Hi all,

 

I have a customer interested in converting his whole resort (60 bungalows) to Eco, solar and wind. Now I have never undertaken a project like this but I am very interested in taking it on.

I have worked out that just to power his 40 AC units for 10 hours a day it is going to use a lot of power. Is it going to be worth putting these on the system or keep them on the mains?

 I want to know what is going to the best to configure it. Will it be to use solar panels and perhaps wind turbine on each bungalow and battery's or to have one large area for solar panels and battery's then distrubute around the resort?

Also I have been looking into new types of battery's such as salt water batteries, we are also thinking to take off all electric hot showers.

Any other advise or ideas will be highly appreciated.

I would go grid-tie solar, that will reduce his bill without spending zillions on batteries. There is also the advantage of the grid being available if the sun doesn't shine :)

 

Payback on net-metered grid-tie is about 7 years. If you get on the MySolarRoof scheme there's a favourable feed-in tariff which will shorten the payback time significantly.

 

BUT

 

You must have your ducks in a row with PEA, they should be your first port of call.

 

Systems of over 10kW of PV (i.e large domestic) have their own rules (and that resort is well over 10kW).

 

The investment is going to be large, very large

 

What is the resort's monthly power bill?

 

EDIT to get an idea of what will be needed, a 12,000BTU aircon will need about 1kW of solar to run it for 10 hours. So for 40 aircons you are looking at 40kW of PV, i.e. about 160m² of panels.

 Now I have never undertaken a project like this ---------  this large or ever  whatever size ???