Is Solar Reliable?

One of the best questions one might ask is about the reliability of solar power- For a home owner, can a rooftop solar system actually be relied upon?

Well, short answer is yes- the technology has advanced and a properly designed and installed solar power system can be relied upon to do what it was designed to do.

There’s concepts to understand here that make the answer not as straight forward…

In the utility level discussions, fossil fuel proponents try to discredit wind and solar by labeling them ‘unreliable’ due to the intermittent (solar) or variable (wind) aspects. The idea being (I guess) that only those power sources that you can start up ‘on demand’ are considered reliable.

Well, contrary to that narrative, the engineers who design wind and solar are pretty smart- and they’ve got solutions. We all know about batteries, and there’s other kinds of storage that include pneumatics, water, and even heavy trains.

I like the definitions in the dictionaries and think that ‘unreliable’ means - can’t be relied upon.

I also think that solar engineers know exactly the nature of the sun’s availability cycle (they can tell you when the sun will rise and set) and they have engineered solutions that allow a day’s (or more) worth of energy to be produced in the 5 or so hours of maximum sunlight and store it for later use when the sunlight has dwindled.

Perfectly, as designed, those systems operate in a way to convert the intermittent availability of sunlight into full time power.

Now, do they break down? Yes. A great analogy is a car….
This works for wind turbines, solar power systems, nuclear, natural gas, coal, oil, and even hydro plants as well.

New cars work great, but sometimes they break down unexpectedly. Early in the car industry, that sucked enough that warranties were created- and they last until today. Meaning, everything we manufacture is subject to some level of failures…

One way to look at the ‘reliability’ of a power system is to look at how often they break down- and solar stands just fine in that category. In fact, inverters typically have a 10 year warranty and panels 20+ year warranties- significantly longer than any cars, washers, driers, refrigerators, or even pools. That is a significant fact- manufacturers are willing to stand by the gear in a big way.

But what about weather? How does solar stand up to fossil fuels if there is extreme weather? The answer is surprising.

Let’s look specifically at the big Texas 2021 blackout. There was a deep investigation and analysis done by the University of Texas at Austin Energy Institute that looked into the root causes of the issue. (Link at end below)

In one part of the analysis, they compared the impact of the outages for each source and said:

"Compared to wind and solar outages, the peak coal and natural gas generator outages occur at much longer intervals of time after reaching freezing temperatures. The peak capacity of outages, relative to the time when the plants first experienced freezing temperatures, was approximately 6 days for natural gas plants, 5 days for coal plants, 1 day for wind turbines, and 3 days for solar generators."

So, for that specific event, utility level solar farms came back online twice as fast as natural gas plants which are hailed as one of the most reliable type of power plants.

So, what does all this mean for a home owner…

To me, it means rooftop solar technology has advanced to a point where the manufacturers are putting extremely long warranties on their equipment. This, and the stories like the Texas power outage all point towards rooftop solar being extremely reliable.

Finally, one more issue to address…

At the beginning I mentioned ‘properly designed and installed’ solar systems. This is important to understand because there are, unfortunately, many misconceptions that can arise out of a conversation with a solar sales team that either has low experience or worse- low integrity.

A home owner needs to understand what the system is being designed for. It might be only to produce power for home use and feed back the rest to the grid. It might be to power all the home’s requirements in an ‘off grid’ style.

If a home owner thinks their new solar system will allow them to divorce from the grid and maintain power through the night during the next power outage, but there’s no batteries included in the system- they’re in for a rude awakening…

A rooftop solar system, just like a car, will do what it is designed to do. Also, just like a car, the operator of the rooftop solar system needs to understand how to drive it…

If you are looking into rooftop solar for your home or business because you are tired of ever increasing energy bills or want a bit of freedom of choice from the local monopolistic utility- I have a book coming out soon that will help. Click here to get notified when Tucson Solar Insider Desk Guide for Buying Solar is released.

“The Timeline and Events of the February 2021 Texas Electric Grid Blackouts”

https://energy.utexas.edu/sites/default/files/UTAustin%20%282021%29%20EventsFebruary2021TexasBlackout%2020210714.pdf

By the way, just have a look at the executive summary- you might be shocked to see that natural gas delivery to the power plants was disrupted before electricity was disrupted… Think about that- the fuel supply to the ‘reliable’ power plant failed first…

Be Good!
Curtis