Intel Testing Solar Power For Data Centers

miller60 writes "Intel has installed solar panels at a New Mexico facility to test the potential for using photovoltaic solar power in data centers. Solar has proven impractical in data centers thus far for reasons of cost (too high) and capacity (too low). Intel will test the 10-KW solar array with data center containers and as supplemental power for summer capacity challenges, and says the project is a first step toward solar data centers. The project is housed at the New Mexico site of Intel's recent research in air side economizers in data center cooling."

Comments

Solar is starting to become promising

[ducomputergeek]

We're not a datacenter, just a development company. We had money left over last year that was either going to be taxed and some tax credits expired in december. So we needed to be reinvested into the business some how. We put in solar panels on the office roof that meets about 60 - 70% of our power needs. This has lowered our power bills by over half. That's freed up enough cash flow to pay for another developer. We viewed the investment as a sunk cost that freed up enough to hire an additional Jr. programmer that we were really needing.

Re:Solar is starting to become promising

[ducomputergeek]

It's not green economy, it's just economics coupled with things they don't teach you at business school. (I hold degrees in German and International Business). What holds most people up is that the rate of return and ROI calculations aren't quite that good from an accounting stand point. It still takes about 7-12 years to pay for itself ceteris paribus. That is if you just calculate the cost savings off the utilities. Then you can add some future present value if you were to invest the money in the analysis if you want to get complicated. But in this market, where do you want to invest? Now it maybe true that for, say an average home owner, solar has not come down to the point where it can be declared feasible. But there are some other intangibles that are hard to put a number to down on paper. i.e., if we use the extra cash flow and spend it on marketing, or another developer, etc., what are the potential payoffs?

What we do know is that utility prices are unlikely to go down and the new developer is already paying dividends. We have a new product release ready to ship at the end of the month. Without him, it would have been March or April. If all goes well, then the cost of the solar panels could be recovered in as little as 18 months and we're getting started on the next phase of the project 2 months ahead of schedule and we can do so with little or no change in exiting net cash flow.

I wish I could say they taught me this at college, which taking 4 semesters of Econ did help, but I learned about sunk costs and how to factor risk into ROI considerations from our family farms when I took a year off from work before I started graduate school to learn how to run them with my Dad. (We rent the farms, but take an active role in managing the business side of things like selling on the futures market, etc..) An example was putting up grain storage bins. It was taking over 3 weeks to harvest the rice when we had to take it to the dryer, they could manage to unload 2, maybe 3 truck loads a day. That's 3 weeks where $500k worth of crops were sitting out in the field. All it takes is a hail storm or high winds, and you can cut that number by 30% or more. (It happened this year, Hurricane Ike knocked the yields down by about 30 - 40 bushels per acre, and at $5.50 a bushel it adds up). For $50k we could put up storage on the farm. It now takes 3 days (or 2 long days) to harvest all the farms. So a ready crop is now sitting out in the field a very short period of time. How long is it going to take to recoup the ROI there? Well if you look at the raw numbers, about 15 years. But if you get your crop in once before a hurricane Ike comes around, suddenly they've just paid for themselves. Now granted, my Dad is a retired executive that spent his entire career on the finance side of things at a large company. So I've grown up around looking at things...differently than my peers.

On the farms, we hedge. In a sense, that is what we are doing here. We are hedging that utility prices in our area will continue to rise over the next 15 - 20 years. But more over, we think we an invest the savings into other projects that will in turn pay off more than the cost of the solar panels. So it made sense in our case.

Re:Been there, done that

[Torfbolt]

... uninterpretable power supply ...

Yeah, those things sure are hard to understand sometimes...