Slashdot Mirror
Google's Wind, Solar Power Investments Top $1B
Lucas123 writes "Google just announced it is investing another $80 million in six new solar power plants in California and Arizona, bringing its total investment in renewable energy to more than $1 billion. The new plants are expected to generate 160MW of electricity, enough to power 17,000 typical U.S. homes. They are expected to be operational by early 2014. With the new plants, Google's renewable power facilities will be able to generate a total of 2 billion watts (gigawatts) of energy, enough to power 500,000 homes or all of the public elementary schools in New York, Oregon, and Wyoming for one year, it said. Currently, Google gets about 20% of its power from renewable energy, but it has set a goal of achieving 100% renewable energy."
Watt is a unit of power, not energy. So the content is completely impossible to assess. Are we to assume Wh (Watt-hours) instead? 2GWh would be a significant power plant output, the equivalent of a full nuclear power plant, however is this peak capacity? This would be far less impressive as average capacity would be significantly less.
News for nerds and you still fuck up the Watt thing? 2GW is enough to power 500000 homes for a year? This isn't Fox News. At least get the units right.
With the new plants, Google's renewable power facilities will be able to generate a total of 2 billion watts (gigawatts) of energy, enough to power 500,000 homes or all of the public elementary schools in New York, Oregon, and Wyoming for one year, it said.
Energy is power. Power is energy. Time is an illusion (lunchtime doubly so).
It would be good to install them on this location :
Houses complex
$4,700 per house.
115M homes in USA - 115Mx4.7K
$0.54 Trillion dollars to have solar to every US household. We need baseline power, and some areas of the USA would be less effective for solar, but that $0.54T investment ought to cover around 50% of electricity needs in the US. It would also help to usher in the era of electric cars.
Dammit, the cost of Iraq/Afghanistan has been projected at ten times that amount ($6 Trillion). So much for "securing energy supplies".
While many states offer subsidies for solar, Arizona is starting to tax solar installations
God spoke to me
"enough to power 17,000 typical U.S. homes."
Or one google data centre.
Except it's oriented towards their bottom-line and not R&D. We can only hope that the solar companies they contracted for this stuff pool their money to fund more solar R&D.
"100% of its power from renewable energy"
NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN.
What they'll be doing is using traditional brown power and offsetting that with renewable energy "credits".
This is so blatantly NOT 100% renewable that it isn't even funny.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
with REAL gorilla SOUNDS!
What will they do the following year?
With this type of investment do you really believe the propaganda that Google pumps out to the masses? Can you really believe anything that they and their stooges publish on their websites, including slashdot?
Peak capacity is used throughout the electrical industry, from the generators to the nameplates of the devices in your house. The reason is the peak determines the size of the wires - in your walls or for transmission lines - to carry the load safely. For power sources, the other number you care about is "capacity factor", the percentage of peak capacity you can supply on average. It may be 90+% for nuclear (they still shut down for refueling, and sometimes for unplanned maintenance), and lower for other sources. Even hydroelectric has a limit if the water supply is less than peak turbine capacity. Photovoltaic can be as low as 15% in poor locations, while solar-thermal with storage can be much higher.
Less than 100% capacity factor is OK, because no power plant routinely operates at 100% capacity. For one thing, customer demand has daily and seasonal variations. For another, every plant stops for maintenance sometimes. Lastly, each power source has a different marginal operating cost. Hydroelectric, wind, and solar don't burn a fuel, so are relatively cheap per kWh when they run. Coal and natural gas consume fuel, thus have higher marginal cost when they run. A utility operator wants the cheapest mix to satisfy demand at any given time. Since natural gas prices can fluctuate dramatically over the life of a plant, one thing solar does is stabilize their costs. You know for sure that a solar plant will still not be burning fuel at the end of it's life. You have no idea what natural gas will cost in 40 years.
As far as photovoltaic peak production only being part of the day, that is well matched to the US southwest, where the peak air-conditioning demand happens exactly when solar has maximum power. Something like nuclear is better suited to baseload power, the part of demand that is always there. A nuclear reactor is a bitch to turn on and off, so they would rather keep it running all the time between refuelings.
If you are going to discuss power grids, you need to stop using just one performance parameter. That's not how real grids operate.
Give up and just get the other accounts to mod it man.
That's so awesome! Kumbaya...
Does it say anywhere how much they saved off their electric bill? People seem to get wrapped up in the greenwashing, but Google does this for one reason only. That is to reduce their capital outlay for electricity. It's about cost reduction, not carbon reduction.
I don't fault Google for saving a few bucks, especially when we're talking billions. I fault Google and their fanboyz for even implying that this is for planetary greening benefits.
