Google Campus to Become Solar-powered

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."

Comments

Yawn!

[J. T. MacLeod]

Call me when they hit 1.21 gigawatts!

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:Yawn!

[julesh]

This would be more true if solar panels lasted longer, but sadly they slowly degenerate over time. I believe replacement is suggested after 25 years, at which point they have - assuming present energy prices - rarely paid for themselves.

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 .25*25*365*24 = 54750KWh. This comes to a price of 12 cents per kilowatt hour. I don't know about you, but I pay substantially more than that for my electricity.

Re:Commendable

[SuperQ]

What about:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/14/132323 0

and

http://news.com.com/2300-1030_3-6089390-5.html

Seems like there is a lot of hydroelectric power in Oregon.

Re:Long Term Benefit?

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the EI Solutions website, it will only take 7.5 years to pay off the cost of the system.

Cost Savings....

[PhaxMohdem]

I wonder how much this thing will cost to deploy, and if it will be able to pay for itself in energy savings after a while. I'm no expert on solar power at all, but some basic math seems to show that a 1.6 Megawatt system with 8 hours of sunlight per day would save somewhere around $900 USD per day in energy costs (Assuming 7 cents per KWh... I'm really not sure what the rates are out in Cali.) Seems like it would likely take quite a while to pay itself off at that rate...

Is this called 'late adoption'?

[nephridium]

Use of solar panels goes way back. I still can't believe Ronald Reagan took down those panels that Carter installed on the White House as well as axing the solar research program - weakass politics.. :(

Re:Commendable

[hazem]

Well, there's the datacenter they are building in The Dalles, OR. It's next to a defunct aluminum plant and will be powered by the nearby hydroelectric dam. It's awefully hard on the salmon but it's mostly renewable and fairly clean. The many cooling towers are already easily visible from the freeway.

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?

[Phroggy]

I take it you've never seen this page?

Re:I love google but I call "Yippe Skip"

[Kris_J]

Did we cross the threshold of solar panel arrays giving off more power before the MTBF than it takes to create them?

Yes. Quite a while ago IIRC.

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.

[PayPaI]

$1000 for 160W is high. 170W, $845 when buying 12+
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 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 .038% of their market cap, or 3% of YouTube

Economic, not environmental.

[tlambert]

Payback depends on how you measure it.

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=170 25&ch=biztech; they provided the initial seed funding, according to a release on Nanosolar's web site: http://www.nanosolar.com/pr5-6.htm (see second release at this page).

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:Economic, not environmental.

[Silver Sloth]

Thanks Han Wen - a very interesting paper. I'd mod you up if I had the points.

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:Economic, not environmental.

[asynchronous13]

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.

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
various sources for estimates, all 1 to 5 years
"in the worst case, 4 years"
"usually under 5"
"range from 1 to 4 years"

1.6MW enough for 1,000 california homes?

[Eunuchswear]

So 1 home needs 1.6kW of electricity?

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).

Some different numbers

[potat0man]

Let's try this with some more accurate numbers.

180 Watt Solar Panels ($880 each)

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 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 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.

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.