Solar Southwest Florida

Fafco Solar Billboard with Solar Panels

About a year ago I was excited to learn that Lamar advertising was upgrading its billboards in Florida with solar panels. I thought that there might be some work in it for local Florida solar contractors. Unfortunately, that never happened. It gets worse…

I was again excited to see that Fafco Solar’s billboard on US 41 in Fort Myers had been upgraded with solar panels, so I stopped by to check it out. It’s not what I expected. I thought the billboards would have a grid-independent solar energy system with battery backup. It turns out that what is installed is simply a four-panel grid-interactive solar energy system. The system utilizes four 230W solar modules and two [now discontinued] Enphase D380 microinverters. The system is capable of producing 760 AC watts, and approximately 1,300 kilowatt-hours annually (equivalent to approximately $150 in utility electricity).

Normally I would be elated to see anyone install a solar energy system, but this is the epitome of green-washing and an example of a totally impractical use for solar energy.

There are a few good reasons to use solar energy to power a billboard. The first is to be independent from the grid, making the lighting and advertisement rotation motor operate during utility outages. The second is to eliminate the need for grid power in remote locations, like along Interstate highways where it may be costly to install utility poles and meters. Tangential reasons are to reduce operating costs and produce green energy. This is where my concern lies.

If you want to reduce your energy footprint or operating costs, the best way to do it is in the most economical fashion possible. That is, produce the most energy for the lowest investment. The manner in which these solar panels are installed is very expensive, requiring a lot of steel to make a hardy wind-resistant rack. It also requires fixed costs like permitting and interconnection hardware. The better choice would have been to install solar panels at the company’s headquarters in a more efficient ground or roof mounted system. For example, instead of installing four panels on 1,000 billboards, it is far more efficient to install a system with 4,000 solar panels in the same location. The end result would be the same. There is no benefit to having these solar panels colocated with the billboards.

Distributed energy production systems like small grid-interactive solar energy systems are generally a good thing, and I support the concept fully. However, there comes a point at which the marginal benefit is so small that you have to ask yourself, “is this practical?” In this case, the answer is clearly NO!

Fafco Solar's billboard uses microinverters to produce grid voltage to offset utility electricity usage.

There is no question that solar is now “mainstream.” The annual solar photovoltaic production in 2010 was more than double that in 2009, and all signs point to a continuing explosion of solar energy installations in the coming years.

Fafco Solar‘s photovoltaic installations have shown a similar increase in volume in Southwest Florida, albeit not quite as dramatic. The largest job in the company’s history was completed in 2010, and the second largest job was just completed this year. However, with the advent of FPL’s utility rebate program in 2011, the quantity of residential and business photovoltaic systems has increased, resulting in a higher total installed volume.

The other good news for solar customers is that solar prices have plummeted as a result of oversupply of PV modules on the market. Despite the record rate of installations, solar module manufacturer’s outpaced the market, installing an amazing amount of new capacity. That’s great for the consumer, but not great for the supply chain. With prices so low, the absolute dollar profitability on a typical job is drastically lower now, even if profit margins have remained steady or increased.

Solar prices are not expected to increase drastically as the supply/demand balance returns to more normal and sustainable levels, but we may see some price increases as manufacturers scale back production. What is clear is that people are buying solar now both worldwide and in Southwest Florida. Is it your time?

John Spinnler from Fafco Solar presented an engraved photovoltaic module to Florida Gulf Coast University’s Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, Dr. Donna Price Henry today. This ceremony officially marks the commissioning of system at the University owned facility in Naples.

The 164 module solar array covers approximately 3,000 square feet of the facility’s roof and  is rated at 40.18kW. For more information, download this case study.

Left to right: John Spinnler, Dr. Donna Price Henry, Joseph H. Simmons

This evening I am doing a presentation on solar energy and the market in Southwest Florida as it relates to the engineering field. I appreciate the opportunity to speak before the Introduction to Engineering class at the Charlotte Campus.

Here is a link to my presentation for all interested. Without narration, it might not make perfect sense, but there are some nice pictures!

