10.15-Megawatts/year photovoltaics
 

My friend John Gilkison had a turnkey photovoltaic system installed at his home in New Mexico and produced 10.15-Megawatt-hours of power last year.
He and his family is now poised for a zero-carbon plug-in hybrid.Their commute,1-way to Las Cruces,is 25-miles.With opportunity charging in town,they'd rely little on the gasoline backup.If the in-town charging stations were utilizing only renewable power sources,they'd be flirting with a zero-carbon car for much of their commuting.Something my generation would not even conceived of when we were young.

Wow! Must be a good size installation. That works out to about 27Kwh per day. Which seems like an awful lot of energy usage. New Mexico averages 5 to 5 and a half hours of solar insolation per day. So maybe 5 KW worth of panels.

Actually, this is what originally interested me in PV and electric vehicles back when I was still in high school and we had the first "oil shortage". The problem with this scenario back then were that PV costs were IIRC around $10 per watt. And I don''t think that was installed. Additionally, electric vehicles were just experiencing their rebirth. As always, batteries were the weak link. Controllers were less efficient and cars were in general heavier even though they weren't required to have all the safety equipment they do now. I just remember thinking how cool it would be to have a car that didn't need gasoline and having a home that could generate its own power so that no one else could determine my cost of fuel or power.

Anyway,"more power" ha,ha to your friend.
JJ

Maybe my calcs are off, that's a lot of juice for a house !

a lot
 

The sizing was in anticipation of adding an EV as budget permitted.John's a net energy producer and has been selling the excess power to the New Mexico grid.
The synchronous inverter interface allows after-sunset-use without batteries.
The family continues to shed load as more efficient appliances avail themselves,freeing up additional energy for sale or car charging.;)

10.15 megawatt hours (per year) is the same as 10,150 killowatt hours or divided by 12 months would be 845.83 killowatt hours per month.

Is that right?

regards
Mech

Mech,I'll have to verify it,but I think John told me that the system was rated at 5.1-Kw,conservatively,and that he should expect higher performance.
I was supposed to see it last year and then the truck died.:(
I went over to EV World and found John's old blog on the system.They have 20-255-Watt panels,each with it's own inverter.
The company downgrades the performance so as not to give the customer too optimistic an expectation.