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Can the Sun Realistically Power Datacenters?
1sockchuck writes: A massive solar array in central New Jersey provides the daytime power for a server farm delivering online financial services for McGraw Hill. The 50-acre field of photovoltaic solar panels symbolizes a new phase in the use of renewable energy in data centers. Massive arrays can now provide tens of megawatts of solar power for companies (including Apple) that can afford the land and the expense. But some data center thought leaders argue that these huge fields are more about marketing than genuinely finding the best approach to a greener cloud.
Lets just get this out of the way;
As soon as they come out with them super whamodyne batteries, our problems will be solved.
Proceed....
There is no reason to think that this is an investment that won't make a return for a long time.
In case anyone else was curious like I was, the 50 acres used to provide afternoon power could , if used as farmland instead, feed 250 people a minimal diet, or 20 fat Americans who supersize their Big Macs.
Just an interesting factoid.
It may be a drop in the bucket now (Facebook's 100kw solar array for a facility consuming 25Mw is just that), but the infrastructure is in place to put in better panels later as they're developed. Additionally, if using otherwise "wasted" space (such as a rooftop), why not put it in place? The long-term power cost savings for such a facility (that is planned for the long term, anyway) will eventually pay for for the system a few times over, even if the impact to overall energy usage is that proverbial drop in the bucket. In other words, it makes business (read: financial) sense to do it.
My sources are unreliable, but their information is fascinating. -- Ashleigh Brilliant
Given that the Sun is a giant ball of fusion 300,000 times as massive as the Earth, I'd say yeah, it can probably power a datacenter. The question is can it do it "efficiently", not whether it can do it "realistically". Realistically there are few things the Sun can not power, at least on this planet.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
It's a blog. From 2012. and as near as I can tell it's ONE GUY. You editors post some weird shit sometimes.
Congrats on winning today's "Dickhead of the Day" award.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
A: Yes. It's called "evaporation." Next question, please.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Liberals....the party of tolerance and inclusion
New Jersey farms (where the 50 acres of solar is) are very productive. Apples, blueberries, cranberries, peaches and strawberries grow very well there, and they grow over 100 different fruits and vegetables.
There's a lot of that in Seattle. The native American building I used to live near had their panels pointed northward just to thumb their noses at the white people that paid for the panels. The panels only got direct sunlight a few hours in the extreme mornings or evenings during the middle of summer.
> Can't energy not being used be stored in batteries that can be used later?
In a word, no. I mean, you _could_ buy a million dollars worth of batteries every five years, a million dollars of solar panels, and a half million in auxiliary equipment like inverters, or you could buy the same amount of power for $200,000 from the power company.
There are a lot of ideas floated around for storing electricity produced by solar, the best of which need to be about ten times better in order to make any sense. That's the #1 huge problem with solar. If it's cloudy, or night time, or even 9AM, you're not going to be powering anything with solar. Other than that, if there were magic storage, solar would start to be feasible for rich people, just very expensive.
The second link brings up Solyndra and government loan guarantees.
The author conveniently leaves out the fact that Solyndra's failure was a direct result of China dumping solar panels onto the market.
The USA and China have been fighting a slow motion battle at the World Trade Organization over solar subsidies and tariffs.
In 2012, the USA slapped billions in tariffs on Chinese products.
In 2014, the WTO said that the USA overstepped with its tariffs.
Then the Chinese appealed the WTO ruling even though it was in their favor.
Solyndra's failure and the ensuing finger pointing led to $14+ billion in tariffs, over 2 years, on Chinese products.
All because of a $535 million federal loan that didn't pay off.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Grass and other plants grow by converting sunlight, water, and CO2 to sugar. 12H20 + 6CO2 --> C6H12O6 + 6O2 + 6H2O
CO2 is in plentiful supply, so given sufficient water, the amount of growth is limited by the amount of sunlight. If you have big spaces between panels where light is hitting the grass, you're just wasting that solar power - you'd get twice as much power by filling the space with panels. Beneath the panels, there's no light, so nothing will grow. Ever noticed that caves aren't full of weeds? Now you know why.
