First two weeks of solar power

Wet solar panels are not the most
productive solar panels

I was going to write this after one week, but time kept passing. We've now had solar panels on our roof for 15 whole days.

April has been extremely variable so far. We've had very bright times and also heavy rain and hail. Temperatures in the morning have been low enough for there to be a fairly heavy frost on some days.

The peak recorded output of the system so far is 3994 W, and most days a figure very near this is reached at some point or another. However, output can dip as low as 100 W during an otherwise sunny afternoon if the weather turns bad. This has happened quite often, and these two weeks have been far from optimal for generating solar electricity.

Over the last 15 days, our system has generated a total of 178 kWh. Our consumption over this period days was just 139 kWh so we've contributed 39 kWh to the grid. However, last year we consumed a total of 4048 kWh. This works out as 11 kWh per day, or 166 kWh over an average 15 day period. When viewed against this average, our excess is far smaller.

A day later, production was at 191 kWh

The figures for last year's consumption were what we used as a target when deciding on the capacity of our system. We benefit from the retail price of electricity (in our case about 18 cents per kWh) for any amount that we generate up to our own usage but can expect a far lower benefit for each excess kWh that we generate.

Our expectation is that in the summer, with consistently better weather, we'll generate more, but in the winter with worse weather we'll generate considerably less.

It's too early yet to say how well the system will work through the entire year, but performance so far does seem to be roughly in line with expectations. If electricity prices do not vary and we generate exactly the same amount of electricity as we consume then the system will pay for itself in just over 11 years. Any increase in the price of electricity makes the payback period shorter, and as soon as the system has paid for itself we're effectively on free of charge electricity for as long as it lasts.

This is part of our pension, and in essence, we have used it to make a bet that energy prices will increase. I'm not normally a betting man, but I like the odds for this.

Read more about our system.

We now have our own solar power

I've had an interest in solar power for many years. There's a cost in both money and environmental damage in building the equipment, but once installed it's clean, green and gives free energy. It has been obvious to me for some time that the sums add up well for PV, and others have also shown that the best alternative to fossil fuels which currently exists is electricity from photovoltaic panels.

For over twenty years I've had small PV systems powering things in the garage and/or garden shed. Since we've lived in the Netherlands, I have had a 12 V panel on the top of the garage which runs a radio and light and little else. This, like previous efforts, is a hobby, not a serious attempt to power anything. However, now that the cost of installation of a serious system has fallen so much, I felt it was now time to get serious.


After a period of subsidies coming and going, and this rather screwing up the market for home PV installations, there are no subsidies available at the moment. However, the price has stabilized at a reasonable figure. We paid just over €8000 our system, and this should pay for itself in about 10 years - even if electricity prices don't increase. Prices are far more likely to increase than decrease, so the pay-back period could well be better than ten years.

The system that we've had installed consists of 16 ET-P660235 235 W panels from ET-Solar connected in two strings of eight each into a Power-One Aurora PVI-4.2 inverter. This gives a rated output of about 3600 W when the sun is shining directly onto the panels on a sunny day. Overcast days will of course produce less electricity. The panels are guaranteed to have over 90% of this output after 10 years and over 80% after 25 years.

We consumed just over 4000 kWh last year. That's quite a lot, but it's explained in part by our working from home and having two teenagers living at home. Our PV system's expected output is a little lower than this, but we could fit not more panels onto our roof. If we are to avoid paying for electricity, then we will have to reduce our consumption to match our generation.

I'll blog further about how successful the system is in reality. At the time of writing, it's been in operation for under 24 hours.

Our system was installed by EnergieWonen in Almere. If you contact them for a quote, tell them that I sent you in their direction.

The first panel being lifted onto the roof

Fitting of the first panel

They're big. Each is about 8x the area of the small panel on the roof of our garage.

Fitting of second panel

All sixteen on the roof.

Read more about our solar power system including a summary of its effectiveness after the first year.

Digital "Lomography"

A few days ago I came across an old camera that has been sitting in a draw for some years. It's a low quality 1.3 M pixel camera, the Packard Bell DSC-3. We were given it by a friend many years ago so that one of my daughters could play with it, and I'd remembered that some of the photos she came back with had a certain something.

There's no getting away from the fact that this is a primitive digital camera. The LCD screen on the back tells you the status of the battery and how many shots you have left on the compact flash card that it uses for storage, but it does not display a preview of your photos, or let you view your photos after you've made them.

