Google Campus to Become Solar-powered 394
prostoalex writes "Reuters is reporting that Google is equipping its headquarters with a solar panel 'capable of generating 1.6 megawatts of electricity, or enough to power 1,000 California homes.' This will make Google's Mountain View campus the largest solar-powered office complex in the United States."
Yawn! (Score:3, Informative)
OK, to be serious, this is a wonderful leap. Granted, it took a company as flush with cash and as well organized as Google to make the switch, but even if they're much better suited to do so, they can at least be an example to strive for.
Re:Commendable (Score:3, Informative)
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/14/13232
and
http://news.com.com/2300-1030_3-6089390-5.html [com.com]
Seems like there is a lot of hydroelectric power in Oregon.
Re:Google too powerful? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Long Term Benefit? (Score:2, Informative)
Cost Savings.... (Score:2, Informative)
Is this called 'late adoption'? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Commendable (Score:4, Informative)
My guess is the picked the location for the nearby/cheap power, low labor costs, cheap land, and relatively low corporate taxes in Oregon. Plus there's great windsurfing just 20 miles down the river.. and it's a pretty place.
Re:Just one? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I love google but I call "Yippe Skip" (Score:5, Informative)
Solar power is simply a small way from being price competitive with established power generation. It is a viable energy source. It is not a net energy loss.
Re:What this takes. (Score:2, Informative)
Even the MSRP is only $993. $5/W is usually a close enough price for these panels, less if you buy in bulk.
I agree with most of the rest of your post, however they probably are not adding additional batteries (most likely whatever they are running already has a UPS/generator system in place).
possibly $300,000 each for a 500kW inverter [www.ept.ca] if you have 16 of them that's only $4.8 million
So lets say $40mil for panels, $10mil for inverters, cables, installation, etc, thats $50 mil total, or
Economic, not environmental. (Score:4, Informative)
If you measure it as "payback of the purchase price", it could be as little as 2.5 years, depending on the specific technology.
If you measure it as ERoEI, it's generally acknowledged by everyone except die-hard solar power advocates that the ratio of Energy Returned over Energy Input for solar is less than 1, unless you use very very recent strained Silicon-based technology, which barely hit break-even earlier this year.
If you use thin film technology the purchase price payback grows to 4 years, and the Payback ERoEI drops to about 0.8.
There's also the little problem of there being a shortage of polycrystaline Silicon, from which solar cells are made. This shortage is expected to last through at least 2008, since it takes about 3 years to build a manufacturing plant for it, and that's what would have to happen to reduce the cost overhead.
So for right now, any decision to switch to solar by Google is going to be an economic one, rather than an environmental one.
This makes sense, since Larry Page and Sergey Brin are invested in a Solar power startup, Nanosolar http://www.techreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17
Since Nanosolar is a thin-film photovoltaic shop, we are looking at a longer economic payback time; their output capacity after their plant is built will be 430MW of cells per year, so this will eaither be the first run cells, or it will be about a day and a half of cell output at their full production capacity.
FWIW, the 1.6MW capacity is going to put them at ~1/500th of the total US Solar capacity, which as of this year is at 927MW, for just this one installation. Comparatively, total US solar capacity is only 85% of the output of one of the two reactors at Diablo Canyon (1087MW each), while total US wind power capacity is 10,000MW and growing by 3,000MW in 2006 alone, according th AWEA (the American Wind Energy Association).
-- Terry
Re:Yawn! (Score:3, Informative)
1. Replacement is suggested after 25 years, if (and only if) space is at a premium. Over the lifetime, output drops off slowly. After 25 years, output is typically around 85-90% of the original output. If you have the space for it, you just add more panels to make up for the lost capacity. If you don't, you replace them (and sell your used panels to somebody who has more space than you do).
2. Even if they did only last 25 years, they cost around USD$6-7000 per peak KW. Over that 25 years, you can expect them to produce about an average of roughly a quarter of their peak output, so
1.6MW enough for 1,000 california homes? (Score:3, Informative)
Don't people in California have airconditioning?
The smallest contract my electricity company (EDF) will sell is 3kW, and nobody uses that 'cos your main circuit breaker would blow if you turned on a couple of electric heaters and a microwave.
As far as I can remember I've got an 18kW contract, so this thing would be able to power around 100 people like me.
(Personaly I'll stick with my nice PWR thankyou).
Re:Economic, not environmental. (Score:2, Informative)
For those who want a quick answer the worst case scenario for Monochristaline Si based systems under 'Mediterranean conditions' is nine years (p22 of the paper) - and that was 9 years ago so the technology would probably have improved since then. I would guestimate that the Google campus is reasonably equivalent to the Med
Re:Long Term Benefit? (Score:1, Informative)
RTFA
"A Google executive said the company will rely on solar power to supply nearly a third of the electricity consumed by office workers at its roughly one-million-square-foot headquarters. This does not include power consumed by data centers that power many of Google's Web services worldwide, he said."
so which uses more power, the data centers, or the 1/3 of the office workers at one (1) location?
