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Walmart Goes Solar In California
tekgoblin writes "Walmart today has announced that it plans to install solar panels on more than 75 percent of its stores in the state. From the article: 'When completed, Walmart’s solar commitment in California is expected to generate up to 70 million kilowatt hours of clean, renewable energy per year, which is equal to powering more than 5,400 homes. It will also avoid producing more than 21,700 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year, which is equal to 4,100 cars off the road and provide 20 to 30 percent of each facility’s total electric needs.'"
Ok, I'm not going to come with the cliched "citation needed", but dude... do you have any evidence to back up any of this?
and provide 20 to 30 percent of each facility’s total electric needs.
The remainder of the store, as usual is powered by crushing up the hopes and dreams of it's employees and competitors.
Say what you will about Walmart; but they deal hard. I wonder how much they are paying per watt for this installation.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Now give people 40 hours shifts, and better pay and working conditions.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Dude, it was vetted by a friend of his.. a FRIEND.What more do you need~
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
They already do, but skylights are only viable during DAYLIGHT hours.
I live in California, and installed solar on my house back in March.
There's federal and state subsidies, but they're much lower now than they were in the past. I just filled out my state rebate form today - it amounts to about 5% of the cost of installation. I can't recall what the federal rate is off the top of my head, but it's certainly a lot lower than the 50% subsidy rate solar used to get.
The reason for solar's success here in California is only minorly due to the subsidies (they are being phased out). The real reason is that California's power generation system is 40 years out of date, and electricity prices have skyrocketed, with top-tier power costing 55c per kilowatt-hour, the last time I checked. It's not too difficult to get into the top pricing tier, either. If you set your thermostat below 78 in the summer, you'll end up paying over a thousand dollars for power in a month. (YMMV, depending on the size of your house, the efficiency level of your AC, and the thermal properties of your walls and windows.)
If you have solar, you apply your generation credits to your most expensive kilowatt-hours first, meaning you're generating at 55c/kWh. Small scale PV Solar systems have a 10-year levelized cost (after subsidies) of around 25c/kWh, which is why the optimal solution is to buy solar capacity up to a level that it will drop you into the cheap tiers of power. That's why I switched to solar (the environmental benefits are a nice bonus), and is certainly why Walmart is switching to solar in the state.
In states that don't have such backwater environmental laws, power is often flat rate and around 5 to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. Solar doesn't make sense in these states.
They could buy from a US solar manufacturer that only exists to collect government loan money, siphon it off to well-connected investors/political contributors, and then go bankrupt.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
>>Walmart probably already got a quote from this and already knows that if they generate excess power they will get a fair price for the extra electricity. So this may pay for itself and more in the long term.
In general, you target solar to reduce your electricity needs down to the baseline (cheap) tier of power, which is subsidized by the higher tier prices, which run up to 55c/kWh in the state.
PG&E used to not have to pay "net surplus customer-generators" for any extra power they produced, but one of Arnie's last acts as governor was to make PG&E pay the same rate for generation as customers would pay for consumption, with AB 920 (http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/pub/09-10/bill/asm/ab_0901-0950/ab_920_bill_20091011_chaptered.html).
What this means in practice is that for any realistic small-scale installations, PG&E will pay you to generate power at the baseline rate, which is not especially profitable, and certainly not worth the cost of installation.
The reason California has the highest electricity costs in the western world is because they privatized the whole system but without any protection to protect the consumer from price fixing or profit maximization. Corporations like to gouge you, it's what they were designed for- to maximize profit. If the electric company anticipates demand and maintains the infrastructure you get safe reliable cheap power. If they don't you get costly unreliable dangerous power. The first costs more and brings in less (low profit), the second costs less and brings in more(high profit)- clearly the intelligent CEO will opt for the second plan.
You know, if they just put in some windows (hey light tubes too!), they could save a whole lot more money on lighting too.
It always amazes me walking into these huge stores in the middle of the day, and they have hundreds of lights on to make it as bright inside as it already is outside. How hard is this to figure out?