The only way of composing your photos is to use the viewfinder, or "shoot from the hip".

Furthermore, there is no zoom lens and it's fixed focus. There's a mechanical lever on the side which changes the focal length for close-ups, and apart from that it's focused at quite a long distance. It doesn't make very good photos of people as they need to be quite a long way away to be in focus.

However, the photos that it makes have a certain something:

Packard Bell DSC-3 ignored the trees.
And actually, the sky really was blue,
not purple as on the left.

Sensible Olympus compact camera focused on
the trees

Sensible Olympus

Packard Bell gives everything an etched
appearance as if it has been processed outside
of the camera

Rain-drops in focus, a grim view of
the world. A fairly accurate depiction
of the weather for the Noordelijke
elomobieltocht 2012 (which was
otherwise very enjoyable)

The rest of the world in focus, and the weather just doesn't
look quite so bad from the view of the DSC-3.

Judy walks our dog. A dull day somehow transformed.

Hello tree. I like the way the fixed focus worked here.

So, will I use this camera for all my photography from now on ? Of course not. It's flawed. Sometimes hopelessly so.

Sometimes the Packard Bell camera
completely loses the plot and produces
photos like this one

You can forget about taking photos with low light with this camera as the amount of noise quickly becomes intrusive.

There are lots of photos that you can't get with a camera like this, as you can never be sure what it will do in any particular situation.

However, when it "works" it does occasionally produce rather pleasing results, so I will use it sometimes.

Yes, I know that "lomography" refers to a particular type of film camera. However, this sort of primitive digital camera endorses a motto of "Don't Think, Just Shoot" just as much as a real LOMO.

It's that ecological footprint time of year...

Today I was pointed towards a website which calculates ecological footprints (link removed because it's no longer what it was). Many people reflect on their life at this time of year, and I suppose that looking at your impact on the planet is a way of reflecting.

The website claims that my carbon footprint is 0.78 earths, which I suppose indicates a relatively sustainable level of consumption.

Being vegan, using motorized transport of all types as little as possible, keeping the thermostat in our home at a relatively low level in winter, not making long distance journeys around the world, making things last and fixing things which go wrong rather than always "updating" equipment all genuinely help to keep the footprint down, and it is likely that our footprint is lower than that of some of our neighbours

Of course, to give an exact figure of "0.78 earths" is actually nonsense. The vagueness of the questions asked means that results are not far from being completely meaningless. Accurately measuring an individual's consumption would take a lot more than a few questions on a website. Besides, like everyone else we consume some amount of fossil fuel both directly and indirectly. There is no truly sustainable level of consumption of a limited resource. What's "ecological" about using up a limited resource, even if we do so relatively frugally ?

I always approach these sorts of things with a bit of caution as you have to ask what the people behind them are trying to achieve. "Follow the money". Sometimes people who take part in such surveys report their calculated impact as something to be proud of, but I don't think they should. Websites are not always what they seem.

In this case, the website is sponsored by a range of different companies including Coca Cola and a construction company whose "Latest News" on their own website concerns a contract for exploitation of oil sands. Do they really have our best interests at heart ? Do they really want us to consume fewer processed foods and less oil or could this be "greenwashing" ?

This website, like others of its ilk, gives "carbon offsetting" as a partial solution. It's nothing of the sort. Carbon offsetting has become a business in its own right. Airlines sometimes give customers an option to "offset" their journeys by paying a little extra when they buy tickets. However, carbon offsetting is a con. It's merely a salve to the conscience. It allows consumers to continue to consume while feeling good about it. However, fundamentally, "offsetting" is a nonsense because it doesn't even attempt to solve the problem that is being created. Buying carbon offsets from an airline does not create more jet fuel. You can't put oil back under the ground by planting a tree.

If you want to do good, then by all means plant trees. Also do please support schemes to give people in the third world more efficient stoves, and make the choice of using renewable energy. These are all good things to do. However, don't imagine that any of these things gives you a right to burn fossil fuels or makes any difference to the impact that you make by doing so.

There is only one way to reduce your impact and that is to reduce how much you consume. Walk or cycle as much as you want, but use motorized transport as little as possible. It's not so much the mode of transport but the distance that you travel which is important. Buy reliable products, look after them and keep them working as long as possible. Don't replace things which still work, don't buy things you don't need. Don't let "fashion" convince you to replace your existing clothes, computer or telephone. Avoid buying products with non-replaceable batteries. Learn to repair things yourself. Insulate your home and keep your thermostat set low in the winter (we only increase ours to 18 C in the evening). Eat responsibly (a vegan diet reduces impact considerably).

