Solar Plexus

    It's possible to get all your electricity for free from the sun. The one drawback is the initial cost of the equipment to capture the solar energy and send it into your house. Right now the government is offering a big tax credit to install that equipment so we decided to go solar and quit relying on the coal fired power plant out in North Dakota.

   For the past two months we've been meeting on Zoom with Simon Eddy, the technical sales rep for RealSolar in Backus, MN. It's been a long process of figuring out exactly how much this is all going to cost. A series of ups and downs has led to bottom line we can live with.

   During this process Simon reviewed our bills from the Roseau Electric Cooperative. In the past Roseau County has had some of the best electric rates in the country thanks to the abundant coal deposits out West. But things have been changing over the past few years. The government has mandated the power plant pay for expensive retrofits to scrub the discharge from its stacks. It's had to put up wind turbines. And its had to share some of its cheap output with the rest of the country. These things have causedour monthly bill to rise.

   We'll have to continue relying on the coal plant when the sun doesn't shine. We could buy batteries to store our excess power, but batteries are expensive. Instead we'll sell our excess production on long sunny days back to Roseau Electric who will bank it to provide us with power on long winter nights. We should break even in the course of the year.

   But there's another kind of breaking even. How many years of free electricity will it take to pay for the solar panels? According to Simon's calculations it will take 21.5 years to break even. I'll be 95 1/2  old years old by then. Perhaps one of our grandchildren will want to move here. We'll give them a family discount on the place.

  Last Friday Simon came for a site visit. He marked out a 40' by 12' rectangle on the lawn south of the garage where the panel array will sit. He took a soil sample. He set his solar pathfinder on a tripod and declared our panels would be shaded at no point during the year except late in the afternoon around the time of the winter solstice by some trees several hundred feet away. 

   There was one little glitch. The array should be oriented to the south to get maximum solar exposure, but our garage is a bit off from true south. The array would be aesthetically less pleasing if it did not line up with the garage. How much would it cost us to make it look nice. Simon ran the numbers: we'd lose $8.00 worth of electricity per year. What the heck. Let's go for pretty.

   Simon took pictures of our meter and our electric panels, then we reviewed the contract. The RealSolar crew is going to be real busy this summer. Simon estimated they would get to our array in October or November. As I handed over our deposit check I said, "Don't be too late, Simon. Electric rates aren't going down anytime soon."

Mosquitoes throw a lot of shade. I'll definitely be keeping them off.