Edison State College Presentation

Officially there is no longer a property tax exemption for solar energy products installed on Florida properties. It’s a long story, but the bottom line is that a once-in-place exemption disappeared because of some technicalities in the wording up in Tallahassee. Despite the fact that Florida voters overwhelmingly passed a ballot amendment to retain the property tax exemption in 2008, the Florida Legislature failed to enact the law three years in a row, ignoring the Florida voters.

There is good news on two fronts.

First, Senator Jack Latvala submitted a bill in late August 2011 that would define the renewable energy products exempt from property tax assessments, and provide for such exemption. It looks like the bill is going to be heard in committee on October 19, 2011. That’s a step in the right direction! The summary and full text of the bill can be found here.

Second, the Lee County and Collier County property appraisers appear to have no interest in assessing solar energy equipment installed in homes in their counties. I am not sure about Charlotte County, but I have not heard anything to suggest that homeowners are being assessed for solar energy products there, either.

If all goes well, property tax exemptions for solar energy products will be enacted into law once again and solar products will be officially exempt from property tax. If you or anyone you know has been assessed for solar improvements at their property, I would like to hear from you, but I would be very surprised if I did.

I have just been informed that the next round of FPL funding for solar rebates will start on October 25. The first time around, reservations were exhausted in under 15 minutes.

It is urgent that you contact your solar dealer NOW if you want to take advantage. This is the opportunity of a lifetime!

If your solar photovoltaic module installation in Southwest Florida has rails longer than 30 feet and there is no expansion joint, you are asking for trouble. We have about a 75 degree Fahrenheit temperature swing around here, and aluminum rails can expand and contract substantially. The temperature of the rail can exceed the ambient temperature substantially. Let’s look at the numbers…

Aluminum has a thermal expansion coefficient of approximately 13 microns per inch per degree Fahrenheit. A 30 foot rail section is 360 inches. Let’s assume the aluminum will experience a 100 degree temperature range from 30 – 130 degrees Fahrenheit.

0.000013 x 360 x 100 = 0.468 inches

That means a 30 foot rail section can expand/contract by almost 1/2 inch! The purpose of the expansion joint is to prevent the rails from buckling. Thermal expansion also puts a lot of stress on the roof attachments and the hardware used to fasten modules to the rail. it is critical that these expansion joints are installed, and installed correctly. Because the joint breaks electrical c0ntinuity, it is important to make sure your grounding system bridges the gap.

A proper expansion joint.

The picture above shows a Unirac Solarmount rail at the Lee County Public Safety Building in Fort Myers. The Unirac splice bar has only two screws in it on one side of the joint. A WEEB bonding strap is used to provide electrical continuity for proper grounding. This is not the cheapest option, but I’m not about doing it cheaply. I want it done right!

Solar Water Heating Panels

This Port Charlotte home is being outfitted with an array of solar energy products, but this picture shows the solar water heating panels. This is a 48 square foot Fafco Revolution 500 Series Solar Water Heating system, which includes three 2′x8′ solar panels, an expansion tank, integrated circulation module, and photovoltaic module for circulation pump operation. It was retrofit the the homeowners existing electric water tank.

In a power outage, like Port Charlotte experienced after past hurricanes, this homeowner will have hot water because the water in the existing electric tank will be heated by the sun using a hot transfer fluid from the solar panels in the heat exchanger that operates using solar electricity.

One of the greatest advantages of the Fafco Revolution system is that the panels are made from a UV stabilized polymer rather than the traditional copper and glass solar panels. These traditional collectors are prone to glass breakage during storms and are much heavier on the roof, possibly causing further damage. Also, because your potable water flows through a copper collector, if a leak develops on the roof, you may need to shut off your hot water until it is repaired.

The solar water heating collector, paired with solar pool heating, solar electricity, and solar attic fans will save the homeowner tremendously on their electric bill. During the winter months, it is likely that they will be selling electricity back to FPL.

Really?

The word is going around that you can get cheap solar panels at low prices in Southwest Florida. Just like any “creative marketing,” you have to read the small print. Let’s just get one thing straight – you get what you pay for.

I will be the first to tell you that you can install a cheap solar energy system on your home, and it will produce energy and save you money. If you want to do it yourself, there are lots of resources online that offer discount pricing on solar panels and related equipment. The truth is, you can buy most solar energy equipment for pretty close to the price that I pay for it. There are no deep wholesale discounts for solar energy dealers.