Petition to make Dutch schools websites work for everyone

I'm very pleased to find out today that there is a petition against the hopeless software that increasing numbers of Dutch schools use to show students their results and to keep parents in touch with what the students are doing.

The Magister website is really very simple and could have been implemented entirely with open standards software, in which case it would simply have worked for everyone. However, someone made the rather stupid decision to use Microsoft's Silverlight, and as a result it simply doesn't work on any of our computers, or those of thousands of other parents. Even if you run Windows there is no guarantee that this thing will work because its dependent on particular versions of software which you may not have, and will probably require an expensive upgrade to access information which should be free to all. This has caused us any amount of grief.

It is high time that websites like this which all parents and students are supposed to have equal access to, actually did give all parents and students equal access.

More information here:
http://www.janstedehouder.nl/2011/09/28/make-the-use-of-open-standards-in-education-mandatory/

And on Slashdot:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/10/01/0013203/battle-for-open-standards-in-dutch-public-education

Peacetime uses of Atomic Energy

Back in the late 1980s I worked for a computer company in South London. One weekend I went into the public library in Bromley and found this splendid book on "Atomic Energy" was being discarded, so I paid 50 pence and took it home with me.

Martin Mann's "Peacetime uses of Atomic Energy" was first published in 1957. Mine is a "revised and enlarged" edition from 1961, is a time-capsule. It shows a remarkably positive attitude to all aspects of nuclear power.

The first few words of the introduction in this book make a great start: "Somehow, a great many people still think of atomic energy as solely a military weapon. Yet this is not so. The fact that books like this one can be written without any references at all to weapons is one indication of atomic energy's usefulness in ordinary, peaceable pursuits".

It could be said that he's already, in those first few sentences, managed to mention the unmentionable. However, this is of course one of the many problems with nuclear power. It is forever linked with nuclear weaponry.

A few pages later, the book includes a photo of the then new Chapelcross nuclear power station in Scotland, it refers to this as simply "one of the many atomic power plants now being built in Britain", while making no mention that this particular station was always intended to produce plutonium and tritium for nuclear weapons as well as electricity.

That is the reason why this supposedly civilian facility also had an on-site processing plant run by the Ministry of Defence.

But we'll carry on. There's lot more to see.

The book attempts to look unbiased. In fact, it also includes the concerns of experts such as these:

What we have here is someone trying very hard to convince us that there is no danger at all of anything ever going wrong. Experts at "government laboratories" have "proved the BWR safe". Recent events at Fukushima demonstrate, of course, that things certainly can go wrong with boiling water reactors.

In fact, this confident statement is actually contradicted by other things in the book. For instance, this set of time lapse photos of an exploding boiling water reactor:

After a year of safety tests on boiling-water type reactor, Borax I unit was deliberately blown up. These motion-picture stills show what happened as control rods were entirely removed in 1/10 secnd, abruptly increasing power to 10,000,000 kilowatts. Last photo shows climax of explosion which hurled machinery 80 feet into air, but caused no dangerous radioactivity beyond a few hundred feet.

Where this reactor once stood is now a superfund site, targeted for environmental cleanup. The Borax 1 reactor was the forerunner of the SL-1 reactor. In January of 1961, the year in which my book was revised, this reactor suffered a steam explosion and meltdown which caused three fatalities. According to wikipedia, 790 people were exposed to harmful levels of radiation, and "The bodies of all three were buried in lead-lined caskets sealed with concrete and placed in metal vaults with a concrete cover. Some highly radioactive body parts were buried in the Idaho desert as radioactive waste."

This information did not find its way into Martin Mann's book. However, other things did. Such as this photo of a woman "cooking on the first stove in the US to be operated by atomic electricity."

There are many interesting photos in the book. I'll present some of them below:

More food and better specimens are expected to result from controlled "hot farms." In the experimental plot (below) the plants are set in circular rows so that all plants in any one row are the same distance from the radioactive cobalt in the center. The effect of its radioactivity on growing things is indicated by the ears of corn (opposite( grown at different distances from the cobalt. Occasionally, radioactivity causes a plant to change - mutate - into an entirely new and better variety.

