Let’s be clear. Wood, gas, heating oil, or any other carbon based fuel or biomass is NOT the most efficient heat source. This is! Solar energy is FREE, all day long! Though it does cost money upfront to purchase the high tech equipment to harness the power of the sun. Just like buying a $30k car or $50k truck or $100k tractor for your job and off grid farm and ranch, your investment into solar technology is the same thing. You’re investing in the energy it will produce for your homestead.
You look at your $150k to $300k average land and homestead price as an investment in your off grid lifestyle, so solar technology should be on your list of MUST-HAVES for your off grid homestead.
Solar tech is just as important to your off grid farm as your tractor and your truck. It’s just as important to your ranch as your barn or home.
Gravity from the sun holds the earth in its place in orbit around the sun. The extreme amount of energy the sun puts out every single day is enough to run ALL of earth’s energy systems for an entire year.
173,000 terawatts of the sun’s energy hits earth’s surface continuously.
“The sunlight that reaches Earth every day dwarfs all the planet’s other energy sources. This solar energy is clearly sufficient in scale to meet all of mankind’s energy needs — if it can be harnessed and stored in a cost-effective way.
Unfortunately, that’s where the technology lags: Except in certain specific cases, solar energy is still too expensive to compete. But that could change if new technologies can tip the balance of solar economics.
The potential is enormous, says MIT physics professor Washington Taylor, who co-teaches a course on the physics of energy. A total of 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously. That’s more than 10,000 times the world’s total energy use. And that energy is completely renewable — at least, for the lifetime of the sun. “It’s finite, but we’re talking billions of years,”
The problem is that solar technology is expensive to produce compared to carbon based fossil fuel and biomass energy.
There’s enough hitting the earth’s surface at any given time to power the earth and all its systems for 1000 years.
But we’re not there yet.
Efficiency of solar panels is at about 25% maximum, and that’s the most expensive newer technology. The proliferation of solar into the energy market is fighting an uphill battle against the entrenched (and arguably greedy and corrupt) fossil fuel industry.
Average efficiency of solar panels is about 20% as of this writing. That’s actually pretty good.
This means that about 20% of the sun’s energy that hits a solar panel is converted to usable electricity. If we can figure out a way to capture the other 80% that’s lost, then solar will quickly become the biggest energy source on earth. We’re about 20% there and solar tech is getting better every day.
Then there are losses in the transfer from the panel through the charge controller/inverter to the batteries to store the solar energy as electricity.
There are other ways to store the energy collected by the sun. Such as what’s called a gravity battery. A gravity battery is exactly what it sounds like. It stores electrical energy in the form of mass at height. Then the mass is released, into an electric generator (there’s actually no such thing as a “generator”; read our article about energy conversion) to extract the stored energy and convert it back to electricity to be used to do work. Like power our homes.
Wikipedia has a better explanation: “A gravity battery is a type of electricity storage device that stores gravitational energy, the energy stored in an object resulting from a change in height due to gravity, also called potential energy. A gravity battery works by using excess energy from the grid to raise a mass to generate gravitational potential energy, which is then dropped to convert potential energy into electricity through an electric generator. Energy generated from a gravity battery is a form of sustainable energy. One form of a gravity battery is one that lowers a mass, such as a block of concrete, to generate electricity. The most common gravity battery is used in pumped-storage hydroelectricity, where water is pumped to higher elevations to store energy and released through water turbines to generate electricity.” SOURCE: Wikipedia – Gravity Battery
A hydroelectric dam, or rather the water stored behind it, is a kind of gravity battery. The stored energy in the water is released when the floodgates are opened and water pours through the turbines which are electric generators (energy converters) this energy is then sent through the grid to power cities building and homes.
In the case of using solar energy to create a gravity battery, solar energy is used to power the motors to raise a large mass (concrete or water) to a high elevation. The initial cost of building a gravity battery is extremely expensive due to its high tech nature. But those costs will come down as the scale of this new tech increases.
Solar energy storage is a big deal. Capturing the energy is also a big deal. We’re currently experimenting with the best combinations of energy storage tech and solar capture tech.
Capturing the solar energy is only 20% efficient right now. That’s good enough to power your off grid cabin and your RV. Even your suburban home with a 5k Watt solar power system and a 1000Ah battery backup.
You’re going to need a high tech AFFORDABLE way to capture and store solar energy. Right now, batteries are the tech that we’re focused on advancing.
Lithium and other types of battery technology are being developed to store more energy in smaller spaces for less money upfront. As the advancement and scale of these technologies increase the cost of these technologies will decrease making them more affordable options for powering our homes.
Eventually energy capture and storage will be a secondary thought much like turning on a light switch is now. We don’t really think about it when we’re living in the city or suburbs. But when you have to capture and store the energy yourself so you can use it later, we are very quick to try to calculate and figure out how much it’s going to cost upfront and how long it will take to recoup those initial costs.
The good thing about solar and battery technology today is that the initial cost of solar power and battery systems has decreased substantially and are now more affordable than ever.
A 1500 Watt solar power system that would have cost you more than $5k a few years ago, now can be had for less than a dollar per Watt in most cases. That’s a great improvement in cost and more and more people are now choosing to power their homes with solar power. 20% efficiency is good enough! For now. For most of our needs. The batteries will store enough for us to use later.
A good solar power system is complete with solar panels, electronics for regulating charging, metering and distribution, and high quality deep cycle batteries for energy storage so you can have power when the sun goes down or on those cloudy days.
Wind turbines fill in the gaps of time at night and during stormy weather to continue charging your batteries so you will always have power to run your off grid homestead now matter the time of day or whether there is sun in the sky or not.
The sun powers our entire literal astronomical solar system. Our planet earth is held in place by its immense gravitational power. And all our cities and homes can be powered by solar energy. We simply need to capture it and store it so we can use it when we need it.
Invest in solar for your off grid homestead. Buy the best system you can buy. Not only will it last longer there will be less maintenance and less chance of you having to replace it ever.
Solar panels will last 10-20 years or more if you take care of them. Doing the math, you can invest $5k now into a solid high quality 2500 Watt solar power system with battery backup and NEVER HAVE TO PAY FOR ELECTRICITY AGAIN!
I don’t know about you but even $10k sounds like a good deal for 20 years of energy to power my off grid homestead!
Think about the solar power system you could have for just another $10k. Not to mention the increase in value of your home. According to Zillow, solar power can increase the value of your home by 4.1% or more.
That may not seem like much but when you factor in the average home price in America is $348,079, that’s about $14,271.24 in value increase!
That easily pays for your $5k solar power system nearly 3 times over, and that’s a hefty 42.7% profit on a $10k solar power system.
The numbers don’t lie. Solar power is here to stay.
It only makes sense to power your off grid life, by the sun!
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