patrick.net

Interesting solar panel situation:
https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/1pokxz6/bought_a_house_with_free_solar_panels_15_years/

Bought a house with "free" solar panels 1.5 years ago. Just found out $45K is owed on the panels.

Solar panels all go away when then price goes down. Here in Idaho it's 10.5c Kwh. Panels here are rare only people from blue states moving in buy them lol. You can't pencil out those high energy prices it's impossible. I advise move away from those blue areas.

zzyzzx says

Interesting solar panel situation:
https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/1pokxz6/bought_a_house_with_free_solar_panels_15_years/

Bought a house with "free" solar panels 1.5 years ago. Just found out $45K is owed on the panels.

Flag right here that this is a bullshit Reddit post:

We do not know if there were any other owners between the original owner and the person that we bought it from.

And another:

Last month, we refinanced our mortgage. The lender asked for proof of ownership of the solar panels.

AD says

or is this a total waste and failure ?

Depends on the purpose of the project. If the real purpose was to grift massive funds under the guise of creating solar power, it was a success.

HeadSet says

AD says

or is this a total waste and failure ?

Depends on the purpose of the project. If the real purpose was to grift massive funds under the guise of creating solar power, it was a success.

Like the California HST.

AD says

FreeAmericanDOP says

Concentrated Solar Failure

another R&D failure subsidized by the federal guvmint

so anything good came out of this like lessons learned to apply to a future similar or next generation renewable energy project ? could they salvage a lot of the hardware and software from this ?

or is this a total waste and failure ?

Lessons? It was all fraud, they’ll do it again. Success isn’t the goal, theft is the goal. And that goal was accomplished.

There are good use cases for solar, but I doubt that solar cells are one of those cases.

Using a parabolic mirror to concentrate sunlight on the cold water input to a hot water tank sounds cost-effective.

Arranging houses to take advantage of sunlight via solar mass is an old method that works. Iranians had that worked out millenia ago. They also did clever cooling with solar-heated chimneys.

I've long thought that algae and yeast based solar cells to create and then ferment sugars into burnable alcohol might also be worthwhile.

Patrick says

Using a parabolic mirror to concentrate sunlight on the cold water input to a hot water tank sounds cost-effective.

That is a common technique out here. Virgina law requires that a rooftop solar water heater must feed into a conventional hot water tank. The purpose is to cool down the water since the rooftop system will heat the water above the 160 degrees considered safe for a hot water supply. I had an Australian friend tell me that back home there is no water heaters, as the issue there is cooling the water down (Australia is partly in the tropics).