From the related: "But $20,000 invested in geothermal produces about $1,300 worth of energy per year..."

Yet $20,000 invested in Canadian Oil Sands Trust returned $1480 a year.

We need more environmentalists like Patrick Moore.

This guy takes a practical and common sense view of the environment, free of the knee-jerk socialism and anti-scientism that plagues many other environmentalists. Moore doesn't view industry -- or mankind in general -- as the enemy.

Naturally this makes him despised by many environmental groups such as Green Peace. But in the end he may be far more effective than GP in helping the environment precisely because he rejects their radicalism.

In Ontario where they've even made Nuclear power into a welfare bum, the best way to describe solar is techno-theocratic welfare on steroids. I can't wait till they shut down the coal-fired plants. Our old NEP era bumper stickers might come to fruition yet.

The even bigger scam will be the Feed In tariffs.

They'll pay green producers a variable premium, from 700% to 1500% above base rate to green producers.

So electricity that comes form Hydro or thermal that sells for $1 will be purchased from Green sources for $7 - $15.

Great business model, as long as you have deep taxpayer pockets to pick to pay for such foolishness.

installed geothermal 8 years ago into my new home.
no regrets.

do you need to drill a relief well with geothermal too?

Your figures are definitely off. My brother outfitted his house to run on solar and he no longer has a $110 per month hydro bill. In addition, he generates a surplus which is sent back into the grid that he is then paid for. I'm not sure on what that amount is, but total cost for the solar system was around $15,000. The system was unsubsidized too.

actually no, just 1000 ft of 6 ft deep trench. 4000 ft of 1.5 inch pipe. aprox cost was $20 000
verse 15 000 for conventional.
Heat in the winter, cool in the summer.
Roughly $200 electic per month in January.

How about that! An eco freak that said something I could agree with. Before going ahead with it I would have to do a whole lot of research but it sounds attractive.

Actually, wind power could be a useful adjunct to a home geothermal heating/cooling plant, at least in rural areas.

The "engine" of a geothermal plant is a compressor. If you had a wind-powered compressor operating in paralled with the standard electric compressor, it could offset some of the electric bills. And a heating plant can be fairly tolerant of a "peaky" power source, because the thermal mass of the house itself will tend to damp fluctuations. This would allow one to get some useful work from the wind, without the huge expense of storage batteries and inverters. And since home heating is usually the largest single utility expense we have, it make sense to whittle away at that, rather than the electric bill. More bang for the buck.

To be clear, I'm talking about a rotary or reciprocating refrigerant compressor driven directly by a low-speed wind turbine such as are still used on the farm for water pumping.

This is my first heat wave with geothermal. Our current consumption keeping the house at 25 is the same as no a/c in past years. (Yes, we read the electricity daily so we can figure out what things cost us, not what the government or industry says.)

Daily readings helped us disproved the 7 year payback period the salesman promised us - even with the HST, we are looking at an 18 year payback because we use so little energy to heat/cool to begin with because of major insulation and keeping the house cool in the winter.

We did have to drill a discharge well which added 5 years to the paypack time.

On the other hand, I'm making almost as much return as the oil sands investment noted above but I'm awfully comfortable in the daytime and sleeping well at night - something I wouldn't be if I didn't have the geo heat pump.

BTW: we had an honest and ethical solar panel salesman. We went to him to get solar hot water and he did a detailed analysis of our situation over many months and meetings and told us the money would be better spent on geothermal. Which he didn't sell.

There are people in the industry who are in the industry because they want to help the planet, not because they are trying to get rich quick by defrauding people. (Ironically, we offered to invest in this guy's business but he turned us down because we don't believe in AGW. So I'll have to continue to get my royalties from the oil industry investments.)

"Nearly 50 per cent of sun's energy is absorbed by earth and the oceans,'' said Moore, vice-president of industry and government affairs for NextEnergy.

Oh THAT'S why Al Gore said it was millions of degrees below the Earth's surface. Guess he was right...

Re: wind power. I'm opposed to massive wind-farms but I keep thinking personal wind turbines might work because the owners would be able to adjust their consumption. For instance, cooking on the bbq instead of the oven or putting off running a load of laundry until the wind starts up again.

You are right about the thermal mass of the house dampening the need for power. I ran the a/c for 2 hours this morning before 9 taking the house down to 23. The a/c has not kicked in since, the house is currently at 24 and the outside temp is now 37.7 in the shade.

This is why I need a/c for only a few days a year; most of the time I just cool the house down at night by opening all the windows and shut it up in the daytime but for that one heat wave we get each year or two, the house can't cool down at night and then it gets pretty unpleasant and I get really stupid and cranky. Since we work out of the home, cooling down in a/c at work isn't an option for us.

Oh, and even if the grid does fail, the geothermal heat pump uses so little electricity to run, our generator can handle the cooling (and the fridge, freezer, computers and internet.)

