News and Views

On cloudy or partly cloudy days, like today, I generate less electricity from my solar panels. Of course, that makes sense. The paradox is that on a partly cloudy day like today, although the power may fluctuate up and down as the clouds cover and then uncover the sun, the peak power is higher than […]

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Here’s a graph of our power usage from SRP so far for the Feb 22 – Mar 21 billing period. We’re just about breaking even, as the days get longer and warmer. We’re getting more sunlight and therefore more power, and using less for heating. The days stand out when we do laundry or a […]

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Just a couple of comments on solar power. I see SRP and other power utilities claiming large areas of desert to install centralized solar energy generation facilities. There may be economic reasons where large scale installations are more efficient, but it seems to me that it makes more sense to utilize the “empty” space on […]

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That’s how much my electric bill was this billing month (which ends on the 17th). Last year it was $174.09. I guess my solar panels are starting to pay back! And $15 of that is a fixed fee, so we really only bought about $15.71 worth of electricity from SRP. Of course, it’s not really […]

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Derek’s university, ASU, held a campus wide Cryptography contest, where the students competed to solve a series of ciphers, or codes. 40 students entered, and Derek and a partner took First Prize. You can see a brief note on it here. Look for “Crypto Rally Recap” a couple of items down. I have fun solving […]

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Here’s a graph showing the energy I’ve used since installing the solar panels two and a half weeks ago. The blue is energy I have bought from SRP, and the red is energy the solar panels have generated. You can roughly infer the weather from looking at the graph. The sky has been clear except […]

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I got a burr coffee grinder for Christmas this year. I’m really impressed by the difference it makes in the taste of the coffee. The theory is that a blade grinder just whacks the beans into smaller pieces, with lots of variation in size from powder to big chunks. The burr grinder yields a much […]

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Here’s a graph showing the the progress of our two power meters over about 4 days. The red line is from the meter that measures the solar power we generate. The blue line is the SRP meter. The vertical axis is in kWh. Notice the solar meter does a “stair step”, rising during the day, […]

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Our solar energy system finally became active today. SRP (the local power company) was here at 9:00 am, and did the final connection. Since then (it’s now 3:00pm) we have generated about 24 kWh. Of that, about 14 were sold back to SRP, and we have used about 10. They installed a new meter that […]

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SRP, the local power company, sent me an email today scheduling the “commission” for next Wednesday, Dec 21, 6 days from now. So it’s nice to finally have a firm date, but it’s hard to understand why it took so long.

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