Sanyo Solar Ark and Giant LED Display

shokk writes "Those of us who have played with CrystalFontz and Matrix Orbital serial LCD displays for geeky messaging will get a kick out of the 77k+ LED Solar Ark by Sanyo (only 21k of which are using as red/green/blue combinations for the presentation display). Not only does this behemoth show off its fantastically huge array of solar panels generating 530,000kWh/year and its high efficiency white LED technology, but it also sports a non-chemical water purification system in a very Feng Shui way. Lighting to restrooms underneath is provided by fiber optic paths from the white LEDs in the giant display above." It's a small plant as power plants go (600 kilowatts, when many plants are hundreds or thousands of megawatts) but it was cheap to produce, aesthetically pleasing, and of course, non-polluting, so that Godzilla won't visit.

Comments

Japanese may be down but they will be back

[asmithmd1]

Their enconomy has been in the doldrums for 10 years but long term thinking and a relentless focus on the customer will bring them around. Check out this quote from the web page:

All of the Solar Batteries used in the Solar Ark where collected from customers who had solar cell modules that did not meet standard output requirements discovered last year. The "Solar Ark" represents SANYO employee's commitment to not forget the lesson learned from the power deficient module incident that occurred last year. Furthermore the system will serve as a useful device to actively test the basic performance of the modules in order to regain customers confidence in using SANYO Solar Batteries.

Compare that attitude with Firestone's policy of deny and cover-up when people's lives were at stake

Speaking of Feng Shui...

[Reality Master 101]

Something I've been thinking about lately...

When I was growing up (born in '64), superstition was still pretty widespread in mainstream society, such as rabbit's feet, black cat's crossing your path, "bread and butter", salt over the shoulder, knock on wood, etc. There were people who really took these things seriously: in fact, you might remember a twilight zone episode where some guy speaking about superstition matter-of-factly noted that many people believed in rabbit's feet (and then some guy piped up with "darn right" or something like that).

It occurred to me that these sort of things are almost totally dead, most likely caused by the homogenization of society caused by television and mass media.

Even astrology seems to have taken some big hits. I'm sure there are still some nutcases that follow it, but nothing like it once was.

One superstition, however, seems to be actually gaining prominence: Feng Shui. There are people who actually take it seriously. My wife has a friend (who's Asian) whose mother actually made her not buy a particular condo she was looking at because some Feng Shui witch doctor didn't like it. I've even heard some stories about dot-com idiots in the Silicon Valley who felt the need to blow big $$$ on Feng Shui analyses of their office spaces.

Not sure what the point of all this is, but I found it interesting.

[of course, I'm leaving out religion from this discussion of superstition, but that's another subject entirely. :)]

Re:Speaking of Feng Shui...

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Funny all the AC's who freaked out, trying to call me racist and what not - if any of you spas ACs are muslim, then judging from your responses I know more about being a muslim than you do.

First off - no one mentioned trichinosis - the worm that often lives in pig meat and is fatal to humans. If you eat pork with trichina worm that has not been well cooked, you can get infected yourself. That is the reason both Jews and Muslims have a superstition about avoiding pork - because 2000 years ago, give or take, it was real hard to cook pork well enough to kill the worm without making the meat into charcoal in the process. That no longer applies in a 1st or 2nd world country where we have ovens, yet the superstition persists and you get to hear all kinds of rationalization for it about pigs being dirty and what not, even in the face of contradictory evidence - which is a prime characteristic of a superstition.

Second - both pork and lobster, and even shrimp for that matter, are all haram. The only kind of sea food that is halal is that with scales on it, i.e. fish. If you don't have a learned person to ask directly, just whip out google and do a search, it should take you about 30 seconds. There is no halal method of slaughter for any of these animals to prepare them "properly."

Third - pigs are not naturally dirty animals. They seem to tolerate crap pretty well, but they certainly don't go out of their way to live in feces. It is humans, for the most part, that force them to live that way. Wild pigs certainly do not live that way at all - I grew up in an area with enough feral pigs to know that first hand.

Re:We need more of these (not first poster's eithe

[Graff]

Solar energy is a pratically infinite source of energy, and we have not even begun to tap its potential.

Sooner or later we are gonna run out of oil, and solar is the future. this shows that we dont big ugly solar farms to get the same result

Yes, there is a lot of energy coming from the sun that we can potentially harvest. The main problem is the terrible efficiency at which the current collection methods operate. It turns out that once you add everything up, you come up with a power/pollution ratio for solar energy which is far above that of fossil fuels.

The main factor in this is a combination of the dirty manufacturing processes needed for solar cells, and their terrible return over their operational lifetime. We need develop cheap, long-lasting, efficient solar cells that don't create a lot of pollution during manufacture or else solar energy will remain merely a pipe dream.

One idea which has great promise is for us to put up power satellites. These satellites would collect the more concentrated solar energy outside the Earth's atmosphere, turn it into a microwave beam, and beam it down to collectors on the Earth's surface. Because of the enormous amounts of energy which would be harvested in this manner, it should be far less polluting than almost any other power generation method. The only real pollution would be in the form of heat pollution, but that can be taken care of with reflectors in space to lower the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth in that area, balancing out the heat added by the microwave beam.

But Firestone IS Japanese now

[A nonymous Coward]

They got bought up by Bridgestone some time ago.

There never was a problem with Firestone tires...

[tgd]

That was over-hyped media BS, and absolutely nothing more. Anyone with any experience in automotive sports, in particular, can tell you what happens when you run a tire outside of its spec. They blow, often catastrophically.

