Tomorrow, City of Bellingham, Whatcom County, and even federal officials will be on hand to dedicate a solar power system installed on a parking garage in downtown Bellingham.

While I’m always intrigued by new ways to generate power, and I applaud PSE and others’ efforts on this project, I have to look at the numbers. Is this project really worth it?

The City of Bellingham press release it says it’s a 2.4 kilowatt system, and they expect it to produce about 2,000 kilowatt hours of power per year (read the full city press release here http://www.piersystem.com/go/doc/1264/267506/).

I did some quick research online, and it seems the average U.S. home uses 9,000 kWh per year. That would mean this entire new system would cover less than 25% of the power needs of a SINGLE home.

Am I just raining on their parade? I don’t know how much it cost PSE to set it up, but my guess is that it’s going to take an extremely long time for this to pay for itself.

It seems so many people are so excited about so-called ‘green energy’ that they forget to do math.

Let’s try some more basic math. This system puts out 2.4 kW. A basic, portable home generator — the kind you fire up when the power goes out, and you at least want to keep some lights on and use the microwave — puts out anywhere from 2 to 20 kW.

Hmmmmm…. sounds like I could barely depend on this system to run a few things in my house during a power outage.

*UPDATE* I just researched small, portable home generators online. Looks like the 3kW to 5kW generators range in price from $300 to $600 dollars. Granted, they take costly gas to run and produce lots of pollution in the process, but the fact that 300 bucks will buy a generator that will produce as much power as this entire solar power system shows just how financially inefficient this solar energy thing is, at least so far.