RESIDENTIAL SOLAR PROJECT | L. BENTLEY | CALGARY, ALBERTA

Owner Comments

Motivation As a Geoscientist who regularly interacts with climate scientists, I am convinced CO2 and methane emissions are causing climate change and ocean acidification. Run-away global warming and ocean acidification would lead to an environmental, social and economic catastrophe. We feel we must do our part to reduce emissions. How to Compare Prices? Different systems and arrays produce different total output for different total cost. We compared by looking at cost per KW. Our 4.02 KW system was $3680/KW. Other quotes were $3670/KW and $3400/KW. The least expensive quote was for a single inverter system. Due to shading, and as we have found out later, snow, single inverter systems are not optimal because one panel can stop all production if it does not produce. The second least expensive system by this measure was for our garage, but the orientation to south was not as good even though shading issues were not as problematic. So we went with Dandelion because the price differential was minimal. Our System

• Dandelion Renewables
  • $14,800
• 12 X 335 W Suneison mono crystaline modules
• 12 X One Micro-0.3 micro-inverters
  • Individual inverters as opposed to a single inverter for the entire array to avoid performance degradation due to variable shading
• 1 X Power One CDD monitoring gateway
  • Individual real-time monitoring of inverters
  • Estimated 3.9 MW-H/Year

Installation Dandelion handled the engineering, permitting, ENMAX contract and inspections. The process was painless. The physical installation took 2 days. Operation The system has operated well and we can monitor its production with the ABB system. We removed a big spruce which was shadowing the system and that increased the production quite a bit. The spruce had become too big for the yard and we have replaced it with a smaller slow growing pine. Our power bill has declined significantly. Future Improvements Although we can monitor the production of our system, we cannot monitor and record the amount of power we are importing or exporting to the grid. This improvement would help us better understand the economics of our system and help us manage our own power consumption (e.g. how to manage the use of the washing machine or dishwasher). – Larry Bently