Ford was telling people to run the tires more than 25% below they're recommended inflation pressure because the proper safe pressure made the ride in these soccer-mom driven deathmobiles too harsh. If you look at how most street tires are manufactured, its very obvious that running at too low of a pressure will eventually cause a separation in the steel belts or braid in the tire, leading to weakening. It also puts too much strain on the sidewall, which weakens and eventually blows.

But, you know what? Its not Ford's fault either. There is one reason, and one reason only why these people were injured or killed: driver incompetance. A well-trained driver who is actually save behind the wheel knows how to maintain proper air pressure, knows how to control a car when a tire has blown, and most importantly knows not to jerk the wheel when you have traction on only one side of the vehicle. Otherwise you roll over and die, especially in a top-heavy truck like an SUV.

Hell, a number of published independant tests blew out the sidewalls on Ford SUV's and the cars stopped perfectly straight and in a controlled manner. An inexcusably poorly trained driver doing the exact wrong thing is the only thing that can lead to an accident in cases like that one. *Any* good driver knows that perfectly well. Its embarassing how easy it is for any idiot to get a license in the US, and people die because of it.

They do NOT die because of a non-existant policy to cover up a problem in a product.

So, what is it?

[baudbarf]

As usual, the corporate website reveals little about its function, purpose, or use. It shows lots of pictures and a pretty little flash movie with writing all in japanese.

From the writing in the Slashdot article, I've gathered the following:

It has solar panels.
It has an LED display.
It has bathrooms "under" it.

So based on this information, the "ark" is a solar-powered advertising sign with bathrooms under it which are lit by LEDs. Are the bathrooms underground? Are they porta-potties? Why were bathrooms part of the design when they seem rather unrelated to the concept of advertising? Is the "ark" a prototype for a whole bunch of "arks" which are to be produced and distributed for home use? Or for commercial use? Or are they too huge/expensive for more than a few organizations in the world to use? OR, is it a one-of-a-kind tourist destination somewhere in Tokyo? Will it fit on your computer desk, or is it the size of a couple football fields? (I got a small incling of scale in the flash animation, because little flowers were growing on the ground below the picture of the ark, but you never know)

Is this another example of the increasingly-common marketing mimimalism that companies like to use to infuse an annoying hybrid emotion (composited from annoyance and curiosity) into their victims in order to spur them to voraciously seek out all information available on the product just to find out what it IS?

Or was there some hidden screen on the website somwhere that said, in plain english, "The Ark is a ______, built for ______, it will probably be used for the purpose of __________ by _______ or _________."?

Re:So, what is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an extremely elegant hack.

A photovoltaic collector provides the power to run a system of lights and a water purification system. The lights and water purification system are brought back together to provide a set of clean roadside restrooms. Some of the company's ongoing research (which is normally nothing but a revenue drain until productization occurs) is demonstrated to the public at large in a way that clearly benefits the company.

It is a brilliant, practical, impressive, and functional billboard that meets the needs of travellers, serves the purposes of corporate PR, and extracts the best possible value out of a huge pile of returned surplus PV cells that were returned to them because they didn't put out the advertised power.

Talk about making lemonade outta lemons.

Incomprehensible

[bperkins]

I spent a good minute reading this story before I had any idea of what they were talking about.

Could he have at least said 77kw+? Solar Ark isn't very discriptive.

The use of the term "Feng Shui" is not necessary, and prettry much improper in this context.

Sheesh. Can't we do better than this?

Carbon debt - you can say that about anything

[Mandelbrute]

At approx 3000 tonnes I would hate to know how much carbon was burnt to construct this monolith. At a saving of approx 90T/annum of Carbon emmisions (the rebate for solar energy) this will be back to break even approx 2035.

It costs energy to make anything that is constructed - even weaving a basket with has a carbon debt. After all, the materials had to get to you somehow, plus the energy that went into producing and transporting the food that you ate for lunch before, and if you do it with the light on that adds in as well. In a lot of cases it just isn't worth claculating such things, the figures you get for oil, coal etc. carbon debts would usually just include the fuel and not transportation, construction, mining, energy used when the contractors are watching tv at night etc. In the case of alternative energies a lot of these things are considered to make the figures look bad - but there is no real comparison. The "carbon debt" is usally at best a very rough comparison, and at worst a lie used for political ends. The numbers are just not kept in track in enough detail. Even the carbon debt for the CPU of the computer you are reading this on is going to vary wildly based on the batch size, rejection rate, and how big the zone-refining setup for the silicon was. The carbon debt for all the copper bits will also vary wildly.

stuff like steel uses a bit less

You need to use a lot of carbon to make steel, and a lot of electricity to make aluminium. How you get the electricty will affect the carbon debt of the aluminium wildly - if it's from the south end of Australia it will be from hydro, if it's from the north it will be from coal - it isn't just a simple number.

Besides, with processes like sol-gel you can almost make solar cells in a bucket, and cure them in an oven.

Non polluting? Ahem...

[SysKoll]

Guys, last time I was in a bunny suit (aka clean room jump suit), I was within spitting distance of a lot of extremely nasty chemicals. Sulfuric acid, heavy metals, arsenic, to name only a few.

This web site does not describe the process they used to fabricate the solar cells. If they use the same old cheap process as usual, their cells slowly release arsenic in the environment. In 10 to 15 years, the cells will be too porous to be useful and so worn out they'll have to be scrapped.

Which of course will release all the arsenic still trapped in them.

I really don't know what's this legend about the semicon industry not polluting. Between the huge water use and the nasty chemicals, any semicon plant is a drain on resources. And solar cells release contaminants, so it's not an environmentally acceptable power source either.

Between a nuclear plant and a field of solar cells of the equivalent power, the latter would be by far the worst source of pollution.

-- SysKoll