Genetic engineering 1950s / 1960s style ? Some of the new plants produced by the genetic mutations due to radiation in these experiments were beneficial and are grown for food. For instance, some grapefruit and peppermint varieties. Read more on the atomic gardening website.

Opposite: What to do with "hot garbage" - waste radioactive materials and contaminated machinery - is a  serious problem. Here containers of hot wastes are buried in a ditch. Earth will be bulldozed over to cover it. Some hot garbage is sunk at sea.

This is the only discussion in the book of nuclear waste. It appears to be the author's view that 1950s nuclear scientists really had the answers so far as safe disposal of nuclear waste was concerned. This reminds me of the infamous Dounreay shaft, which is now being cleaned up at considerable cost.

Between the photos of scientists in white coats who we really must trust, and optimistic pieces about how trains, aeroplanes, ships, cars and homes of the future will include their own miniaturized nuclear power plant and even suggesting the possibility of domestic self-running table lamps (I'm still waiting), there are many other highlights in the book.

While in the introduction there was talk of how we mustn't confuse nuclear energy with weaponry, the author later can't help but be impressed with the Hanford plutonium works where "Big reactors convert uranium 238 (the nonfissionable type) into plutonium atomic fuel." Hanford is now the most contaminated nuclear site in the USA.

These reactors which so impressed the author existed solely to produce plutonium for nuclear weaponry. They produced enough for most of the 60000 weapons in the US nuclear arsenal. For coolant, they used water from the Colombia river, which was returned to the river rather warmer, but also gained several terabecquerels of radiation every day. For decades, this was kept secret by the federal government.

The heat from all but the last of these reactors was, unlike Chapelcross, not used to generate electricity. It was simply thrown away as waste energy in the form of heat. The Hanford plant was a huge consumer of electricity generated by other means, as were other plants used to generate materials for nuclear weapons. For many years they consumed more electricity than New York City, while producing only weapons of mass destruction and considerable environmental harm as a result. When people talk about low carbon emissions of nuclear energy, they tend to omit things like this.

The book continues to urge us to be positive. We are told that "scientists in every field, from archaeology to zoology, benefit." and of the bright future of nuclear medicine. A chapter headed "Atoms for health" starts with the text "Soon after Pierre and Marie Curie discovered radium, they saw it used to save lives from cancer". It doesn't mention that radiation exposure was the cause of death for Marie Curie: "Her papers from the 1890s are considered too dangerous to handle. Even her cookbook is highly radioactive. They are kept in lead lined boxes, and those who wish to consult them must wear protective clothing." Pierre Curie didn't live long enough to be killed by radiation, instead falling to one of the biggest killers of our age.

Finally, this is one of my favourite photos from the book. It's captioned "The atomic age already promises better health and a longer life span for the average man and woman."

What I like about that photo is that it is so gratuitous. It has absolutely no meaning at all. Simple propaganda. Two smiling young people on the beach are linked with a spurious pro-nuclear message.

This book illustrates much of what is wrong with the nuclear industry. There is too much secrecy, it's too closely tied to nuclear weaponry, and most of all those who promote nuclear power are still lying to us. And that is where we arrive at the present day.

At Fukushima we have also seen secrecy, breaking of regulations concerning how the reactors should have been run, and experts providing assurances that no meltdown could possibly occur, and that it would remain a minor nuclear incident. However, then we saw a meltdown and today the alert level was raised to the same as that of the Chernobyl incident.

These assurances followed by things going not quite as the experts say they will have come time and time again over the entire history of the nuclear industry.

For example, in Dungeness there are constant erosion problem requiring that "Shingle extracted from north of Dungeness has been used by British Energy to maintain the shingle bund to the west of Dungeness power stations as part of a defence against any possible storm surges and coastal erosion." However, when a question was asked about this in parliament back in 1964, it was dismissed out of hand.

There is also a problem of externalization of costs. This comes in many forms, including subsidies for constructing plants, of claiming zero carbon emissions while ignoring the vast amount of energy and materials used to construct plants, mine, transport and process fuel, re-process old fuels, provide "safe" storage etc. Also, the costs of cleaning up the messes left behind by incidents also tend to be cleverly avoided. Who's paying to build a new sarcophagus for Chernobyl ? And what carbon emissions will produce ?

If the expensive British and American plants built to sell MOX now are not commercially successful, who pays ? And what energy have they used in their construction ?

