Welcome
by Neil Caudle
This morning, my house began making electricity. A pleasant young man named J.R. came to fiddle with the wiring and flip a few switches to put the system on-line, and now twelve photovoltaic panels plus two water-heating units are in business on my sunny, south-facing roof.
As we stood in the basement, eyeing a nifty panel of switches and digital readouts, I asked J.R. what I would need to do to operate the system.
“Not a thing,” he said firmly, meaning, Keep your mitts off the gear. But then he hurried to console me: “You can go online and monitor your system and your production rate any time you like!”
Well, okay then.
As soon as my batteries are charged, surplus electricity will flow past an electric meter and onto the grid. In January, Progress Energy will send me a small but satisfying check. I like that idea. Next spring, I will claim a tax credit for a part of the cost of the system. I like that too.
But I will freely admit that my brand-new solar system may soon be obsolete. MegaWatt Solar is the cutting edge, and they’re not on my roof yet.
And I make no claim to bragging rights. Tom Meyer, a chemist who has spent much of his career working on ways to harvest sunlight using cheap chemistry instead of costly silicon, told a group of us last week that conventional photovoltaic arrays like mine are a dead end. The United States would need a photovoltaic array one hundred miles square, costing trillions of dollars, to satisfy its appetite for energy. His answer: new materials that capture sunlight and store it far more efficiently than batteries can.
So my rooftop array is a drop in the bucket. I get that. I also get that technology changes so fast that wise people wait for the next wave, or maybe the next, before they take the plunge. But I’m impatient, and I’m not trying to satisfy the nation’s appetite for energy. I’m just trying to have a little more control over my own. I will be delighted if Tom Meyer or MegaWatt Solar or anybody else can produce the breakthrough that weans us away from fossil fuels for good. So go ahead, guys; render me obsolete. But for now, I’ll just try to make a little hay while the sun shines.
