SolarYpsi

Evergreen was a solar panel manufacturer based in Marlboro Mass with a plant in Midland Michigan. They invented a new technology where they could make ribbons of silicon to make solar cells. Unfortunately, with China entering the solar market in a BIG way, prices were driven down to a point where Evergreen could not compete any more. They file for chapter 11 back in August. You can read more here.

One of our SolarYpsi supporters, Matt Grocoff from Greenovation.TV in Ann Arbor alerted me to a close out sale of Evergreen panels from Sun Electric for $0.78/watt! I could not pass up a price like that.

A quick phone call to Corinne the Ypsi Food Coop manager and a survey of the roof, we ordered eighteen 220-watt Evergreen panels for another 4 KW to add to the roof. Here is the datasheet if you want more details about the panels.

The panels were shipped by R+L Carriers and I was able to pick them up at there warehouse just off Ecorse. Here they are being unloaded behind the Ypsi Food Coop.

These panels are bigger then the Sanyo panels we have been using.

Robert helped moved the panels into the back of the Ypsi Food Coop where they will sit until we have some warmer weather.

I’ve started working on a rack design and got a quote for the inverter and racking material. My first rough estimate is that the ROI on this installation will be about 8 years. Maybe shorter depending on how quickly electrical rates rise.

The next time you are hanging out in Ypsilanti’s Frog Island, bring your laptop and connect to WirelessYpsi. About a month ago SolarYpsi and WirelessYpsi teamed up to install a solar power wireless internet radio on a pole on the North end of Frog Island. It is located at the North end of the community gardens. The radio at the top of the pole is powered by a small battery inside the box and recharged by the solar panel beneath it. When someone connects to WirelessYpsi, their laptop will connect to this radio and it will relay the signal to other WirelessYpsi radios until it finds a gateway radio to connect it to the internet. You can see some installation pictures on the installation page under WirelessYpsi Solar Radio. Thanks to Steve Pierce from HDL and WirelessYpsi for funding this project.

There exists a company out in the wild called Enphase Energy that makes various solar related products, one of which is called Enlighten. This is software that allows an owner of a solar panel array to track the amount of electricity generated by the array. This data is also uploaded to an Enphase website and the data is made available for download. We here at SolarYpsi have begun developing a procedure that will download this Enphase data for 403 Huron St and make the solar generation curves available through SolarYpsi.org. The early fruits of our labor are already visible! Do note that data may look strange or might even disappear as the kinks get worked out, but it will come back, we promise!

One of the most exciting things with this addition to SolarYpsi is the relative ease with which new installations can be added to SolarYpsi. Anybody who is using Enphase products can be included on our website with only a few minutes worth of work and without the need for one of our old laptops. There are already a couple of other locations that may be coming online soon!

The designer of SolarYpsi, Nik Estep, has added a new feature to the “installation” page. At the bottom of that page there is a link to compare sites. Clicking on that link will bring you to a new page with the all the solar curves on one graph.

Solar Comparison Graph for Oct 23, 2011

In the graph you can see that the Bakery generates more than twice as much power as the other sites. This is because it’s a 6KW systems where as the others are all around 2.4KW. You can see that it was cloudy in the morning and sunny in the afternoon. The Bakery’s power drops off faster than normal because it starts to get shaded from some tress. You can see that with the Ypsi Food Coop panels too at around 4:30pm in the afternoon. You can also see that Adams School’s power get’s clipped a little in the very late afternoon. City Hall is very high and has no shading issue, so the parabolic curve is smooth all the way to sun set.

Note that this clipping is worse in the winter, since the sun is lower in the sky. It will be interesting to look at this comparison graph again next summer.

Click on the link and play around with the graphs for different days or weeks. If you click on the names in the legend you can turn individual curves on and off.

Yes, we need to get over to the Bakery and Ypsi Food Coop and trim some trees.