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

Re:Commendable

[JymmyZ]

I don't think there's enough space in all of California that could be covered in the solar panels needed to power their data centers. Maybe if they bought New Mexico and turned it into one big panel array though.

Re:Google too powerful?

[the_weasel]

Pretty sure the grandparent was making a Matrix reference there......though I admit the 'future' scenes in Terminator 2 didn't seem to show the kind of environment where sunscreen played a big role in anyones life.

Re:Long Term Benefit?

[Karloskar]

pretty powerful nuclear furnace.

I think the boys from They Might Be Giants summed it up best.

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees

Yo ho, it's hot, the sun is not
A place where we could live
But here on Earth there'd be no life
Without the light it gives

We need its light
We need its heat
We need its energy
Without the sun, without a doubt
There'd be no you and me

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees

The sun is hot

It is so hot that everything on it is a
gas: iron, copper, aluminum, and many others.

The sun is large

If the sun were hollow, a million
Earths could fit inside. And yet, the
sun is only a middle-sized star.

The sun is far away

About 93 million miles away, and that's why it
looks so small.

And even when it's out of sight
The sun shines night and day

The sun gives heat
The sun gives light
The sunlight that we see
The sunlight comes from our own sun's
Atomic energy

Scientists have found that the sun is a huge
atom-smashing machine. The heat and light of
the sun come from the nuclear reactions of
hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and helium.

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees

Payback?

[Nick9000]

I wonder what the energy payback period is expected to be? I've heard up to thirty years for solar panels, which has always put me off because I would guess in 5-10 years there will be improvements in the amount of energy a panel can produce.

What this takes.

[Animats]

OK. One square meter of solar panel is typically good for 130 watts at peak, but only about 655 watt hours per day, or 27 watts averaged over 24 hours. In other words, the average power is about 20% of the peak. So, to get 1.6 megawatts average power, you need about 60,000 square meters of panel, or an area 245 meters square. This is about two football fields of area, or three Wal-Mart Supercenter roofs.

A typical price for a good solar panel today is about $1000 for 160 watts peak. So to get 1.6 * 5 = 8 megawatts peak power, you need 50,000 of those panels, or about $50 million worth of panels. Batteries, inverters, and installation extra. (I suspect that Google is talking about 1.6MW of peak capacity, but that's a phony number to compare to other energy sources that can run 24 hours a day.)

There are already data centers that draw 30 megawatts continuous. That would take about a billion dollars worth of solar panels to power.

And by power plant standards, 30MW is dinky. Commercial power plants today run around a gigawatt.

Re:What this takes.

[Yonder Way]

Your prices are way off for PV panels. It didn't take me more than 60 seconds to find . Quantities of 12x panels that peak at 175W, $810 each. About $4.63 per watt (peak) Google will be purchasing in larger volumes than this and will no doubt get a much better price. But at this price point, the PV panels alone would be about $139M for a 30MW peak production array.

Google will realize tax writeoffs for the whole thing, a one-time tax credit (or perhaps they will find a way to make the tax credit apply at a lower amount over multiple years), and above and beyond that they will see significantly reduced site power bills.

The next thing they need to be looking at is average power consumption per employee and find more efficient ways to work. Putting a PC on every desk is wasteful. One fat LTSP server per department (or for multiple departments!) and a thin client on every desk would be more than enough for most people. I did this at another shop a few years ago and it worked great. It's a real shame that most people are stuck in a rut and won't try a new way of doing things .

OK it's not a new way of doing things. The idea itself is really very old. But the technology has caught up with the idea, and it's now a very workable idea, unlike the old X terminal toasters of the early 1990's running on 10Mbps ethernet with lousy graphics chipsets and poor performance, with a couple of dozen people sharing a SPARCstation 5 (not enough machine for one person, let along 12).

Re:Cost Savings....

[l3v1]

Cost Savings

Cost savings, cost savings, cost saving... This is why humanity's lifespan as we know it will be much shorter than it could've been. It should not be just about the money and cost saving, but about nature saving, resource saving, human saving.

Any company who deploys renewable energy sources as a partial or total replacement, gets my support.

And, this news is proof for one more thing: geeks should have more money, they can do the coolest things.