3 Responses

1. Biggest problem with your question is “how big?”

   You might take a look at http://www.tesserasolar.com/ though, and if I were you, I’d write them an email, they look like a company that would help you./

2. it costs a lot of money, unfortunately. im involved with a project at the moment which is awaiting planning consent. we need power on a farm. to have mains electricity installed would cost £85,000. we are having a wind turbine, coupled with solar panels, and the necessary battery bank to store the power. even then, we may have to have a small diesel generator as absolute backup although we would rather not if at all possible. the lowest cost that we can achieve for this is £28000, and that is after any grant awarded and by doing all of the work ourselves except the actual connection and testing. it will take at least 15yrs to recouperate the money at todays electricity prices.its sad really, we have all this talk about going green and renewable energy, but how many people can put their hands in thir pockets for such amounts and then wait so long for the benefits? for the purposes of your project, you need to cost out for your power scource, cable,storage, and power converter.

3. You can research the Do-It-Yourself e-books out there and spend about $50/ each or you can go to this site.
   http://www.fsec.ucf.edu/en/ The Florida Solar Energy Center can help answer your questions.
   Do you have to build one or just figure cost?