Gary: your brother doesn't have $110 bills but what are his bills now? Even if his bill was zero (which I doubt) his money is better spent somewhere else.

Invest that money and take the income it generates to pay your power bill AND buy yourself a double double every day, rather then just pay your power bill.

A penny saved is a penny earned. While true, doesn't mean two pennies earned are worth less then one saved.

Geothermal is way overrated when it comes to using it on the average home. Geothermal contractors will often quote potential customers a payback time before they have even drilled a hole to find out what the soil is like at the site.

If electricity prices were at market rates, geothermal would be far less appealing, and payback times would be even longer.

The calculations are fudged for every last one of these so-called "green" technologies.

As an engineer - and I know quite a bit about geothermal systems - it disgusts me.

Gary if you you gave 15000 to someone for an RRSP and they said it would pay you 100 a month I bet you would run. If it lasts 12.5 years, you might break even,.....

If it works in winter, and on cloudy days, and no break downs,...

Does it come with a 15 yr warranty?

I bet there is a real story behind who is getting money, or owns the buisness that are supplying these panels?
Where is the money going? To who?
JMO

I guess Patrick Moore used to make sense to me 25 years ago which was the last time I gave money to greenpeace. He's right about nuclear and hydoelectricity and probably right about geothermal. If I had a spare $20 K to spend though, I'd cover my roof with solar panels.

One thing that solar gives you (besides expensive electricity) is relative energy independence. I also like to play with electronics and a solar power system would be a very neat toy to have. If we have another Carrington event then centralized electrical power generation may be down for months or more. This would mean ensuring that ones solar system is EMP proofed (which I think is possible but haven't talked to an EE about it yet). There is the problem of energy storage with solar power which can be handled through a large bank of lead-acid batteries which will power up the computers overnight and LED lighting will reduce the size of the battery bank needed. The other alternative is a gasoline or diesel powered generator but fuel storage is a problem.

My largest user of electricity is the AC in the summer and, coincidentally, the AC runs maximally when the sun happens to be shining. I can turn off the AC at night and open the windows and get free house cooling that way.

Rather than going for "sustainability" we should be going for multiple distributed power systems which means that one massive solar flare doesn't throw us back to the stone age (well OK, the pre-computer age which, IMO is not that much different from the stone age). Why can't "environmentalists" worry about the real potential future problems of the world but instead spend their time worrying about non-problems?

Just made practical use of both solar and wind power in a low tech manner; ie I hung my laundry to dry outside. Now have to figure out what to do with the $0.25 or so that I saved by not using my electric drier (small load of laundry).

I was first intrigued about Patrick Moore when I heard him on the radio with Roy Green some years back. He is a very sensible enviornmentalist. Reading some of his articles and the profile he has gives me some hope that sanity will prevail.
- Paul

http://www.greenspirit.com/home.cfm

LOKI: A/C with the geothermal is not my biggest electrical draw in the house. (My house is all electric btw except for gas hobs on the stove.) Biggest is hot water tank. If I had a gas hot water tank, then the a/c would be the biggest draw but currently it is quite low due to the fact that my a/c gives me hot water too.

The second highest draw is the fridge. Am considering a chest freezer mod to make a really low power fridge once this one dies (it is an Enerstar model.)

The third largest regular draw is the waterbed heater. In the summer, the bed is a bit cooler than a regular bed (the water pulls the heat away from us) and in the winter it makes it easy to keep the house super cool at night, but there is a cost to that comfort.

Adjusting any one of the rest of the electric items in the house doesn't give me any visible reduction (except the media centre computer which we will replace with a laptop in 2011 when the tv tuner in it ceases to work.) I don't notice increased energy consumption on days that I do laundry (cold water wash, line dry year round) so it isn't a big enough bump to show up over and above the daily gyrations due to temperature.

Our next "big" project is a timer for the hot water tank. After that it will be the fridge mod. At that point, our usage for 2/3 of the year might be low enough that we could run our house off solar panels.

Our goal is energy self-sufficiency but we will probably run into bylaw issues since I live in a city (rural village but within city limits.) So that will be in our next house (if we move.)

The solar guy asked why were were doing all this if we didn't believe in AGW. We replied we were conservative and believed in conserving everything, our time, money and energy. It's a game with us to see how little we can use, much like it is a game for some of Kate's readers to use as much as they can to off-set my efforts. Since I don't believe in AGW, no skin off my nose, although I think wasting the money to run a big truck out on the driveway to get back at the 'greenies' is not the sign of a true conservative. Maybe I'm getting conservative and skinflint mixed up.

Doesn't anyone remember that at GWB's ranch in Crawford, Texas, he uses a geothermal system to cool the place in summer and heat it in the winter? Plus he has a grey water recycling system.

Meanwhile, Al Manbearpig's Nashville house uses as much energy as ten regular homes.

