9479 photovoltaic cells

Pricey and your you would be looking at 15 years plus to get your investment back........all prices are ISH.........

[quote=craftfairy;88815]I don't know if there is a thread on photovoltaic cells, but if there isn't I'd like to ask about it. I heard on a Uk, radio programme that it was easy to get these in Italy. Has anyone got them?
Are they easy to buy?
Where can I buy them?
How do you go about selling surplus back to ENEL?
Any thing else that anyone want to add?
Thanks.

Yvonne[/quote]
This is something to consider with feet very much on the ground,one wouldn't just go out and buy the things,get a local expert from a company to look at your site,also to give a feasability evaluation,the cost of installation of a system adequate for the needs /possibilities of the site/building etc with all the theoretical
return from the "gestore di rete" on excess production,as has been said it's pretty big money up front and i personally know three people(italian) who have been doing it a while(2-4 years) they have received as yet nothing back,which rather vanifies the equation of break even etc,so it might not be the best solution at the end of the day,Another thing i did not know about but someone informed was telling me that the current photovoltaic "technology" is quite old and there will be in the short- mid term breakthroughs changing many things as the current equipment can be subject to breaking/damage or requiring maintenance etc.

[quote=Sebastiano;88835]Another thing i did not know about but someone informed was telling me that the current photovoltaic "technology" is quite old and there will be in the short- mid term breakthroughs changing many things as the current equipment can be subject to breaking/damage or requiring maintenance etc.[/quote]
I've been interested in renewables since the time when the only people who were interested in such things tended to have very long hair, aspired to get 'back to the land', lived in comunes and said, "Far out, man!" a lot.

Then, there was talk of how photovoltaic technology would soon be revolutionised by new discoveries and how - in just a couple of years - everyone's electricity would be supplied by panels on their roof.

There have been advances over the last few decades and it's always possible that the breakthrough discovery which will result in panels that cost £1 a kilowatt and have a lifetime measured in decades will be announced next week, but history suggests it would be unwise to expect this.

The current technology is such that photovoltaic panels couldn't be used in place of tiles on your terrace floor, but the panels are not terribly fragile and they do not require maintenance.

There is a thread [URL="http://www.italymag.co.uk/forums/cost-living-utility-services/8669-winding-your-electricity-meter-back.html"]here[/URL] which briefly discusses this topic. I recall reading in another thread - which I can't currently find, possibly it's one of the fairly long ones to do with "heating" - that the scheme currently in place here involves getting a bank loan to cover the cost of photovoltaic installation sized such that its output will result in ENEL's payments for electricity generated covering what you'd normally pay in electric bills plus the repayment of the loan over a period of ten years. All the payments from ENEL after the loan is paid off are profit.

If this is what Sebastiano's acquaintances are involved with, it's hardly surprising that they have not received anything back in the sense of not yet making a profit, but they should be effectively getting electricity for free if the installation was sized and sited correctly.

Al

If you have mains supply to feed back in to then you probably do not need the cells. My son uses them but then he has no mains supply. As for selling back excess I just don't think it viable at the current capital costs involved. Perhaps one day...

[quote=elliven;88865]If you have mains supply to feed back in to then you probably do not need the cells. My son uses them but then he has no mains supply. As for selling back excess I just don't think it viable at the current capital costs involved. Perhaps one day...[/quote]

No you're missing the point about grid connected systems.

1) You don't need batteries. Big saving.

2) You can get by with a smaller system. More savings.

3) The government has/had a program for this. You actually got paid for all your production and not the excess.

When Prodi came in the incentive program changed. The older program was quite different. Who knows what the next budget will bring?

My company in the UK is involved with renewable technologies and definitely photvoltaics are bottom of the list when we are considering options. They have a high capital cost and long pay back periods. I can' t see they would be any more viable in italy and the area of cells required to export back to ENEL would be huge.
Normally you would only export to the grid if you were generating excessive electricity. This is more likely to be from something equivalent to Combined Heat & Power schemes (CHP) or wind power ( again not something I would do) than from photovoltaics. I've no idea what the grant sitaution is in italy and my own dealings with ENEL are at an early stage but already the way to deal with them ( as far as I can see) is to keep things very simple!

What would be much more worthwhile investigating is the use of solar thermal for producing hot water. Here you could store the hot water produced until you need it. It's not as dependant on high tech solutions ( effectively the sun is heats up the equivalent of a radiator on the roof and hot water is produced and subsequently stored). This would be much more efficient and there will be commercial systems pretty readily available.

My advice is generally improve the efficiency of your systems and / or the house so you need less energy so that if you really do need to use expensive and complex renewable technologies you need less of them. Improving Energy efficiency is less sexy and less visable than rewable technologies but much more cost effective. The only renewable technology i would consider in Italy would be solar thermal for the hot water. As I have an apartment it isn't really an option for us.

