PV Gap

Jane Said:

Should we mandate every house in the USA have solar panels and a windmill?

We Answered:

and only a 2 minute shower is enough to clean hugo chavez's body.
he stated that.
imagine if a windmill farm kills an endangered bird species...then what??????

Gloria Said:

How many solar panels do you need on your house to power your heater in winter?

We Answered:

I would not use photovoltaic solar panels at all for heating. A solar heating system is much less expensive. I have an experiment running in Manitoba (latitude 50 deg 7 min N) that uses passive solar heating in a building 60' long by 36' wide. The long wall that faces south to catch the sun is clad with 2 layers of infrared absorbing poly. The building has 3000 sq ft of roof. The poly cost $1500. The north wall is insulated R20. The east and west walls are insulated with straw bales to R50. The east and west walls are painted dark red, which warms the external surface by approximately 5 C in sunshine. At night an insulating curtain is drawn over the south side to minimize heat loss. The internal temperature depends upon the weather. On an overcast day in February, the building is 6 C warmer than the outside. In a February heat wave the outside temperature hit +2 C and the internal temperature spiked to 36.5 C, somewhat incongruous with 4 ft of snow on the walls of the building. More typically, the internal temperature is 23 C warmer than the external temperature during daylight hours (+6 C inside - 17 C outside). In October, internal temperatures exceeded 50 C, so be prepared to vent excess heat on a warm day. For a residential building, you need to buffer the temperature by adding a heat exchanger (cooling during the day, heating at night), insulated water tanks to store the heat and a pump to circulate the water.

Edit @ Peter
6 hp = 4.2 kW. Lets take a pessimistic view and say the solar cell is 10% efficient (The best lab result is 27.4%). Assume that you store energy in a battery to operate the pump at night. In December the solar insolation in Winnipeg, Manitoba is .99 kW-hr/day/m^2.
http://solarelectricityhandbook.com/sola…
To run your pump 24 hr you need 1028 m^2 = 0.254 acres. In July the solar insolation is 5.92 kW-hr/day/m^2 and you need 0.042 acres to run the pump for 24 hours. Further south in the US, the numbers are more favorable.

Jonathan Said:

Why did Ronald Reagan take the solar panels off of the white house?

We Answered:

The people that make solar panels weren't donating to his campaign, but the oil guys sure were.