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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."
I can only google stuff when the sun is shining in Mountain View?
"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."
That's great, I am really proud of them for using an alternative energy source (especially in such a sunny area) but most of their energy usage is those data centers and servers, not their employees. They purposefully did not give a % of total energy saved because it probably would have been on the order of 0.1-5%, which would have revealed the ridiculous amount of energy they actually use.
I wonder how easy the transition will be for them to leave Linux behind in favor of a sun powered setup.
Oh yes. I went there.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
Yeah but wait til Google becomes too powerful, the only option we'll have to shut the computers down will be to black out the sky :-/
I think I heard a story about it once...
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
They'll all show up at your door one day and go, "Wern't you the guy who dropped incredible internet science at slashdot? Our one single panel broke, and we're out a vast amount of money. Apparently, you're the man who will lead us into the next generation of solar powered offices."
"Old man yells at systemd"
Two words: Duct Tape.
Navicula hydraulica plena anguilarum est. Omnes castelli tuus nostri sunt. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
The article didnt say anything about its physical size. I wonder how much space they would have to consume to supply that much power.
The google campus doesnt have that many buildings, I have this weird image in my mind of all their buildings completely covered by solar panels.
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.
The unexamined life is not worth living
Maybe if they bought New Mexico and turned it into one big panel array though.
So, they'd be replacing New Mexico with something useful? And the catch is?
Well, I guess that's one way to keep people from working late...
"This Search Powered By The Sun" -Now with 1/3 Less Evil?
Think there's any chance Google would start installing solar panels on their data centers? This would be a HUGE gesture of enviro-friendly computing, even if it did cost them a bundle. It would certainly get other data centers and large power consumers (like yahoo and microsoft) to consider following suit. Based on estimates posted at Wikipedia, they consume 20MW of power for their 450,000+ servers (which actually seems really low - only 50W per server?).
... let's see, 16 wind turbines vs. 150,000 solar panels ...
Assuming it's more like 80MW of power they consume (equivalent to ~60K homes), I wonder if there'd even be enough high quality solar panels to offset a majority of this power consumption? I guess it makes more sense for them to start building wind farms near their out-of-the-way GooglePlexes. Some 5MW wind turbines are being tested today - hmmm
BTW: here's a link to a more detailed article on the subject: SF Gate - Google sets sight on solar
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
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
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.
Two words: Duct Tape.
Would that be to fix it or to shut up the person who revealed the problem?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Does that include hiring someone to scrape off the bird shit from the cells?
The windfarms will take care of the birds. Crisis averted!
Remember: There are only two tools in life. WD-40, for when something doesn't move, and should, and Duct Tape, for when something is moving and it shouldn't.
Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves? -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
So does the universe explode if you spray duct tape with WD-40?
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.
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.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Lets conduct an experiment and investigate what will happen if duct tape is sprayed with WD-40.
But, before we use any power tools, let's take a moment to talk about shop safety. Be sure to read, understand, and follow all the safety rules that come with your power tools. Knowing how to use your power tools properly will greatly reduce the risk of personal injury. And remember this: there is no more important safety rule than to wear these -- safety glasses and a funny hat.
I have with me a brand new roll of duct tape, and a fresh can of WD-40. Next to me is my trusty lab assistant, Timmy, who will be assiting in this experiment.
I am now going to rip a piece of duct tape approximately six inches long off of the roll and have Timmy hold it.
(I rip tape and hand it to Timmy)
Ok, Timmy, hold the tape tight, I am going to commence spraying the tape.
(I spray the tape)
Ok, Timmy... continue to hold it as we observe what happens.
(wait 5 seconds)
Timmy has told me it is starting to shake and do funny things...
OMG! A black hole has opened where the tape was. Timmy, hold on to it... this is the crucial moment...
Uh, oh! I think we are going to need another Timmy! It looks like Timmy was consumed by the black hole.
Luckily, I was prepaired for this. I will now throw into the black hole a few New Kids on the Block tapes and a copy of the movie Hobgobblins. This should cause the blackhole to enter "terminal suckage phase" and end its existance.
(I throw in the NKotB tapes and the copy of Hobgobblins. The black hole immediately ceases to be)
Well, it looks like yet another experiment has occured.
Tune in next week when I will show everyone how to build a perpetual energy generator using a cat and a slice of buttered toast.
Navicula hydraulica plena anguilarum est. Omnes castelli tuus nostri sunt. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
It's bird shit, who cares?
Wouldn't enough of it end up reducing the effectiveness of the panels?
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.
Nike doesn't often get good press, but they recently build a windfarm in Lakdaal, Belgium, where they have their main European distribution center. The windfarm provides 100% of the power needs of the facility, in addition to the power needs of some 8000 households.
I'm sure google will share/sell what they don't use.
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.
With a bit of luck, small dust-devils will clean off the panels and it will end up running years longer than it was designed for....
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
Payback depends on how you measure it.
0 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).
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