Can anyone give me a link to a website that sells really big solar panels? Enough to run a small cafe on entirely solar power.
I cannot offer a source of info, but... Solar power is great, but not ideal (yet). Currently, one-story buildings that have a rooftop totally made up of solar panels can only get about % of the power needed by that means. Additional panels will be needed.
Larger solar arrays are made by grouping more solar panels together. There are no large solar panels. They are all about the same size. Do an internet search on solar photovoltaic panels, and you will get hundreds of hits from on line companies that sell them. Most have a sales consultant you can e-mail who will help you decide what you need.
Just google search solar panels or pv panels and you should get a long list of them. That's what I did. Most of the sites selling them will also have the inverters etc that you'll need. Most likely you'll put several small or medium sized panels on your roof - as opposed to just one large one. You probably won't be able to run an entire cafe off of photovoltaic panels, even if you have a bank of batteries. Too many appliances running at the same time. Ask your electric utility company about net metering - you'll buy juice from them when your demand is high and sell to them when your demand is low - IF you can find a sunny day when you're not using juice, but if you have a restaraunt-sized refrigerator you probably won't be selling as much as you're buying. In effect, it won't eliminate your elec bill, just make it a bit smaller. Either way, you may be looking at spending $20,000 to cover the roof with PV panels and your savings won't pay that back any time soon. So, PV is not so great for a business. Much better for a home where you'll be at work all day the only appliances running in your house is your frig. Whatever you invest to solar your house will be repaid when you sell it, meanwhile you'll reduce your bills dramatically, especially if you convert all your indoor lighting to LEDs. On the other hand, the Googleplex, Google's office building full of computers, covered their roof with pv panels and claim to have reduced their monthly bill by /3. BUT, that's a huge building with lots of roof space.
I think you may be surprised how much energy a little cafe like that uses. Since the air conditioning, refrigerators, and other appliances are going nonstop, I'd expect the energy usage to be several times that of a normal house. If you have access to the electric bills of the cafe while it was in operation, look up the kWh's used per month. For scale, I will say that our house uses 500 kWh per month, and needs 3 kW of panels to keep up with that. Scale up to match the restaurant, as a ballpark estimate. If you don't have access to the electric bills, then go visit a similar cafe in town, or a nearby town, and ask them how much their electric bill is. If the ballpark estimate still looks doable to you, then contact a professional solar installer to get an accurate, no-obligation estimate. Most likely, the cafe will use gas heat for cooking. But if not, electricity from solar panels is probably the most inefficient way to cook. Consider having solar ovens for most of the cooking, if you have land, with gas as a backup on cloudy days.
