Dear Business Brains:
You should quickly learn about the difference between electrical power and energy or you will continue to be taken for a ride by unscrupulous dealers and installers like JDL Builders. Your statement that "the solar system has produced an average of 21 kilowatts of power per day" reveals that you are not qualified (lack the Brains) to discuss the solar business. So here is a free lesson for you: Power is measured in kilowatts, while energy is measured in kilowatthours (1 KWH is the energy required to keep a 1KW AC unit working for one hour). The 5KW-rated JDL installation indeed has generated about 20 kWh (not kilowatt!) a day,on average, since the systems started reporting data on Sep 11th, 2009 (meaning, it effectively delivered as much electricity as a 5KW AC system working for 4 hours a day under Standard Test Conditions). However, the photovoltaic material used in this installation has some nasty properties. One of them is the severe degradation of the output with time (after exposure to the Sun). As evidenced by other installations with the same material, this installation will start underperforming vs expectations next year:
http://ecdfan.blogspot.com/2009/07/case-studies-in-underperformance.html
Another nasty property is the heating-up of the roof and increasing HVAC costs due to lack of vantilation, effectively reducing the net electricity generated by up to 20%.
And Miami-Dade have said nothing about the quality of the PV material and whether it generates any electricity - they have only said that it can be glued to roofs. By the way, credit cards can be glued to roofs, as well.
Oh, yeah, this past Saturday, the system generated 15 kWh, or 30% below your 21 kWh. Was it only due to the weather? Only time will tell.
The music students will have some questions once they start looking at the data on a regular basis. Will the music teachers have the answers?
(Updated post Oct. 27 to correct kilowatt hours reference.)
Talk about a working demo project and smart co-branding. To demonstrate that it IS possible for smaller companies to invest in renewable energy technology that won’t necessarily require a massive retrofit, solar dealer John Eriksen of JDL Builders in Stuart, Fla., is using his wife Cindy Kessler’s music school as a live demonstration project.
The 50-year old building housing the Stuart School of Music (the link is for the system’s real-time monitoring dashboard), which contains eight studios, features a 5 kilowatt thin-film photovoltaic solar system laminated onto a new standing seam metal roof. The solar film laminate from Uni-Solar is about as thick as a credit card, and the product is approved for application in the Miami-Dade county.
The school has set up a kiosk that explains how the roof works, so that parents and the roughly 300 students are exposed to its benefits. (The site referenced above provides estimates of offsets that the solar system has enabled, including barrels of oil, carbon dioxide emissions and lightbulbs.)
During the first month of production, the solar system has produced an average of 21 kilowatt hours of power per day. The Stuart School also has embraced a number of other green business practices including an investment in low-E windows (which provide insulation properties), LED lighting, low-flow plumbing fixtures and paints that are free of volatile organic compounds.