The sun is powering data centers all over the place right now... albeit from light it shined down on earth millions of years ago.
Proverbs 21:19
> The fact that some arrays were done in a way that's incompatible with farming doesn't mean that it can't be done.
The light either hits the corn leaves, or it hits the solar panel. The same photon won't hit both. You don't get to use that same bit of sunlight repeatedly. Each photon is either absorbed by the solar panel, or it's absorbed by the crop. You _could_ mix 25 acres of solar with 25 acres of farming, to have 50 acres of both mixed together. The productivity of mixing them together would be precisely the same as having 25 acres of farmland on one side of the street, and 25 acres of solar on the other side of the street. Mixing them, with ten feet of farm, ten feet of solar, ten feet of farm, ten feet of solar would be silly, though, because it's awfully hard to harvest the corn with solar panels in the way.
If they were serious about going green, they would rather than move their data centers here, in Quebec, Canada. We have a lot of electricity surplus generated by hydro-power plants. Their solar panels will never be able to be price competitive with our electricity and we have no problem to provide enough power at night. We can surely power the whole data centers, all of them. They can even build them next to the goddam damn to make the power wires as short as they wish to make the power supply reliable.
Are these guys sleeping or what? You want a phone number and contact?
And no problem for the network speed, it is just next Montreal.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Lifting the panels higher off the ground should alleviate that. And in my example, I did mention grazing.
You also get a lot of reflected light which plants are perfectly capable of using.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
That's right. Since when is being able to generate many Gigawatt hours of electricity without using a drop of fuel "merely marketing"? It's that kind of "marketing" you can take directly to the bank.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
solar here in Seattle
LOL, there's moss growing over mine. It wasn't creating enough power to keep the lights in my hard own until midnight so I haven't bothered cleaning the moss off. When the sunset is before 4:30pm, solar really is useless. I only got it for the tax credit.
They need to integrate the 'solar farms' with pasture based farming. You can graze sheep, chickens, ducks, geese, cattle and goats under these solar arrays. It ends up like a savannah with filtered moving patches of sunlight and shadow. Very effective for pasture. Plenty of light gets to the forages for growth and the animals trim the forages so brush doesn't grow up in the fields. This avoids the need for mowing - a user of fossil fuels or at the very least electricity and time. Unfortunately, too few of these solar farms are through through that far. I know of only one.
What about transparent solar panels? Wouldn't that allow the photons to perform dual duty?
If you elevate the panels you reduce the intensity of the shadow but you increase the size by a proportional amount. Grazing? There will proportionately less to graze on in the areas with solar panels. Reflected light? Plants use it just as much as the solar panels do.
raymorris is correct.
Yes, beef requires a lot more land than grains do. That's why I gave a range 20-250 people , depending on what you. That's no comment on what middle-class Americans SHOULD eat, it's just the productivity of the land based on what we DO eat. We do eat double bacon cheeseburgers.
Now that you mention it, it is funny to read the 1% (Americans) complaining about the stuff they do.
Here you go, super batteries:
http://hardware-beta.slashdot.org/story/14/10/14/2135208/battery-breakthrough-researchers-claim-70-charge-in-2-minutes-20-year-life
Can the Sun Realistically Power Datacenters?
Therefore the answer is: No
Roughly speaking, if you don't capture the photons, you don't capture their energy. You can either capture the photon (with it's energy) or let it pass through and get no energy.
*Oracle
The reflected light is for the grass / plants under the panels; the panels will track the sun. There are a considerable number of edible plants that prefer shade and there have been attempts at making this work in Japan & America
http://www.treehugger.com/sust...
http://www.renewableenergyworl...
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
You missed the point: a photon either hits the solar panel (and is absorbed, with some fraction of that absorbed energy turning into electricity), or it hits the leaves below. Doesn't matter how high the panels are. And I'm not sure where this reflected light comes from--maybe the steel frames holding the panels up in the air? It can't come from the panels, which are facing the sun--so any light they reflect (which is relatively little, since they're black) is directed back at the sun. And finally, cows can't graze off of dirt, you can only graze (if you're a cow) off of plants, preferably grass. Which has to grow out in the sunlight.
