The Challenges of Renewable Energy

There’s something majestic and noble about wind turbines and solar panels.  Looking at them makes me feel good.  They’re good for the planet, good for individual sustainability, and they also seem like an act of defiance against the corporate “pushers” of fossil fuels. 

Yet nothing in the simple life is as simple as it seems.  In her article, “Learning to love the high desert” (Backwoods Home Magazine Nov/Dec 2009 p. 81), Claire Wolfe writes,

I have three words for those of you who envision traipsing off into the backwoods (or back desert) and living free and easy on solar or wind power. Those three words are: HA HA HA.

She tells of charlatan designers and installers and erratic equipment, and adds that her community finally hired an MIT grad to get the system right. “Electricity is complicated. And expensive.”

There’s a lot of truth to what she says. Our own forays into renewable energy have been plagued not so much by charlatans– our installer seems to know his stuff– but by cost overruns and severe weather. Our solar electric system works fine, but at 1Kwh it’s only enough to run our ranch at a bare minumum level. And our wind turbine has been plagued by a series of problems, from broken blades to broken tower. Just yesterday, I noticed the tower has a broken guy wire so, once the current storm passes, down it comes again for repairs.

Even more discouraging are the payback calculations: at normal operation, how long will it take us to save in grid-purchased electricity what we spent on renewable generating capacity? For the solar, which cost $12K (after $4K in tax credits) and generates an average of 5 Kwh per day, it will take about 60 years to recover our cost through electricity savings. Our wind turbine, when it’s operating properly, generatesan average of 222 wh per day; at that rate, it’ll take about 150 years to pay for itself.

We explored solar hot water, but found that a professionally-installed system would cost $11,570, and would take 40 years to pay for itself.  Clearly there’s a lot of money to be made in renewable energy for those who have the skills.

There are two morals to this story.  First, we haven’t ventured into renewables solely for cost savings– assessed on that basis, both our installed systems (and the proposed hot water system) are failures.  Rather, we invested in renewables to increase the reliability of our power– grid power, at 11 cents per Kwh, is a comparative bargain, but only when it’s working. 

And we invested in solar and wind because we believe in renewables.

Still, as the economy has declined and our finances have tightened, we’ve adopted a new attitude: our energy investments need to be more than just renewable, they need to be cheap and reliable as well. 

Over the next few months (as time permits), we’ll be trying several new renewable energy projects.  These will be simple, do-it-yourself projects made from inexpensive (or scavenged) materials.  Stay tuned for progress reports…