My friend wants to put a Solar Array on his House Rooftop. What are the best panels out now and inverters. Should he consider Battery or just sell back to the Power company? We are in the Valley of the Sun! So it gets very hot in the summer I burn my hand opening my car door all the time, flippin oven here.
I want to send them to SolCrypto.com to affiliate the purchase but they may decide not to do it. Very old school and they don't care... Can I claim for them if they don't want to?
Ifloorwalker... I meant to ask, since it will be a while before the Graphene is implemented, is it worth it to wait? Especially in my hot climate and the added Percentage it grants over the lifespan.
Thanks in advance for any direction!
Hi CryptoNick,
basically there are three types of solar panels out on the market that are mature technologies. (i.e. they have been operational now over 20 years and GW installed capacity in most climate zones). I wouldn't wait for Graphene. I've been in research, it takes 5-10 years and then another 5-10 years to get stuff to "mature" or a usable product, and think of all the Solarcoins you could get in that time!
The first is crystalline silicon (i.e. Yingli, Canadian Solar, Kyocera, Sharp etc etc), the second is quasi-crystalline silicon (ReneSola) and thirdly there is thin-film (First Solar, and Solar Frontier). Now these are the three major categories.
For the valley of the Sun, I am familiar with the climate in Arizona and it is a hot desert climate. There are very extreme temperature days especially in the summer months. A dry and wind abrasive climate as well.
This means that panels that have a track record in this Köppen defined climate zone (i.e. crystalline silicon and also CdTe as the First Solar HQ is in Phoenix and they are testing there many years.)
I would gravitate to buying panels with a lower temperature loss coefficient (e.g. ReneSola at -0.4%/DegK) or First Solar CDTe (-0.25%/DegK). And also a good warranty for sand storms (if you get any) and excessive abrasive activities that diminish the solar modules encapsulants. (this is tested independently by IEC61215 2nd Ed. and IEC61730-2) but better and more data is always good. UL standard is also mandatory for the US as well (i think it is UL1703). The difference per year could be somewhere between 3-4% or even more between the module types in your climate zone.
For inverters, if is a house, micro-inverters (one on the back of each module) are getting very affective.
Also for storage, Tesla Powerwall is very exciting (but there are also other alternatives), although you would need to get a bigger capacity than their simplest smallest unit. (I think it was 3kWh?)
We are currently at the verge of an amazing revolution. Solar to power your own house, own storage, your own financial assets (solarcoin). This is excellent and exciting.
Cheers,
-lfloorwalker