So as raymorris points out, you can put the solar panels out in the field, where they'll cast a shadow, preventing grass from growing; or you can put them somewhere else, where they won't get in the way and you won't need tall legs for them to stand on. Either way, the farmland and the panel-land will take up the same amount of room.
I'll invent transparent solar panels right after I sell my current invention: dehydrated water.
Short answer: No
Long answer: No. Because the tradeoffs just aren't worth it, considering that you'd have to invest in a solar field nearly 400 times the size of your data center and you'd have to allot still MORE space for a HUMONGOUS unobtainium battery setup to store power in off-production hours.
Then there's the environmental impact of clearing that much land just to let it like barren and house all those panels.
We won't even go into the issues of the environmental impact of actually MANUFACTURING that many panels
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I have a NDA and can't say how...
You can grow crops that need spacing and don't take much water. One project is growing agave under solar panels.
Have a look at what the Japanese are doing. Also your argument implies you couldn't grow anything under trees which would come as a shock to cocoa plantantions.
There's a 4.4 MW solar farm in Texas that uses goats to keep grass & weeds under control.
I never implied that you'd get 100% benefit for both panels & plants but the idea that it's all or nothing is equally ludicrous.
Before you say it can't be done, look around for people already doing it.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
A massive chunk of the energy requirements for a datacentre is getting the heat out of the place. Using solar thermal heat pumps works at that sort of industrial scale and it's now commercial instead of just experimental.
All it takes is a local utility that's exploiting it's monopoly and doing some serious price gouging for the panels to pay themselves off in a few years - and that applies in a depressingly large number of places.
Now if it was the utility themselves with the panels that's a much longer payback time. The gap between generating costs and retail price is enormous nearly everywhere and keeps increasing. Where I live it can be as low as 3 cents per kilowatt hour for the wholesale rate and in excess of 30 cents per kilowatt hour for the retail price, and it's being approved for an increase before the end of the year.
That has led to a lot of people in my area getting solar panels.
Yes I see your point but it does not appear to have any worth at all.
Please stop using a bit of technology as a proxy for some mindless political pissing contest and instead have the courage to attack the political tribe you dislike directly.
If rich companies like Apple and FB want to burn cash seeing what it's like to do large solar deployments, for fuck's sake SHUT THE FUCK UP AND LET THEM! "Oh no, this problem can't be 100% solved overnight, so no one should be trying anything at all!" No, they won't cover 100% of their power bill on the first day, but they'll cover some of it, and they'll learn a lot along the way, and it's only going to get better over time. By the time it IS viable, they will have already reached capacity and paid off all their costs and they'll be reaping the rewards while the next companies are just starting to get set up.
It's called INVESTING and LEARNING. Look into it. "Thought leader" or not, maybe -- JUST MAYBE -- the folks at Apple and FB know something about data centers too. Or maybe they just don't give a shit. It's like people who buy Teslas -- no, you're not going to save money over buying a gas-powered Civic. But that's not the point.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Molten salts of various types have been used on an industrial scale for steel heat treatment since the late 19th century. A bit about warming them up, cooling them down and so on has been picked up over that time.
You are correct, it is unlikely to work at your desk in an airconditioned office in the middle of a city. Meanwhile there are coal fired power stations already using solar thermal for preheating and things like molten salt storage are the obvious next step. The world is moving on even if you cannot tell from your desk.
Your eyes are able to see in both candlelight and bright sun because you see brightness on a logarithmic scale. What appears twice as bright is actually around 100 times as much light.
At 9:00 AM, the sun is around 500 lux, depending on location, daylight savings time, etc. At midday it's over 100,000 lux. Which means the midday sun is 2,000 times more energy than morning sun. A solar panel that can generate 500 watts peak will produce 0.25 watts in the morning.
That's not politics, that's physics. And I don't dislike any major political faction, I just know each is wrong on some things, and I try to present accurate information when any proponent of any proposal gets their physics and arithmetic wrong. Last week I called myself on it when I got my arithmetic wrong on the cost of Obamacare.
People have been hyping molten salt storage for over 60 years, and it's not feasible yet. Send the next guy your money though, I'm sure it'll be a good investment.