But Manbearpig gets the Nobel Prize, and GWB is an environmental criminal. What did Kate say? The world is run by crazy people?

dinosaur:

Gary if you you gave 15000 to someone for an RRSP and they said it would pay you 100 a month I bet you would run.

Why? That's an 8 percent return, which is pretty darn good in this economic environment.

And, as usual, you're not seeing the whole picture. Depending on where you live, you're probably paying 40% or so in income taxes. So before you can pay $100 for hydro, you need to make about $170. If you don't need that money for hydro, you can stick the whole $170 in your RRSP, and since you're not paying tax on it, now you're making over 13% on your investment, which is pretty good at the best of times.

'Course, I'll admit most people don't have the discipline to do this; they just spend the money on other stuff. But they could.

Finally, hydro rates are set to go up in Ontario, thanks to McSquinty's idiotic programs, so that $100/month saved in Ontario will soon be $110 to $120, making the return even better.

The farther north you are the better sense geo-thermal makes. In southern Ontario and places with lots of water, using lake water from a fairly deep source is much cheaper.

The geo systems I've seen use PVC pipes and will last a lot longer than 15 years. The debate over savings also misses out on one very important point: overhead costs.

I work on contract and my income is always sporadic. I've had my power cut in the middle of winter. Solution? Small-scale solar and an outdoor wood burning water-tube boiler made of an old washing machine drum, feeding hot water into an Atwood RV water heater and indoor radiators. The solar, fans and pumps are all 12 volt. The Atwood will run on AC, DC, or propane if the fire is out. I use propane for cooking. If need be I run a vehicle for an hour or two to charge things up. Shore power (hydro) is a backup and a convenience, not a necessity. When I'm feeling wealthy I run the Atwood on AC power for heat, but otherwise I can survive a long time on a cord of wood. The only other gear I'd really like to have is a 3hp steam engine with a dynamo. Next time a customer or supplier goes bust on me, I'll be ready for it.

The 3000 watt inverter and four gold cart batteries were the biggest up-front costs. Most of the rest was scavenged from a water damaged truck camper and a couple of old Nissan rads with electric rather than belt driven fans. I wonder if Kate paints radiators?

My place is small but it all works. I don't do it to be green. I'm simply not interested in paying 'carbon' taxes on already overpriced fuel and electricity.

KevinB: Your forgetting its those same idiotic programs that are crediting solar at multiples of the market rate.

Lets run the numbers:

Ontario irradience peaks around 6 kW-hr/m2/day in the summer
Unsubsidized electricity costs about 10cents a kW-hr
100 sq meters of south facing roof for panels (15 ft x 60 ft)

6kw-hr/day * 365days (always sunny, always July) * $0.1 = $219 $/year

If your receiving more then this in rebates from the hydro company, congratulations your now collecting welfare (see: other peoples tax dollars)

Another poll going horribly wrong...
Do you think global warming is responsible for heat waves?

Absolutely.26%
Somewhat.21%
No way. 44%
Not sure. 9%

Total Votes for this Question: 9682

Another thing while I'm thinking about it.

If your solar panels are running your power meter backwards and you are getting credit for it, shouldn't you be paying tax on that income? Or at least be taxed on the difference between what you pay for pulling power vs the premium you get credited at?

I think I'm writing an email to the Canadian revenue agency.

Its not like your returning the same energy you used, you've created new energy and have sold it to a purchaser.

Barry O. is taking a page out of Dolton MacLiar's play book with the investment of 2 billion in solar panels:

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2010/07/obama-hails-new-solar-energy-jobs-at.html

Well ...wind energy takes up alot of room in a typical yard,so not gonna happen ,not to mention even the lightest little squeek or hum, and you will have the bi law officers ranting to you not to mention the cost of putting it up and maintaining it ..sorry canadian kate on an acrage maybe feesable but then you must spend the money on the acrage just for a wind mill?

Geo thermal sounds good but like the one poster said them man he dealt with was honest you find me an honest environmentalist and i will show you a lying environmentalist. I do beleivei t can work the sience sounds good but the cost ...even ten years is to long i could die in five minutes.

solar well LOKI the costo f them and to this very day i have herd that the longest lasting solar panel out there last's only 25 years ...so we will be generous and keep the same standard and say the payback is ten years after that it is all profit ..but you must subtract the maintenance if there is any . Sorry i will stick to good ol reliable. witch if my math is right everyone is turning away from now day's so that leaves more for me witch is perfect i won't have to worry about "weaning " off of it .

Paul in calgary.

loki
Yeah your handle is so, so appropriate when you mention a Carrington Event.
Good bloody luck at having an independant energy source after a Carrington Event...unless a wood stove or your shotgun counts.
The phenomina that Lord Carrington identified gave the primitive world of even those days a bloody nose........telegraph systems knocked out.

