The High Cost Of Pie

Pie in the sky, that is. There is an interesting little article from Reuters that describes - in glowing terms - a house in New Jersey that is run entirely on solar energy. It is quite a complicated system.

His conventional-looking family home in the pinewoods of western New Jersey is the first in the United States to show that a combination of solar and hydrogen power can generate all the electricity needed for a home.

The Hopewell Project, named for a nearby town, comes at a time of increasing concern over U.S. energy security and worries over the effects of burning fossil fuels on the climate.

"People understand that climate change is a big concern but they don't know what they can do about it," said Gian-Paolo Caminiti of Renewable Energy Associates, the commercial arm of the project. "There's a psychological dividend in doing the right thing," he said.

Strizki runs the 3,000-square-foot house with electricity generated by a 1,000-square-foot roof full of photovoltaic cells on a nearby building, an electrolyzer that uses the solar power to generate hydrogen from water, and a number of hydrogen tanks that store the gas until it is needed by the fuel cell.

In the summer, the solar panels generate 60 percent more electricity than the super-insulated house needs. The excess is stored in the form of hydrogen which is used in the winter — when the solar panels can't meet all the domestic demand — to make electricity in the fuel cell. Strizki also uses the hydrogen to power his fuel-cell driven car, which, like the domestic power plant, is pollution-free.

Sounds expensive. Which it is. The system cost around $500,000. Now, Strizki says that copying the house's systems would be much cheaper now that they are all developed. (I personally don't believe they would drop that much, but let's just run with that number, shall we?) Which is all well and good, I suppose. But I ran a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation based on data from the census. Retrofitting every dwelling in the US would cost around $10,820 billion.  The total worth of the US GDP was $11,733.5 billion in 2004. That isn't even figuring the land area involved for the solar arrays.

Anyone who tells you that these alternatives are actually workable on a large scale is fooling you or themselves. (And no, magic does not occur later to make it all affordable, there are certain limits to how much costs will come down).

Other Links to this Post

1. Blue Crab Boulevard » The Problems With A Lot Of The Glib Answers — Monday, 5 February , 2007 @ 7:21 pm