Do we know each other?
badBIOS, Facts, speculations, and misunderstandings
First there was Stuxnet, then there was FLAME, the latest weapons grade malware is badBIOS accidentially discovered by Dragos Ruiu 3 years ago. More on the discovery in section 2
http://learning.criticalwatch.com/badbios/
Does the energy actually go to those schools, or is it just a nice way to saying it in a marketing wording?
Because what I read is that Google uses enough to power 2.5 million homes. (20% = 500.000 homes) Making the energy themselves is more cost efficient then buying it and green energy is cheaper and/or easier and/or faster to get into then oil or coal.
Basically cutting out the middle man. Has been done by industry for a long time.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I was told 1.21GW was enough.
Powered by 100% coal and evil
Wind is cheaper than solar and solar goes for $1/W.
So $0.50/W seems about the right ball park.
Your problem may be that you're not bothering to rethink your position on how expensive renewables are.
So why is it that the only method of 100% renewable that you'll accept as true is if NO ELECTRON ANYWHERE is made free in the conductor by a fossil fuel?
I know.
So that you can pretend that renewables can't do it and therefore "all that hippy shit" is worthless and should be abandoned (lest the hippies be proven right: a catastrophe!).
If Google make 1GWh in a day and use 1GWh in a day, they are neutral.
The operator may decide that rather than ramp up the storage they will run a gas power station, but this is not Google's fault: the power company is making a decision.
Only half of that is planned maintenance, the other half of that is unplanned outages and failures.
Yes, nuclear doesn't manage anywhere near 90%.
Meanwhile, wind gets about 40% capacity now.
HOW ARE YOU GENTLEMEN
All your base load are belong to US
You are on the way to destruction.
What you say??
Make your time.
Every time some company like Google announces funding for some Tempest or Solaris farm somewhere I wince. It's not the money, it's the very idea of the thing. The Internet is 24/7, and they're supposed to be the smartest guys & gals in the room. How can they get behind and forge ahead on something that won't even solve their own problems?
How did this decades-long solar slash wind fixation even begin?? Why don't at least half the folks out there pause and say, "wait a minute... what are we trying to accomplish?" I'm developing an honest resentment to those so-called 'green' things, and believe me it's not comfortable or fun. Truth is, wind and solar smell bad.
They smell like grid-down Darwin In Action DEATH. If I can easily imagine some awful Event that would render all solar and wind technology useless overnight, for a week or longer... who else can? Take your pick: Dust from a volcanic event or asteroid impact, or a Winter storm with Arctic air meeting warm moist air from the South that sweeps diagonally across the continent with freezing rain, leaving inches of ice accumulation, road and rail impassible.
Or a Little Ice Age. We are more vulnerable to harsh Winter conditions than we were in 1650-1700. Electricity powers everything. Some scientists are baffledby the sun's behavior lately, but Professor Lockwood and the Washington Post aren't: Sun activity is in free fall, but you shouldn’t expect a new little ice age. I did a triple-facepalm when atmospheric physicist Joanna Haigh said, "Even under the most optimistic scenario [of minimal global warming and a deep solar minimum] the solar cooling would only just offset greenhouse gas warming. So no ice age.” Just like that. Human carbon emissions will offset a global weather phenomenon that lasted some 70-300 years. What makes her so sure?
Wind and Solar for grid energy are Rube Goldberg engineering disasters. So many precision cast moving parts out there in the elements, blades that rely on brakes and oil-filled transmission boxes. Everything subject to freeze and fail sooner than intended, and it's all in faraway places with branch feeders running to it at great expense, so it can solve your energy problems completely. Or maybe 20%. Some day. Some times. Not as much as expected. After the first calamity strikes, not at all.
Power plants are strong buildings with machinery inside built to withstand the worst of the elements. The best of these are completely self-contained, generate gigawatts of power and can stock months of fuel. Three guesses.
Solar and Wind grid energy farms are spacious gardens of delicate -- and ultimately useless -- garbage that never would have and will not ensure our survival, built at great expense in an atmosphere of dreamlike foolishness that has got to stop this minute.
My children deserve better. This is madness, people! Ape-shit madness! When discussing base load grid power, especially with aging infrastructure and an uncertain economic outlook... these sources should have been laughed out of the room. Google deserves better, as do we. This is an existential threat. Their money at this point would be better spent on T-shirts for natural gas producers and coal miners.
Or just perhaps... a commitment to fast-track thorium, a national effort on the same scale that put men on the moon. So we can crack this energy thing for the next thousand years, and go to the moon again.