How NOT to Ground a Solar Panel

The problem is, solar energy systems are relatively complicated additions to your home that require proper design, permitting, installation, configuration, and inspection. That’s why there is a special license offered by the Department of Business & Professional Regulation called the Florida State Certified Solar Contractor License. In recent years and month, the competition has become more cutthroat, resulting in many low cost installers flooding the market. That is a good thing for consumers in a way, as prices have come down substantially. The bad news is that poor workmanship is rampant. I’ve witnessed many poor installations, some which were clearly the result of cost cutting measures and some that can only be explained by an incompetent installer.

Think twice about going with a contractor that is offering the lowest price. Often there is a bait-and-switch, or only very specific homes with very specific roofs and locations qualify for the low, low price. The advertisement will certainly be for the lowest quality equipment with only basic warranties, and a company that provides little to no service after the sale.

Proper Solar Array Grounding by Fafco Solar with Approved Bonding Straps and Lugs

One email advertisement I saw this week offered an amazing price for a solar electric (photovoltaic) system. The price was below my cost of an installed system. If you add up the actual material cost, permits, design, engineering, and installation labor, I would lose about $500 installing the system. Something is obviously wrong, because I’m quite sure that my material costs are among the lowest in the business. One “feature” of the system in the advertisement caught my eye. It said that with this system, you would have power during blackouts. That was obviously not the case, because the system offered was grid-connected without batteries! This is where creative marketing starts to look more like false advertising.

Be careful when shopping for the lowest price for a solar energy system. A reputable dealer will give you a fair price with a healthy-but-fair profit built-in that ensures you will have a properly installed, long lasting, safe and proper installation with quality equipment and solid warranties backed by a company that will be around for years to come.

Jason Szumlanski

In my last post I wrote about the magic of Google Sketchup for use in the solar industry. One of the great ways to use this tool is to take architectural or construction drawings and convert them to three dimensions. This provides very accurate models of roofs that can be used to size solar panel arrays. The model below is a model home from Tundra Homes in Cape Coral, Florida. They want to offer solar panels to their customers as an option. We can show proposed placement of panels on the roof and determine how much solar pool heating will fit.

Hint: You can use your mouse to see the model in 3D!

See the model in the Google 3D Warehouse here.

As you can see, the rear of the home will accommodate up to six 4′x10′ solar pool heating panels, and the left side will accommodate five panels of the same size. Once the proposed placement lot is determined, we can figure out the actual orientation of the home relative to south and determine the best option for solar pool heating.

Solar as an option for new home construction is becoming more popular. As builders try to differentiate themselves in this difficult market, solar can add luxury and operational cost savings for a prospective homeowner. That sells!

3D Drawings are not just for graphics artists and engineers. Sometimes visualizing a concept is tremendously helpful when trying to explain something to a customer or employee. Google Sketchup is a terrific tool that I use to produce 3D renderings of homes with solar energy products. But it is so much more than an architectural tool.

Recently I was trying to explain how solar electric modules are mounted on stand-offs and rails on a tile roof to a customer in Port Charlotte. The easiest way was to use details from a model that I created for a permit package a while ago. I have compiled quite a large library of models showing solar rail attachment details and mounting methods. Whenever I need it for a customer or shop drawing, I can just pull the right details from my library.

Drawing Showing Details of Stand-Off Attachment

Last week I also needed to put into perspective for a customer how much solar power a roof could accommodate. Since I already had the proposed solar module in my library of components, it was simple to put together a rough building model and place modules on the roof. Before even visiting the customer, I can estimate that 516 solar modules should fit, or a 188 kW system!

This Building in Bonita Springs Can Accommodate Lots of Solar Panels

Once a model is built, that’s not the end. The 3D drawing can be used to produce 2D views. These are useful in developing shop drawings, permit packages, and homeowner association approval drawings. Sketchup’s companion program, Google Layout, is the tool used to make 2D renderings from 3D models. A full array of annotations can be made to the 2D drawing.

2D Rendering with Annotations Made from 3D Model

It’s no secret that I am a huge Google Sketchup fan. I use it almost every day for something or other. Today I looked at my home and traced out the lawn to determine the size of each section of lawn to determine how much fertilizer I would need. The uses are endless!