Many people have pointed out that the deaths due to the tsunami and earthquakes in Japan are higher than those due to the nuclear incident. This may well remain true. However, only a nuclear incident can require vast areas to be abandoned for long periods of time. Look what happened at Chernobyl.

Quite apart from the debate which often rages about how lethal the Chernobyl incident was (I've seen people claim anywhere between 12 and a million deaths, neither of which seems necessarily to be plausible), how can one put a price on the cost of losing a huge region of a country, including populated areas and productive farmland, for decades, or perhaps hundreds or thousands of years ? In the case of Chernobyl, the exclusion zone had a 30 km radius. That makes for a 2800 square km exclusion zone. The Ukraine is a big place, but 2800 km2 is a 12th of the total land area of the Netherlands. Should this country's sole nuclear power plant at Borssele (which, incidentally, wants to use MOX fuel) suffer a similar incident, even if there were no deaths, who foots the bill for abandoning such a large percentage of a country ?

Even if such areas are declared safe at a later date, they will remain tainted in the minds of people. Who would want to consume food grown in the Chernobyl exclusion zone ? Who wants to move there or work there ?

Japan now has a 30 km exclusion zone around the reactor. It may only cover about 1% of the country, however a good part of Japan is mountainous and difficult to live in. So it perhaps covers a greater percentage of the area of Japan which is useful for food production and can be populated.

I wish the Japanese people the best in all of this. I hope that things don't get worse and that while they can't bring back those who have died in the recent disasters, they at least can quickly rebuild and repair the damage to their society and economy.

Daniel Mocsny suggested a very interesting video about relative costs and emissions of different energy sources, the problems with the British MOX plant keep getting bigger, and essential work at Chernobyl still hasn't been funded.

Solar power in winter - there isn't much of it

Since the 1980s I've been experimenting on and off with small scale solar power. I first bought about 1/2 a square metre of unsealed glass PV panels from an electronics surplus store in the UK. These worked quite well for several years, producing about half of their rated 12 V / 200 mA on a good day. However by the time we emigrated the output from them had dropped quite a lot so I gave them away to another experimenter in Cambridge on freecycle.

The output of the original panels had dropped in part because this is what happens with solar cells, but it was accelerated a lot because they were not sealed and they had got damp, I'd already bought another solar panel, a 12 V 28 W sealed panel from Maplin shown in the picture to the left, to supplement their output. This came with us to the Netherlands, but for three years after we moved here, it was in a box in the garage.

A few days ago I finally got it out and put it on the garage roof - flat as you see it here to try it out initially - and ran a wire into the garage. I then measured the open circuit voltage at the other end of the wire, about 18 V, and then I hooked it up to a 12 V 20 W halogen bulb in the garage. Nothing happened. Measuring, I find that there is about 0.09 V across the bulb, and the bulb itself has a resistance of 1.2 ohms, so I'm getting a mere 75 mA at 0.09 V from the cells. That's 0.007 W. That's almost nothing. Around 0.02% of the rated output.

My initial reaction was to think that the panels have a bad contact somewhere. That the bonding of wires inside is no longer good. Then I thought a bit about where the panel is located right now. As you can see, one of our neighbours has a good sized tree at the south of our garden which casts a shadow. Also, it's quite overcast weather and of course the panel is not oriented well either. While manufacturers often claim their products will work "in any light conditions" and such like, actually they need very strong sunlight to achieve full output, and it's surprising the extent to which the output is reduced by such things as what looks to a human eye as only partial shadow.

On a brighter evening a couple of days ago I held up the panel to the receding sun and measured about half the rated output, which is probably as good as can be expected at this time of year. However, unless the neighbour cuts their tree down, I don't think I'll ever generate much from a solar panel at this position, except in the summer when the sun is higher in the sky.

I also have a small solar panel on my Mango to keep the battery charged. I built a small charge regulator to go with this, as even though its potential maximum output isn't huge, it could still overcharge the battery on a good sunny day (I've also built similar regulators, but capable of dealing with more current, to work with dynamos on Mangos).

In the summer, I rarely had to use my mains electricity battery charger. Even though the orientation of the panel is never perfect due to it being mounted flat on top of the Mango, the solar panel normally provides enough current to keep the battery charged. You perhaps won't be surprised to hear that it is just about completely inoperative in winter...

Sadly, Freecycle had some problems recently so for similar ideals, you're probably better off looking here.