Sometimes the largest solutions seems to have some of the smallest problems. Recently, a friend of mine and I have been talking about small wind installations. We have looked at the costs of developing a small vertical axis wind turbine system for installation in the countryside of Illinois. The largest expense in our system is not the turbine or the generator, those are actually fairly reasonably priced. The most unwieldy expense is in the inverter required in order to tie the system to the electrical grid. One device that doubles the cost of the system.
It makes me wonder, how many sustainable and renewable energy system options are held up by one problem?
The unique part of this problem is that ANY distributed renewable system that we come up with will continue to be limited by this problem. There are quick ways around it right now, such as powering DC systems in your home without feeding back into the electrical grid, or using a battery bank and going completely off grid. These solutions don’t address the problem head on, and for distributed renewable energy to become popular, they will have to be grid tied at some point in time.
Maybe we should start a collaborative design project and see if the Internet can solve this problem for us?