[quote=NewtoTuscany;88940]
. I can' t see they would be any more viable in italy and the area of cells required to export back to ENEL would be huge.
Normally you would only export to the grid if you were generating excessive electricity.
I've no idea what the grant sitaution is in italy and my own dealings with ENEL are at an early stage but already the way to deal with them ( as far as I can see) is to keep things very simple!

What would be much more worthwhile investigating is the use of solar thermal for producing hot water. Here you could store the hot water produced until you need it. It's not as dependant on high tech solutions ( effectively the sun is heats up the equivalent of a radiator on the roof and hot water is produced and subsequently stored). This would be much more efficient and there will be commercial systems pretty readily available.

My advice is generally improve the efficiency of your systems and / or the house so you need less energy so that if you really do need to use expensive and complex renewable technologies you need less of them. Improving Energy efficiency is less sexy and less visable than rewable technologies but much more cost effective. The only renewable technology i would consider in Italy would be solar thermal for the hot water. As I have an apartment it isn't really an option for us.[/quote]

With the change in government nobody really knows what the grant situation is. But the old program paid something like 45 cents per kw/h produced. Not per kw/h exported but for each kw/h the system produced. Plus the system had an inflation kicker. The whole program ran for 20 years from the install date. So basically you shipped all the power you produced out to the grid and then bought it back at market rates. If you could handle the upfront costs then it wasn't a bad program. The related bank loans even reduced the upfront cost problem.

Can't dispute anything else you said. The kw/h you save is always the cheapest best kw/h.

[quote=NewtoTuscany;88940]...photvoltaics ...have a high capital cost and long pay back periods. I can' t see they would be any more viable in italy and the area of cells required to export back to ENEL would be huge.
Normally you would only export to the grid if you were generating excessive electricity.[/quote]
Agree with what you say about solar water heating being the most cost-effective solar energy technology at present. Also agree that it's far better not to use energy rather than try to produce it on a small scale locally. However, unsure about the above statement.

Over the last 12 months, our average daily electricity consumption was 12.7 kWh. The figures I've seen for photovoltaic systems suggest a 1kW array can be as small as 5 x 2 metres. Even allowing for much less than rated efficiency in the real world, surely this means that an area of photovoltaic panels three times that size would be pretty certain to produce more electricity than we've been using? Is an area of roof 3 x 10 metres actually "enormous"? That would be, in fact, less than a third of the area of our south-facing roof.

As for why photovoltaics (and solar water heating for that matter) might be more viable in Italy than in Britain, doesn't the fact that annual insolation for Rome is 4.2 kWh/m2/day while that figure for London is 2.6 and for Edinburgh 2.3 ([URL="http://www.apricus.com/html/insolation_levels_europe.htm"]source[/URL]) have some bearing on the question?

Al

AllanM and NickZ, I really am not at all sure, but I have heard that the problem of exporting back to ENEL requiring lots of cells is about ENEL policy and attitude, rather than about what is technically feasible. perhaps someone can enlighten?

IIRC Enel was actually pushing this at their shops. Maybe it's local Enel reps? Or maybe they are trying to get people to buy the setups from them.

Enel is going to make damn sure the install is up to their standards or better.

[quote=NickZ;89007]Enel is going to make damn sure the install is up to their standards or better.[/quote]
Absolutely, and that's not necessarily down to being bureaucratic and obstructive just for the sake of it. For example, the last thing they want is a bunch of independent solar systems feeding power into the network when they send out maintenance people to work on part of the system that's been disconnected from the big power generating plants and is therefore supposedly 'dead'.

I have a leaflet produced last year by Enel promoting [I]impianti solari[/I], both [I]fotovoltaici[/I] and [I]solari termici[/I]. I'm not certain, but I imagine this leaflet is still available from an Enel shop. Enel's website has a search facility for the [URL="http://maps.ubiest.com/Product/Customers/Enel2/MapBroker.php?javarel=1&Group=4304.2_ES_ES&StartScale=0&StartX=0&StartY=0&GrpFilter=4&IdCust=4304.2.A63twE&lang="]nearest Enel shop[/URL].

Enel's website also has some general information on photovoltaics [URL="http://www.enel.it/enelsi/offerta/casa_risp_energetico/imp_fotovoltaici/Index.aspx"]here[/URL] for those fluent in Italian (and those adept in translating Google translations from Italian to Engish into English). That website also claims to have simulation software which you can use to experiement with different possible photovoltaic and solar thermal installations. It claims this facility is available to only to registered users, but although I am registered with Enel, they aren't allowing me to play, so I suspect it isn't working at the moment.

Al

Crikey, I seem to have started something here. We're off to Italy the week after next and I'll be in the ENEL shop finding out all that I can. I'll keep you posted too.

Yvonne