Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Measure the payback time: Green Speedometer

With the constant fluctuations of the price of energy in various forms, combined with fluctuations in the cost of renewable alternative sources of energy (for example, the price for 1 kW worth of solar panels) it's hard to keep track of how fast an installed system will pay for itself.

What I'd like to see is a web page that dynamically monitors these factors, and perhaps by entering your postal code it calculates your location (for an estimate of the number of sun days per year, the local electrical rate, and all other applicable factors) and creates a graph or even just a "speedometer" to show how long until the system is paid for.

Perhaps along with this, and estimate of the number of tons of CO2 that will be saved as well, though I'd prefer that the calculation include the impact of producing the solar cells (or whatever) in the calculation.

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