Wind and solar in these times feature electronic stuff that a Carrington Event will fry.
A diesel generator....has electronics in the generator (diodes ya know) and then these new wiz-bang black-boxed diesels......unless ya have an old mechanical injector pump and can some-how hand crank the sucker.

I suppose if your generator is housed in a Faraday Cage like structure and the generator is disconnected from the outside wiring when the proverbial ????? hits the proverbial fan.

Then everything electrical including your waterpump is a boat anchor.......

I have seen the lengths that Navy's go to to EMP harden their ships.....fiber optics are used a lot. Power conduits have massive grounded breakers----even then sensor elements must be replaced to function.

A Carrington Event would whack us just about as hard as that Pyroclastic flow from Vesuvious did to Pompei.

A high altitude nuke test above Enowetok knocked out utilities in Hawaii. That was a very useful and productive test.....we learned a lot.

Duffman:

Using your figures (which I agree are unrealistic in the assumption that it's always sunny, etc.)

6 kWh per square metre
10 cents per kWh
100 square metres of panel

Do the arithmetic, baby. 6 x .1 * 100 = $60 dollars a day. Times 365 days a year, that's $21,900.

Now, we both agree that it's cloudy some days, and intensity drops in winter, etc. Still, it's not hard for me to see that you could easily send back a fair amount of energy. And, as you noted, the MicroFIT lunacy pays more than $0.10 kWh; IIRC, it's in the order of $0.70. Generating say $2,000 worth of power doesn't seem outlandish.

Ironic that you still need a large drilling rig, powered by massive turbocharged and intercooled black tar diesel spewing engines and manned by big, burly cigar smoking beer bellied reckneck boys to drill those magic wells, sanctified by the First Church of Climatology to make one feel that his dick is greener than that of his quiet neighbour who has a trusty Lennox or Carrier gas furnace purring quietly in the basement.

But then again, many people believe in fairies and think if you arrange your tea light candles and Architectural Digests just so, you can fend off disease and 'evil energy'. Good grief how'd we ever get this far as a species? It's time to thin the herd.

Kevin your right, dont do math while suffering a caffeine deficiency (long day)

Collecting more then the market value of electricity is still welfare. But I can't blame those collecting it, rather those handing it out.

Duffman said "Collecting more then the market value of electricity is still welfare. But I can't blame those collecting it, rather those handing it out."

But, if the payout is anywhere near as good as KevinB calculated, we'd be stupid not to buy into the scheme. It beats the return on oil sands stock.

In order to produce enough power to run a small one room air conditioner in 35°C weather, you would need a solar panel with at least 200 square feet of surface, allowing for cloudy periods. Keeping im mind of course that it wouldn't work after dark when you turn the lights on.

Eskimo, the embedded energy in a solar panel is the same or greater than the energy it will produce over its lifetime. And there's a heck of a lot of energy that goes into drilling for oil.

No one talks about the embedded energy in things when calculating energy costs, just like no-one talks much about the disposal costs of things.

You're right, until we do, we are all simply blowing hot air.

But, in the meantime, I'm perfectly happen with the cold air blowing at me from my heat pump. And seeing Hydro One dropping my monthly charge on my account as they realized the drop in my consumption this year was not a short-term event. So much for equal billing, it changed five times this year, always to a lower amount and I'll still end the year having overpaid by $200.

CanadianKate:

I don't know that many roofs that can handle 100 square metres of panel facing in the right direction. I know at my place, there's not any where near that space, and it's blocked out by a lot of trees. Maybe if you had a nice barn without too many trees around it?

Kate...it really is too bad putting together an accurate picture isn't as easy as cut and pasting random quotes. Your ROI numbers are neither accurate nor relevant...EROI is the useful calculation to examine in regards to energy production. ROI is affected by government subsidies and other outside influences, and ignores everything except a narrow economic picture. EROI focuses on the process of producing energy itself. The EROI for the tar sands is poor...about 2:1 to 5:1...arguably the lowest of all sources of energy. Solar is higher, not by much, but certainly highter...5:1 to 10:1. The bigger picture is that the EROI for oil is falling dramatically. Meanwhile the EROI for alternative energy sources has been rising, and though many still have low EROIs, investments in ingenuity and technological progress are minute (financial and human-effort wise, when compared to oil and gas).

In the words of the infamous Ralph Klein "let the eastern bastards freeze in the dark" and something else about "creeps and bums".

Solar Power works fine for us here in northern New Mexico, but then again we are 13 miles / 20 or so k from the nearest utility pole, and almost all of that is federally protected wilderness. We also have passive solar heating for hot water and heating in the winter. We have large batteries that store excess electricity but even so we have two propane generators. Our solar systems need to be upgraded.

And the Enviros are responsible for Toronto's partial blackout:
http://www.financialpost.com/opinion/columnists/3247806/story.html