cts | Volt a Day | Solar-powered Car September 14, 2010

I got a call yesterday from consultants hired by the State of California. As part of the California Solar Initiative they want to come install a monitor on our solar system, so they can see how much power is being generated. It's on a volunteer basis. I said it was fine. They are contacting another branch of their consulting group to do the actual legwork.

A perfect example of how wasteful government is. I already have a monitor on the solar system. It is provided by Solar City, the very people who leased the system to me. So far this year I have generated close to 9,000 kilowatts of power. The Volt will drive 40 miles on 8KWH before the gas generator kicks in. From my utility that energy would cost about a dollar per fill up (which I will do each night). Of course, in the first eight months of 2010 the sun has made enough power on my roof to drive 43,000 miles. I plan to stay under that.

This nifty pie shows that the car, when it is not solar, would really be coal-powered. Although this is a national graph and California has a higher percentage of renewable sources. And and as a household we pay a slightly (10%) higher rate to get a much higher percentage of renewable sources.

The question, when I look at some of this, is whether we will start to see some sort of storage device for private homes. Right now I generate during the day, selling it back to the utility company. Then I use it at night. If I had a super-capactitor at the house, or a huge flywheel buried under the garage, I could store the energy myself, taking that load off the power-grid entirely.

Expect more of these sort of dry, semi-political, and technical posts until I am actually driving one of these cars.