@marc, I am thinking about something called the unMonastery Sustainability Plan (coming soon, I am building it here – feel free to request access) and I was thinking: is there any way we could actually deploy solar, maybe your solar tracker itself, to produce energy for unMonasterians to use in the building? The whole point here is to reduce dependencies to improve sustainability.
From cursory research, it seems that solar (photovoltaic) outputs 12-24V DC, which should be good for most electronics after voltage transformation. What about thermal? Energy storage? Would it run on solar by day and on the power grid at night?
We need rough figures for:
- estimated yearly cost of electricity in the unMonastery, based on buying it from a utility
- estimated yearly savings from deploying solar
- estimated yearly heating costs, based on buying from a utility
- estimated yearly savings from deploying solar
- estimated costs of solar panels based on buying them and having them installed
- estimated savings achievable from building and installing ourselves what we can (this would be a "best case scenario")
- estimated duration in years of the panels.
This does not need to be thoroughly research, a guesstimate will be more than enough.
@ben, @ilariadauria, work with me on this one.