I have been playing with Google’s Ngram Viewer. This tool looks at millions of books and determines the frequency of words and phrases over time. I was shocked by one thing that I stumbled upon. We’re not talking about solar the way we did in the last oil crisis, in books anyway.

Take a look at the Ngram comparison between solar electricity and gas prices. The relationship between the two is staggering in the years following the 1973-74 mid-east oil crisis. However, the more recent gas price increases have not resulted in the same spike in writing about solar electricity.

On the other hand, solar electricity has become the topic of writing steadily since the “end” of the 70′s oil crisis. But why hasn’t solar electricity shown the same spike in interest recently? Perhaps the talk has moved to the Internet. Maybe we don’t need to write about it because it is no longer a pie-in-the-sky concept. It’s mainstream. It’s obvious.

There is a lesson to be learned from the past. Despite the flood of references to solar energy products in the late 1970′s, widespread adoption fizzled out. Prices for solar energy products were sky high, and gas prices were just not high enough relatively speaking. When cheap gas returned, the chatter dropped off, and the solar energy industry entered a stagnant period. Price of gas are on the rise again, and there is no end in sight. This is not a crisis. This is the new reality. Solar energy products are the cheapest they have ever been, particularly solar electricity (photovoltaics).

Right now we don’t need to write about solar energy. We need to do it to avoid the next crisis in the international oil market.

I’m asked quite frequently, what is the most efficient solar electric module on the market? That question has multiple answers. It depends on what you are trying to accomplish!

In the photovoltaic module industry, the term efficiency refers to the amount of rated power that a solar module can produce within a certain area (its size). More accurately, it seeks to explain how much of the available solar radiation is turned into usable electricity. You will hear efficiency ratings from 13-21% these days for commercially available modules. Most people jump to the conclusion that a more efficient module is the best.

Don’t fall into the trap!

It is typically more important to focus on how much rated energy a solar module produces relative to it’s COST! Let’s look at an example:

The Sanyo HIT-240HDE4 is an excellent module that is 17.3% efficient and 14.93 square feet in size. It produces maximum rated power of 230 watts. The Canadian Solar CS6P-230P is “only” 14.3% efficient and it is 17.33 square feet. It produces the exact same 230 watts of rated power. In other words, the Canadian Solar module is 16% larger, or 16% less “efficient.”

Now what if I told you that the Canadian Solar module was half the price of the Sanyo module? If space is not critical, who cares what size the module is? Buy the module with the lower price! This is known as dollars-per-watt ($/w) efficiency. Would you want to pay twice as much for the same amount of energy?

There are some other factors to consider, which are typically much less important. If aesthetics are important, there are some modules that are made to look great. Some are even semi-transparent. Warranty is also a factor. You want your manufacturer to stand behind the product. And some people are concerned with the product origin. There are fewer and fewer domestically produced module options in the United States.

Some module manufacturers claim that their modules actually produce closer to the rated amount of power than others. There is another rating called Practical Test Conditions that attempts to provide a more realistic power output under practical situations. In most cases, the PTC differences are negligible, and conditions at your site may not reflect either rating. There are no guarantees, so I usually discount this factor entirely.

The bottom line is that it all boils down to dollars-per-watt. Don’t be fooled into thinking that a more efficient solar electric module is the way to go.

Solar tubular skylights never cease to amaze me. This light was installed today by an extraordinary guy named Bryan Hammond. Bryan has become Fafco Solar‘s expert on solar lights and attic fans.

Solar Tubular Skylight

Solar lighting is somewhat of an art form. Determining where a light should be placed and how large of a light to install takes experience.  This light was artfully installed centered with the cabinetry and at the entrance to the kitchen. It highlights the wood flooring beautifully.

There are a variety of diffusers available, and UV filters eliminate fading of furniture and surfaces.

Since this room is in the middle of the home, and traditional skylights are not an option, a solar tubular skylight was a natural choice to bring natural light into the space. Absent this light, the homeowner would want to use electric lighting during the day, which is both inefficient and harsh on the eyes. The natural daylight in this room makes it a pleasure throughout the day!