:T:R:A:N:S:
This would work only because then people would be forced to shop elsewhere, at higher prices, and thus able to buy less landfill-destined crap.
This assumes that whatever you pay, all you will get is landfill-destined crap. The alternative is that you will spend more to by fewer, but durable things. They might be more expensive because they require more highly skilled labor to build.
Of course, there is no money in durability if you are a manufacturer or retailer, and highly skilled workers are a liability. Thus, they flood the market with garbage and talk only about price, or at best, trendy features.
I'm sorry, but a lawn chair is a lawn chair is a lawn chair. Just rubber dog shit is rubber dog shit and shower curtain rings are shower curtain rings! All this stuff is crap, and no matter how much quality you put into any of these crappy products, they last about the same amount of time and perform about the same as those that have little to no quality control. These are not automobiles or complex microprocessors. These products have two levels of quality; works and doesn't work. There is no middle ground. This is the type of stuff you find at Walmart. It's stuff that has no measure of quality that is produced so cheaply, it's actually cheaper to throw away 10% of the finished product than it is to improve quality to 95% or even the unobtainable 100%.
So, your American "union quality" shower curtain rings that I have to buy for $5.00 so someone I don't care about can get a paid vacation, health insurance for his "domestic partner" and four 15-minute breaks a day plus 1-hr lunch will perform the exact same function as the $2.00 shower curtain rings that were made by 8-yr-old Tibetan girl. As I'm standing in Walmart at 2:00am looking for something to hang my shower curtain in my new apartment so I can go to work tomorrow freshly showered, guess which one I'm gonna buy. If you really need help figuring that one out, remember, all I see are shower curtain rings and a price tag, and they both will perform the exact same function.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Well, more realistically, what is happening is that China is producing solar panels well in excess of demand (and doing a number on their environment in the process, but that's another story), and it's forced prices for panels down so much that all the other panel producers are dropping like flies. Has nothing whatsoever to do with U.S. regulations (unless you want U.S. creeks to run black with industrial chemicals too), or conspiracy theories about siphoning government money or anything like that.
Even worse, panel prices are now low enough to compete against large industrial-scale mirror/tower systems. So THOSE companies are also getting crushed as contracts get canceled and buyers go with panels. Think about that for a moment. It isn't that panels are less expensive than mirrors, it's that panels are now less expensive than mirrors + tower system + workforce required to keep it maintained.
-Matt
>>Stupid question, but would it not also shield the roof from sunlight as well? Would that not cut in electricity costs? I presume the roof is not *that* well isolated?
It's not a stupid question.
PV panels actually do provide a significant amount of thermal insulation (they have an air layer beneath the hot, black absorption layer). The area of my house underneath the PV panels is a lot cooler than the other areas exposed to the same sunlight, and a lot cooler than last year. I don't have any way of estimating the cost savings from it, but since it protects my master bedroom, it helps me avoid having to run the AC when I take an afternoon siesta.
In my current job I manage development at an environmental software provider. We have a couple dozen chemical and petrochemical customers who are using our software to calculate and report there GHG emissions to the EPA. We are actually in the middle of the first year of reporting for 2010 this month. The plants who are reporting make chemicals that are used directly or indirectly be each of us everyday including ethylene, glycols, nylon precursors...the list goes on. To the point, a single ethylene cracker I just ran calculations for has about 750,000 metric tons CO2 emissions per year . At one particular plant there are 8 of these crackers operating year round. This one plant represents less than 2% of the worldwide capacity of ethylene. I will not even go into the refinery calculations and the emissions generated by the products they make (which we all consume).
Simply put, the stated 21,700 tons of CO2 saved by this solar project is trivial. It is great if Wal-Mart can save money or be more efficient with this project, but to even try selling it as any sort of significant environmental project is ludicrous. I would venture to guess that Wal-Mart could make a much larger impact, from an environmental standpoint, by looking at their suppliers and demanding responsible operation at the manufacturing level.
China shut down a solar panel factory on Monday after hundreds of angry residents staged days of violent protests over pollution, the second such incident in as many months.