Lindsay books catalog has a nice pamphlet on how you can make your own solar cells. I can't say whether the energy you extract over its life exceeds the energy to manufacture a cell. But even if that is the case it could still be an approach - consuming cheap energy today to build the cells, then having energy available at no additional cost, to use or sell during a 'Max Max' future when the prevailing prices are apocalyptically extortionate.
http://www.lindsaybks.com/bks3/solar/index.html - GLL Original Message: ----------------- From: Michael Robinson [email protected] Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:02:17 -0700 To: [email protected] Subject: [PLUG] Do it yourself solar... Since I'm looking at building a do it yourself UPS, I figured I ought to look into a do it yourself solar power system as well. Well, I can't find any Portland businesses to buy panels from at a reasonable hobbyist price. Even at $6/watt, panels are awfully expensive. The best I can get a grid tie inverter for is $299 and that's only a 250 watt inverter off of Ebay. Batteries only get you so far. Can anyone build a solar system that can provide 250 watts for say a single server for significantly less than $1k? How about a wind mill? Any other options? To get 250 watts worth of panels I'm looking at $1.2k alone and getting only a fraction of the power most of the time. Anyways, I'm curious. Are there any incentives in Oregon for people who buy solar panels to address the cost issue? So I'm back to getting a non grid tie inverter and somehow managing to program a PIC microcontroller to monitor the battery and report to the Linux server. I guess I'll have to design a circuit to charge the battery and monitor the AC line for outages, spikes, and brownout conditions. With sliver solar panels and other emerging technologies, one would expect that solar panels would be a lot cheaper by now than they were even a year ago. I guess that just isn't the case. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web.com What can On Demand Business Solutions do for you? http://link.mail2web.com/Business/SharePoint _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