And let's send women to the moon. It's their turn.
Some Google Talks. They should listen.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
For great justice.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Even the solar array is really powered by coal. It takes a lot of energy to fab the silicon, build the panel, add the wires, ship said panel to the site where it is being deployed, and set it up.
Far, far more energy than that panel will ever get back in its usable lifetime before the panel has to be replaced.
So, in reality, it still is a computer powered by coal and oil, but just being used through a solar panel.
Solar panels are like ethanol. Great for patting one on the back, but as for energy, it still uses the coal and oil, just in a different way.
What they need to do is capture the energy of all the hate for the Google+ comments on youtube. That's got to be a few megawatts.
That was years ago, not anymore.
The energy to produce a solar panel went way down. It now takes 1 or 2 years before that energy has been recouped, instead of 10 years or more.
New things are always on the horizon
Interesting you say volcanic dust could shut down solar. Despite at least two volcanoes shutting down a large part of air travel I have not seen any indication of solar panels being affected
How can they be sure the sun reduction will not lead to an Ice age?
They have looked at how much the reduction is predicted (in the worse case) to be and how much the CO2 increase is predicted to be.
And months of storage does not mean much compared with 70-300 years.
What happens when the remote mines get hit by the elements?
My Transformation Website
Kindle Books http://www.catprog.org/rev
Interactive CYOA http://www.catprog.org/st
Interesting you say volcanic dust could shut down solar. Despite at least two volcanoes shutting down a large part of air travel I have not seen any indication of solar panels being affected
Thanks for listening. We have not yet experienced a Big One in the industrial age.
The most recent global weather phenomenon that has been ascribed to volcanism was "1816, the year without a Summer", triggered by an eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. "In the spring and summer of 1816, a persistent "dry fog" was observed in the northeastern US. The fog reddened and dimmed the sunlight, such that sunspots were visible to the naked eye. Neither wind nor rainfall dispersed the "fog". It has been characterized as a stratospheric sulfate aerosol veil."
Another global climate event of even greater magnitude occurred in 535AD which is presumed to have been an eruption of another Indonesian volcano, Krakatoa. David Keys has researched this extensively and has found many historical references to this event, also see the fascinating PBS documentary Catastrophe! available on-line: Part 1, Part 2. From Cassiodorus [Italy, 536AD] "The sun ... seems to have lost its wonted light, and appears of a bluish colour. We marvel to see no shadows of our bodies at noon, to feel the mighty vigour of the sun's heat wasted into feebleness, and the phenomena which accompany an eclipse prolonged through almost a whole year.
Both events are accompanied by reports of unusual weather besides the dimming, massive crop failure. They should send a shiver through anyone who envisions that the United States might some day rely on solar or wind for base load energy. It's a slate wiper
And those are just garden-variety volcanic eruptions, though severe. Yellowstone has erupted on average every 600,000 years and the last one was 630,000 years ago. A flock of geologist-birds will descend to peck my eyes out if I should whisper "any day now", but at least, a Yellowstone event of some magnitude should be part of anyone's 100-year plan. BBC did a great two hour docudrama depicting possible effects, Supervolcano [2006] along with companion program Supervolcano.The Truth About Yellowstone
And that's not even bringing up the possibility of a significant sized meteor impact, which would be certain to generate a global plume of aerosols. So a bad day for plants is a bad day for solar energy and history has recorded these events as lasting for months and years.
How can they be sure the sun reduction will not lead to an Ice age?
They have looked at how much the reduction is predicted (in the worse case) to be and how much the CO2 increase is predicted to be.
There are so many effectors besides pure chemical CO2 that are emerging as factors. Some of them like Svensmark's theories on cosmic rays effecting cloud formation, after years of deliberate marginalization (see this documentary). And some long-suspected avenues which have not been explored enough (my opinion) such as study of aerosol particulates like carbon black and their effect on climate, which suffered a setback with the tragic loss of the Glory satellite. Just two serious, possibly game changing factors. Until I see more of these angles play out to my own satisfaction -- a period in which they are rationally explored and not just 'rebutted', dismissed or ignored by pure-CO2 ca
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
The most noticeable thing I notice about your scenarios is electricity is not the biggest problem. And the most common is 1 in a 1000 years,
Given the wind is now one of the cheapest forms of power, using wind to power CO2 sequesters is probably a good match. Especially because you do not need base load for it. If you can turn the sequesters off quickly it is even better.
Or you use the wind electricity to make hydrocarbons.
My Transformation Website
Kindle Books http://www.catprog.org/rev
Interactive CYOA http://www.catprog.org/st