Let me know when it actually works, without making the cost of the average home electric bill over $1,000 / month.
Try again without the sleight of hand.
The summary mentions Apple's facility in NC. That's not a 100% solar data center. It also uses Bloom Energy fuel cells to cover night operations and when the weather isn't ideal for solar. But, to say this is all about marketing is juvenile and simply missing the point. We need to cut our carbon footprint and using non-fossil fuel sources of energy is a very good way of doing that. Sure, there's a benefit to the marketing department that can now check off the our-company-is-doing-something-for-the-environment box, but it's a lot more than that. It's putting your money where your mouth is, whereas most marketing is pretty much just running your mouth.
Any reason why you think that the panels cannot be installed on non-farming land or a bit higher up?
Next you will be arguing that because you saw some fellow build a house on prime farmland, we should all live in caves instead. Do you actually use your brain?
Regardless of the power output, covering parking lots with solar panels at about a 70-80% coverage rate is a win-win. Provide weather coverage and shade for the parking lot patrons, harvests energy that would otherwise heat the asphalt. and the incomplete coverage allows enough light through to avoid the need for artificial lighting during daylight.
We are the 198 proof..
All Earth-energy comes from the sun. Planet Earth is our best battery, it has been storing energy for quite some time.
The only way to remain energy neutral is to consume less than 250 W/m2 (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insolation#Earth.27s_insolation)
That's funny, I did. 200 times, not 2,000 of course. So your "500 watt" panel would be generating 2.5 watts. Hardly worth storing 2.5 when the output about to rise to 400, then 500 if it's a particularly bright, cloudless day.
There's about four hours per day in which they make significant power, typically 11-3.
Sure, they could have put their installation somewhere else, but they didn't.
They could have installed it on the beach and we could look at what impact that had.
They could have clear cut a forest and installed it there. Then we'd discuss that.
They didn't build it on the face of a cliff, or underwater, they built it on nice flat farmland, and I wondered about what 50 acres of farmland normally produces.
As discussed, "a bit higher up" doesn't make any difference.
This assumes that plant growth is limited by direct solar radiation (and not say total radiation or some other environmental variable, e.g. water, temperature, humidity, ???) Is this a true assumption? Do you have a citation for this assumption? It has sparked my curiosity.
I believe 1) it is likely there are circumstances for which this is not true 2) this has probably been characterized 3) it could be leveraged in the design of solar farming installations that in fact produce more than either would alone.
> Uh. You do realize that you can use more than ONE panel? You know?
Yeah, you _could_ use a THOUSAND panels to run your hair dryer in the morning, at a cost of half a million dollars.
That would be pretty silly, though. Two and half watts just isn't much per panel. In the afternoon, when each panel makes 400-500 watts, that's a usable amount of power.
This is something I'll never understand about solar electric advocates. You could make a good case for solar power, something that makes sense like this:
Using solar-electric panels in sunny areas can reduce utility power usage in the afternoon by 5%, reducing CO2 emissions by x.
Preheating the water before running it through a black pipe before it enters your water heater can save you $X and reduce emissions by Y.
Those are reasonable, logical arguments. Instead, you guys suggest "duh, use even more panels in the morning. Use 1,000 large solar panels to run your hair dryer". It makes you, and solar-electric, sound crazy.
Germany IS the world leader in solar power, producing 19 million kilowatt hours of solar. That meets 1.9% of energy needs in Germany. The German experiment may suggest that it is at least possible, though pricey, to use solar for at least a small portion of a country’s energy needs. Eurostat’s Statistics Explained reports that German households pay three times as much for energy than the average cost in the US reported by EIA (Statistics Explained 2014). The same source reports that 44.9% of German electric bills is taxes and levies, including the levy to subsidize the 1.9% solar. Do you want to pay $340 per month for energy that's 2% solar, 98% fossil fuels? Does that really seems like a good idea to you? Given the significant impact on household budgets for even a very small amount of solar power, solar electric may be the least favorable of all possible energy sources. Wind is better, hydro is better, geothermal is better, and nuclear is far better.
