Solar Power over natural gas?

Question

Here are the numbers, more detail below.

Natural Gas: 6,000 $ / month (average) @ 0.85 - 1.00$ ccf

Going up 20% next year.

In short, is it worth it...

So my dad owns a small business and is using gas to heat a swimming pool and general heating. He wants to switch to solar power and electric heat.

I just graduated as a chemical engineer and most of my profs were pretty green, but they said no business actually willingly switches to solar......Its more that they are gonna get fined if they don't and the cost of solar panels are cheaper than the fine.

Winter months the cost is about $10,000 / month

We're in central PA, rains more than Seattle (i'm told they are the standard of extreme rain in U.S.).

Had a gentleman's bet with someone....he said there wouldn't be more than 15 cloud-free days in a year....he won.

It does snow.....up to 4 inches in one day, business stay open.

Answer 1

At the moment, with today's technology, it costs more to produce a solar cell, in terms of energy and resources, than it will ever produce in its useful lifetime of about 15 years. That is, you will never recoup the cost of the initial outlay. Here in Australia, with a lot of cloud-free days, it costs about $10,000 to put on Solar power for an average house. This will cover about half of your electricity usage. But you still need to pay a supply charge for the electricity to be connected, so really, only about one quarter  of the costs are covered, so the saving amounts to about $500 per year, saving about $8000 over 15 years.

I don't know what the supply charges, as opposed to the per unit usage charges are in PA, but this must be taken into account, as you will still be paying them.

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Answer 2

call a repair guy

Answer 3

Solar electricity is terribly inefficient, and I hate to say that.  You don't go that route unless there's no other options.  PV's are extremely expensive and only convert around 11% of the sun's energy into electricity and rest turns into wasted heat.  If just a single cell on a panel gets covered in shade (leaf, or other object) the whole panels efficiency drops 50%!  

As stated above, a PV panel only converts 11% to electricity and 89% into heat well, it goes without saying sunlight converts to heat very well!!!  And that's where the savings happens.  Instead of a Solar panel that converts sunlight to electricity, a solar panel that converts sunlight into heated hot water (that's to say a panel with copper tubes passing water or glycol through it) is 60-95% efficient at turning the suns energy into heated hot water and, they're cheap!  You'd need eight or nine 4x8 PV panels to make enough electricity to heat up water as well as a single 4x8 panel!  

The larger the amount of water you want to heat and the lower temperatures you want to heat them to, the more efficient solar water heating is.  What has huge amounts of water that you don't want to heat to high temps like 120F?  Pools!!!  A pool solar hot water heating system is over 90% efficient.  The link in my source says there's enough sunlight per year to rate central PA as "Good".  

I'd look at solar hot water pool heating systems.  The panels that will work in winter you'll need ones that are insulated & glazed and running glycol.  As in the kind typically used in houses for their solar heating all year round.  This site http://www.radiantsolar.com/solar_packag... has pricing for $10,198 but I calculate it will cost about $8,700 after you remove the storage tank, scalding valve, and Thermostatic slab control and you'll then have to add in freight and an exchanger... which you can contact that company or someone else if you like on how to exhange the heat from the panels and put it into your pool.  It's more bang for buck if you can fit bigger panels, if you can get eight 4x10 panels instead of ten 4x8's do it.  Also since panels are cheap I'd add as many as you can.  The price quote above is just the equipment, if you can install it yourself go right ahead but each panel weighs about 120 for a 4x8 and about 140 lbs for a 4x10 empty.  In winter, sunlight energy is about 1/3rd that of summer.  If you won't be installing it yourselves factor in labor.  I think solar hot water heating will pay for itself in savings.

Answer 4

Call a contractor, most will charge very little if anything for an estimate.

But is sounds like big bucks, and you may not have enough area, even for those few sunny days. Then on cloudy days you will need to pull power from the electric company, and you may wind up paying more to the electric company then you did to the gas company, even after you add all the solar panels.

Perhaps you should look into solar arrays as a supplement to the natural gas.

Also look into geothermal. Do you already have a well? That makes it easier.

Bottom line: You will spend lots of $$ to add the solar arrays and wind up paying more in monthly charges for electricity on cloudy days.