Some Basic facts... (Score:1, Informative)
The point of these systems is to be able to provide some of the power that a building needs. NOT ALL OF IT!
More importantly, the peark Solar power is available when the Utility companies need it most -- when it's bright and sunny outside and the air conditioning load is hammering the utility grid. That's when the power companies need to buy 'peak power' from outside of California. And peak power costs butt loads of cash. Sometimes 10 to 15 times more than 'non-peak' power.
Here's a link to the real time power consumption for the state of California. Click on the graph for lots of details,
http://www.caiso.com/outlook/SystemStatus.html [caiso.com]
At the worst, the red line will peak at over 54 Gigawatts.
Here's a real time display of a working solar power system used by a business, http://www.fatspaniel.com/datapage.html [fatspaniel.com]
Google's system will be the same, just bigger.
Let's stop all this silliness about 'running the office on Solar' and 'DC Powered Offices'.
The Solar panels make DC. The panels get connected in series until the voltage from the panels adds up to about 600 VDC. These structures are called 'Strings'.
Strings get connected in parallel to Inverters. Inverters convert the DC into AC.
If you want to play with an online system for configuring strings, go here, http://www.sma-america.com/solar-technology/solar
The outputs of the Inverters are connected into the building's electrical system.
The main power for the building comes from the utility company.
The Inverters will try to deliver as much power as they can to the power system in the building. Any 'extra' power is delivered back into the utility grid. Google gets a credit for what get's delivered to the gird. That credit reduces their monthly energy bill.
It would be insanely expensive to try to convert an office to DC.
Also, Solar panels won't be able to provide power during all of their business hours -- and it's simply not economically viable to build a battery system to store the energy and recover it later.
Some different numbers (Score:2, Informative)
180 Watt Solar Panels ($880 each) [mrsolar.com]
That's 8,888 180 Watt panels to get to 1.6MW peak.
Total cost for the panels: $7,821,440. Now, let's say for spending that much money google is able to negotiate a modest 5% discount to bring the cost per panel with discount down to: $7,430,368.
I'm going to stick with the above assumption that wiring and converters at this level will come in around 20% of the cost. Which is $1,486,073.
Now let's assume they can get the whole thing installed at a price of $500 per panel on average. That's $4,444,400.
There, my total cost for installation is now: $13,360,441.
It's hard to estimate how many watts per day one of the 180 watt panels will produce because it depends a lot on local weather patterns and how they're positioned. But over a 24hour/365 day period I'm going to go ahead and assume an average hourly production ballpark figure of 25 watts per panel. So that's 25 watts x 8,888 panels: 222.2KW hours. Multiply it by 8,760 hours in a year: 1,946,472 KW hours/year.
The best I could find for electric rates is Sacramento [jea.com] at $0.111/kwh.
At that rate, google will save $216,058/year.
Solar panels last much longer than 15 years. Here's a company [premierpower.com] that claims a lifespan of 30+ years and they have a 25 year warranty. Here's a guy who talks about a 21 year old panel still producing at near it's peak rating. [otherpower.com]
From personal experience I can say many older panels lose some efficiency and after 12-15 years their output drops to ~80% of the their original peak output. But let's assume the gradual loss of output will coincide with a gradual increase in the grid power price, offsetting each other.
So let's say a 30 year life, $216,058/year comes to $6,481,740. Subtract that from the installation costs and you get: $-6,878,701. Not nearly the $120M loss you estimate.
Now, if prices did, in fact, quadruple (which over a 30 year period isn't only unheard of, but likely) the numbers get ever closer to a net of zero. Not to mention the publicity google gains from this and the mitigation of risk by not leaving themselves susceptable to rising energy prices. And who knows, the panels may last 40 years.
Either way, it's not the giant boondoggle you make it out to be.
Re:Economic, not environmental. (Score:2, Informative)
its easy to debunk this myth.
Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that it takes 100 units of energy to make a PV panel. Then according to this myth, the panel only ever produces, say, 90 units of energy. The manufacturer pays for the 100 units of energy + materials to make the PV, and then sells it to the consumer for a profit. The consumer who buys this product (at a price which already accounts for 100 units of energy) is able to save more money than was spent on the purchase with only 90 units of energy? This is clearly not possible.
Either, there is no monetary payback from PV panels, or the ER/EI is greater than 1. But both cannot be true simultaneously. And the data shows that ER/EI is, in fact, greater than 1.
Estimated times for energy payback, from various sources:
(pdf) "1 to 5 years [clarion.edu]
various sources for estimates, all 1 to 5 years [ecotopia.com]
"in the worst case, 4 years" [seia.org]
"usually under 5" [wikipedia.org]
"range from 1 to 4 years" [nrel.gov]