Futurist reality. Solar and Wind taking over power grid much sooner than you think. Home is sweeter and warmer with solar

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Farmer recently put solar panels all ovr his roof, now collectng cheques instead of paying bills, thanks to solar
No one likes getting a hydro bill in the mail, but a Sudbury farmer is now collecting cheques instead of bills, thanks to solar panels. Stew McCall of McGrows Farms and Gardens, is now getting money back from the hydro company, thanks to solar panels installed on his roof.

Stew McCall is converting his farm to be entirely self-sufficient when it comes to energy, as he's recently put solar panels all over his roof.

He sends that power back to the grid and gets paid for it. McCall said solar power generation has the potential to create independence for small farmers.
"One of the major costs for farming is energy," he said. "If you can defray your energy costs or reduce them by generating your own power, or partially generating your own power, then that offers the opportunity to expand your farm." He said this month, he received a cheque from the utility for $520.98 — all for the power generated by the solar panels on his property.

"After years and years and years of paying hydro, it's kind of been nice to be in a situation where they can pay you," he said.

3 Reasons Solar and Wind Energy Will Take Over Our Power Grid Much Sooner Than You Think

Survey: Solar and wind finished one and two, respectively, when the polling firm Zogby Analytics asked a swath of American homeowners to name up to three forms of energy they felt were most important to the country’s future. Getting power from the wind and the sun no longer seems like a hippie fantasy: Elon Musk is betting that solar power will be so profitable it will help fund space travel, and big tech companies like Apple and Google are buying in, too. Today most homes and businesses are still powered by fossil fuels, but in just a few decades — maybe even as little as 15 years — most energy could be coming from renewable sources.

An enormous new survey of industry experts shows how fast things are moving. Recently, DNV GL, an international energy consulting company, asked 1,600 people who actually work in the field — at equipment manufacturers, power producers, utilities, policy-making agencies, energy retailers, regulators, and equity investment firms — about the future of renewables. One of the main questions: How quickly will renewables be generating 70 percent of the energy in the markets you work with?

Almost half of the survey respondents said they could see that happening by 2030. And almost all of them — about 80 percent — thought renewables would dominate by 2050.

ScientificAmerican.com April 9, 2015 - Gas-Happy Texas Goes Solar: Solar farms will boost Austin Energy's renewable sources to a whopping 55 percent of its power supply
Austin Energy, the municipally owned utility providing power to roughly 1 million people in the Texas capital, will add 600 megawatts of solar to its generation portfolio by as soon as 2017. Officials said the new solar power will account for a "major component" of Austin Energy's recently adopted Resource, Generation and Climate Protection Plan, which calls for meeting 55 percent of all delivered electricity using renewable resources by 2025. Roughly 60% of Austin Energy's current generation mix comes from fossil resources—44 percent from natural gas and 16 percent from coal. But renewable energy is growing quickly, accounting for 28.5 percent of all generation in 2013, according to the utility. While Texas claims rank as the nation's No. 1 producer of wind energy, it has been much slower than some other states to tap its solar power potential. Solar, along with biomass and hydropower, accounted for less than 1 percent of all power produced in ERCOT last year (EnergyWire, Jan. 14).

NYTimes - The Roof-Mounted Solar Photovoltaic Panels
1. Generate electricity, which feeds into a device, an array disconnect
2. that allows the electricity to be turned on or off. An inverter 3. converts dc electricity to ac, making it compatible with common 110-volt household appliances, before it passes through a familiar circuit-breaker box
4. In a system like this one, excess electricity is returned to the utility grid 5.; in most states, homeowners earn an electrical "credit" they can use during cloudy periods. Currently, solar photovoltaic panels cost about $5 per watt, but new thin-film technologies could lower costs to less than $1 per watt within the next decade.

NYTimes - Skylight and Solar Electrical System Design
1. Skylight
2. Solar Photovoltaic Electrical System
3. Reclaimed Cedar Siding
4. Formaldehyde-Free Lumber
5. Passive Solar Design

TIME - How the homes of the future will generate and store their own electricity, turning your house into a mini-power plant
Electric vehicles are our fastest-growing alternative to oil-derived gasoline. Solar panels are our fastest-growing alternative to coal-powered electricity. They’re both getting less expensive and more effective, driving our clean-energy revolution. And there’s new evidence that these two great tastes can taste particularly great together, transforming how we consume and produce power in ways that will accelerate that green revolution. The evidence comes from Opower, a firm that uses software and behavioral science to help utilities promote energy conservation — and has amassed the world’s largest storehouse of household energy data along the way. Opower studied the power-consumption habits of about 2,000 plug-in electric-vehicle owners enrolled in “time-of-use” pricing programs. That means they got discounted electricity rates from midnight to 7 a.m., when demand is typically low, but paid a surcharge during peak daytime hours, when demand tends to spike. Grid managers have to balance supply and demand every second, so big gaps between peak and off-peak demand can create big inefficiencies by forcing them to turn power plants on and off to adjust supply. In theory, the combination of electric vehicles (which can be charged anytime) and time-of-use pricing (which encourages charging after midnight) could help reduce those gaps. It could also help prevent electric vehicles (which alleviate the problem of carbon emissions) from exacerbating the problem of overloaded daytime grids. And that’s basically what the data showed — with a twist.

Opower found that EV owners did respond to the incentives to charge during off-peak hours, using three times as much power as the typical household between midnight and 7 a.m. It’s notoriously tough to get consumers to adjust their behavior, even when it’s in their financial interest, so that’s good news. At first glance, the data from the rest of the day looks like bad news: from 7 a.m. until midnight, EV owners still used 21% more power than the typical household. But this was mainly because they’re richer than the typical household; their houses were bigger and more likely to have a swimming pool. They clearly did the bulk of their vehicle charging after midnight when power was cheap.

The most striking data was from EV owners who also had solar panels. From 7 a.m. to midnight, they used about one-fourth as much power from the grid as the typical household, because they were getting power from their rooftops and often selling power back to the grid. In other words, they took very little from the grid when demand was high — at times even helping to increase supply — and took much more from the grid when demand was low. They helped smooth out demand. That’s very good news, not only because smoothing out demand is a kind of holy grail for utilities, but because EV owners were 6.6 times more likely to have solar panels than the typical household. Nancy Pfund, a venture capitalist who invested early in Tesla Motors, the hottest EV firm, and Solar City, the leading solar installer, calls EVs “the gateway drug to solar.” Once you stop using hydrocarbons to fuel your car, she says, you want to stop using hydrocarbons, period. “Together, they can be a huge tool for managing our energy load,” Pfund says. “And they’re both taking off.”

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Image courtesy breakingenergy.com , breakingenergy.com, and Steve Sanford / NY Times