I find that argument specious. I guess it depends on one’s priorities. Buying energy from the utilities is certainly the easier way to go, but it’s clearly not the cheapest — not in California anyway.

And the environmental issue can’t be argued: solar energy is clean.

Anyway, we’re extremely pleased with ourselves. I will admit to frequent checking of the skies and the inverter and, yes, I enjoy watching my electric meter spin backwards, because frankly I feel like I’m getting away with something.