I sat in on a Department of Energy webinar on photovoltaic solutions this afternoon. It was from the Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy group. The entire presentation is posted online here – Solar PV Webinar: In My Backyard and Open PV Mapping Project. I found a couple of useful items for our blog readers. Check them out!

Presenter Chris Helm, a GIS developer at the DOE National Renewable Energy Laboratory, showcased a web tool called In My Backyard (IMBY).

It is a web based simulator for small commercial and residential solar projects, calculates production potential, and estimates cost of the system and energy savings (including applicable rebates and local electric rates). It also can do a bit cruder simulation for wind projects, including calculations for production potential (limited to 38 states), but with no economic components.

Future versions will potentially include an Open API, enhancing the wind components, adding dynamic building loads (currently assumes your house and standard power consumption), and perhaps even an iPhone application.

You can check out IMBY here.

It is a good first step for looking at potential solar projects, but it has several obvious drawbacks like ignoring shading and it also assumes constant electric rates for the life of system.

They mentioned a similar tool at Cooler Planet.

For grins, I tried a house that I own in Austin, Texas for the south-facing roof space and got the following results: 11 kW generation system, $90K gross cost, only federal incentive (30%), $63K net, expected energy savings year 1 at 9 cents per kWh = $1250, payback = over 50 years. Yikes.

I also did an apartment project in Houston, Texas with a similar payback timeframe.

Then Ted Quinby, another GIS developer at the DOE National Renewable Energy Laboratory, showed the Open PV Mapping Project.

It allows you to see where current solar projects exist that have been entered into the NREL database and it includes information on each like size, cost, date of install, and location.

The Open PV Project can be viewed here.

It is a great visualization of the available stats, but it is limited since it is only as good as the data that has been added. Think about it like Wikipedia.

Perhaps the most interest stat of the day was that the average price in the U.S. for the average size solar system is coming down substantially. It was $11.00 per watt in 1998 to $8.01 per watt in 2009.