Just put the datacenter, and the solar panels in orbit.
All Energy besides nuclear originated with the sun, son.
> nuclear is theoretically far better if a nuclear
Nuclear does provide 20% of US electricity (IEA 2012). No ifs, no theory, no "invest now, we're about to have a breakthrough" - it's very likely powering the computer you're currently using to hype your solar-electric hopes. US nuclear plants actually produced 8 quadrillion BTU of power in 2011 (IEA 2012). Maybe one day solar will get there, perhaps when people look at all of the _heat_ the sun generates instead of having tunnel vision on solar-ELECTRIC. People have been trying for over 50 years to build feasible solar-electric, maybe it'll happen some day. Nuclear IS providing the electricity to run the offices of solar-electric marketing firms. As is friggin coal, because some people are so insistent on remaining blind to basic physics (two and a half watts) that they'd rather keep burning coal while wishing the sun shone at night rather than switching to clean energy that actually works, today.
Of course, Sun puts the dot in dot com!
So enough energy for an eight degree temperature rise is nothing? WTF is it with reality denial every fucking time something that doesn't conform to the Tea Party line is mentioned? Fuck off with the condescending bit about a log scale - I bet you are not old enough to have even seen a book of log tables and you are attempting to apply an exponential scale to a situation where it does not apply as clearly shown by my example above. Eight degrees with very little energy input? That's very childish magical thinking.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Note full daylight (not direct sun) and how the above poster is pretending the sunrise value is still the amount of ambient light several hours after sunrise.
This stupid "ends justifies the means" bullshit to try to bring down one alternative energy seen as a rival to the fanboy's choice of alternative energy is pathetic. If you like nuclear then sing it's praises instead of slandering what you see as the other team.
No single technology will work. On the west coast a combination of hydro, wind and solar has a real chance. Other regions are less lucky.
Where solar really helps is to produce power during peak power loads. Night time is when there is a lot of spare hydro, wind, and coal capacity. When AC is running in summer is when we have the highest peak demand. If solar provides just 10-20% during those peak hours it can replace the need for a lot of fossil plants.
We also need a more overbuilt grid to allow power to be more readily pushed from region to region to allow Mojave sun to power Portland dank.
What you just said pretty much summarizes what I've found in my research. None of the most environmentally friendly sources can provide the majority of the energy , but all combined together they can make a difference.
Solar heating and other solar other than solar-electric can also achieve just as much as solar- electric can, but for some reason when most people hear "energy" they think "electricity" . Only half of our energy usage is electricity, and some of that is using electricity for heating. Heating directly with solar often makes a lot more sense.
Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore has written some things about that which you might find interesting.
In brief, an M80 and a candle release very roughly the same amount of energy. The M80 is dangerous because it releases all of that energy QUICKLY. Radiation from nuclear is similar in that way to radiation from burning. If the energy is released quickly, it can be dangerous. If it's released very slowly, it's not dangerous- you'd need to sit next to the source for a thousand years to get enough radiation to hurt you.
That's what half- life is all about. The most dangerous stuff has a half- life of three and a half years, so disposal consists of waiting ten years. There is also long-lasting waste, which slowly trickles out radiation over a period of 1,300 years. Over the course of a year, it releases less radiation than an equalivent mass pf carrots.
Think you'll have to rely on your sales of dessicated dihydrogen monoxide
http://www.extremetech.com/ext...
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Actually, I carry that around with me. Doesn't weigh hardly anything.
Seriously dude, just step outside of your cave full of albino fish - oh wait, you are not ignorant, you are lying.
When have I ever called for a ban on anything?
If you think that providing food for that many people is a better use of the land than reducing the afternoon power usage of a data center, that's your own judgment call and you can make up your own mind what you want to do.
Are you trying to say you don't HAVE a smart phone to go measure it yourself?
And apparently don't know how to use Google to look it up?
I was probably using a handheld light meter for photography before you were born so I am very well aware that there is not two orders of magnitude of light between when the sun is at 45 degrees and directly overhead.
Why are you persisting with this utterly stupid bluff?
As far as reality denial is going here you are beating the people who think fossils were placed six thousand years ago to test us.