Making money with putting solar enery power into the grid ?

[hartiberlin]

Hi All,
until we will all have real free energy from magnetic motors
or other devices,
I have thought today about a topic, when I browsed through some
solar power panels.
What about making money with selling solar power to the utilities ?
I think over here in Germany the utilities pay you about 50 cents/KWH,
if I remember right ? I think this is also sponsered via governmental tax money..

So are already new cheap solar cells available, so that one could
buy maybe cells for a constant 10 KWatts output and install it
on some private land you own and put the generated power into the
grid ?
How much investment would be needed with the newest cheapest
commercial available solar cells and how fast would be the Return of Investment ?

How much money would be needed and how much space for the solar cell panels ?

Are there companies, who specialize in such things to sell you ?

Please post your views and experience with this.
Many thanks.
Regards, Stefan.

[hartiberlin]

WHat about Greg Watson?s suncubes at:
http://www.greenandgoldenergy.com.au

Would this qualify for such a project ?
Although the suncubes seem to be a bit expensive ?
But you would not need so much space as with normal
solar panels...

[hartiberlin]

Hi All,
I got a reply from Greg by private email.
I did not do much research yet into the financial things,
so I estimated the cost too high of his Suncubes....


Here are the right numbers:

Hi Stefan,

I don't know how you think SunCubes are expensive. At US$8,700 installed for
3 kW peak and 6,000 kWh / year including grid connect inverter that is
US$2.90 / AC watt and US$0.058 / AC kWh. At your quoted buy price of US$0.50
/ kWh that is a payback time of say 2.9 years, US$3,000 in yearly income and
a ROI of about 35%.

Flat panels will give you about 25% of that, so I don't see how you can
claim my SunCubes are expensive? They are 25% of the cost / kWh cost of flat
panels. In large solar farms it gets even better.

Want to build a solar farm? For say US$2 million you could get an annual
income of at least US$670,000.

All the best,
Greg Watson
Green and Gold Energy
Adelaide, South Australia
+61 408 843 089
http://www.greenandgoldenergy.com.au
Online SunBall discussion group
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sunball

[FredWalter]

Greg Watson

Is this the same Greg Watson that invented the SMOT device?

There are two sayings that seem appropriate in this situation:
"once bitten, twice shy" and "I'll believe it when I see it".

If you are going to run the numbers for solar power then it makes sense to only consider commercially available products. The sunball/suncube isn't commercially available yet, and there are questions about how well it will stand up in the long run. What are the regular maintenance requirements for the moving parts? What is the lens made out of, and will it stand up to long term exposure to the UV in sunlight?

When you are running the numbers, note that if you are going to buy enough solar panels, then you can deal direct with most manufacturers, and you will get a volume discount.

[hartiberlin]

Yes, it is Greg Watson, the inventor of the SMOT,
Suncubes is his new business ! ;)Yes, I wonder,
how long the mechanical parts inside suncubes
will last and also how long the solar cells will last...