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Apple Powering Nevada Datacenter With Solar Farm
Nerval's Lobster writes "Apple's Nevada data center has been in the works for quite some time: a 2,200-acre plot outside of Reno will host a 90,000-square-foot datacenter that, in turn, will support the tech giant's cloud services. Apple will reportedly spend $1 billion over the next decade on the facilities, in return for significant tax abatements at the city, county and state levels. It will also fund and build a 137-acre solar farm, managed in conjunction with NV Energy, to power the datacenter (it will generate approximately 43.5 million kilowatt hours of electricity). The Reno datacenter will be the third Apple cloud facility in the U.S. that is powered largely or entirely by solar power. Sixty percent of the power for Apple's North Carolina datacenter comes from an existing solar-power farm near the facility; an Apple datacenter in Oregon uses solar power for part of its power load, but also uses power from wind and hydroelectric sources."
They're powering their iCloud with solar panels? I thought clouds blocked the sun?
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Over its lifetime? Per year? Per what?
The Burning Man festival noted that with all the Nevada rebates on solar panels, net was effectively the cost of installation.
Burning Man has access to a large amount of volunteer labor, so they can effectively put up solar panels for free. They setup panels to power parts of the event (the man), then move them to Gerlach once the festival is over. As I recall, the goal was to provide all the power for the towns nearest the festival.
I wish other states were as forward-looking. At this point the benefits (to the state) of encouraging the infrastructure probably outweigh the costs.
(Yes, I know. Just getting to burning man uses an enormous amount of fossil fuels. What's your point?)
The major downside would be apple.com being down once the sun sets.
0x or or snor perron?!
That's less than a half-mile square (which is 160 acres).
They should go for at least a 1 mile square (640 acres) now that would be worth talking about!
The other (and more clear) way to say "half-mile square" (i.e. a square with each side being one half mile long) is "one quarter square mile".
The wattage is by itself meaningless. How much power is produced varies wildly based on the duration and intensity of the sunlight, which varies by geographic location and local weather patterns.
Measuring it in watt hours, on the other hand, is a practical measurement, since it's both how power is actually paid for, and gives you an idea of the real output of the system.
For example, TFA indicates this is an 18 megawatt installation, but the 43.5 "million kilo" watt hours (or 43.5 gigawatt hours if you don't use bullshit units) indicates an average of a bit under 5 megawatts.
Fortunately, they have batteries. Unfortunately, they're not replaceable.
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Not user-replaceable.
They'll just have to ship their datacenter to an authorized service provider.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
The wattage is by itself meaningless. How much power is produced varies wildly based on the duration and intensity of the sunlight, which varies by geographic location and local weather patterns.
Measuring it in watt hours, on the other hand, is a practical measurement, since it's both how power is actually paid for, and gives you an idea of the real output of the system.
For example, TFA indicates this is an 18 megawatt installation, but the 43.5 "million kilo" watt hours (or 43.5 gigawatt hours if you don't use bullshit units) indicates an average of a bit under 5 megawatts.
43.5M KWh by itself is meaningless, unless, as the parent posted wrote, they are planning to tear down the plant after it hits that level.
You're assuming 43.5M KWh per year which wasn't stated in the summary and only implied in the article.
...it'll be drawing power from NV Energy's conventional fossil fuel plants.
No, it will be drawing power from geothermal sources. Check here.
This problem is either handled by thermal storage or by just simply using other power source (commercial, wind, etc) when there's no sun.
One common approach is liquid sodium. You use an array of moving mirrors to heat sodium being circulated in a tower in the middle of the mirror farm. That circulates with a large, heavily insulated tank of liquid sodium under the facility. It heats up during the day, cools off during the evening, but is always hot enough to boil water to run turbines. (unless you get like a week straight of no sun, iirc these facilities can "coast" around four days without much sun)
Really downtime isn't important anyway. During a sunny day, they'll be generating a lot more power than they use in the center. The remainder of that will be getting bought back by the local utility, for credit on their bill when the sun goes down etc. A lot of municipalities/states are passing laws requiring the local utils to buy back power during peak-production times. (they were fighting it) So even just straight solar panels with no thermal or even battery storage is fine. They'll rack up credit during the day, spend it overnight, and will come out somewhere around even on the average, without having to spend money (and reoccurring replacement money) on batteries etc. Batteries are a very poor investment if you can just sell your excess power back to the local utility and use them as an almost zero-cost buffer.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
There are always batteries and even flywheels to store some power for use come night, which can help reduce the power bought from the local utility even more.
Solar is one of those things that is becoming a "why not?" as opposed to a "why?" Throw a couple panels on a roof or a shed, have a MPPT controller [1] for a set of batteries, then add a 3000 watt inverter and a 15A circuit to the house where all chargers and relatively low, parasitic items can plug into. That way, even though the larger items like the A/C, hair dryers, and such end up using grid power, the small loads which are expensive over time are taken care of. With a battery bank and a transfer switch [2], one can even switch medium-size, but critical items like a refrigerator if there is a blackout.
[1]: PWM controllers are OK, but why waste the watts, especially if one has limited room for panels, so might as well pony up for something that is better for battery charging.
[2]: I prefer transfer switches over circuit breaker interlocks, just because they are more idiot-resistant, and a lot harder to backfeed the mains.
I'm a physicist and software engineer, and although I agree that the idea is fantastic, I'm skeptical of the execution. Photovoltaics, as I understand, are economically less viable than concentrated solar power (even Concentrated Photovoltaics, which are more efficient than your run-of-the-mill solar panel, aren't quite there yet), particularly in the form of Solar Power Towers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_tower). I'm not sure what the obsession is with solar panels: they're not only resource-intensive, but they're still quite inefficient (commercial units now have ~20% efficiency, only recently has research broken the 30% limit). They require materials that are more difficult to obtain (rare earths) than what's require to build Solar power towers (steel, lots of steel, and water).
Please, somebody tell me what the obsession with photovoltaic solar power is...