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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.
We don't have a farmland shortage. We do have a need for vast amounts of cheap power.
Assuming of course that all land is equally suitable for farming... If you believe that, I have some tundra to sell you.
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
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Newsflash - the panels aren't lying on the ground and there's space inbetween and beneath. There are livestock farms where the animals happily graze among the solar installation.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
There are a number of ways to quantify the impact of one's decision, and by many measures (e.g. greenhouse gas produced by commute to work, & etc...) I'm sure the ratio is even further from unity.
Congrats on winning today's "Dickhead of the Day" award.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
There's an array near where I live here in Ontario, the arrays are packed so closely together that cows and other livestock would have a serious problem navigating them to graze. In many cases, high quality farmland is being turned into the "next big scam." Much like "windmills will solve your needs" from the 1920's.
Om, nomnomnom...
A: Yes. It's called "evaporation." Next question, please.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I know a guy in Alaska who uses solar for all of his power needs during the summer. So if that farmland sale doesn't pan out - you can try to sell off the land for power generation - because that'll be equally suitable too (year round).
;)
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.
Efficiency can be easy - we just need to build a Dyson sphere.
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!
The fact that some arrays were done in a way that's incompatible with farming doesn't mean that it can't be done.
And a lot of "high quality farmland" in many places has been and is being used to alleviate the vast condo,housing & shopping center shortage that's been such a burden on modern society. I'll take the wind turbines & solar panels over yet-another-Walmart
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
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.
But then we'd need an army of self-replicating construction robots, which if capable of learning and adapting to construction issues well enough to not foul up, may decide to rid humans, leading to Borg and/or Battlestar Galactica.
Table-ized A.I.
How much food do you think you could have grown on the grounds of the 200 acre Solana generating station in Arizona?
Here's a nice street view of the area from I-8 outside of Gila Bend, AZ, right next to the plant.
https://www.google.com/maps/@3...
Molten salt systems are already increasing the hours of usable operation of solar plants. Tanks of molten salt can stay heated for A WEEK.
In fact:
As tank sizes increase, and as plants increase, you'll have solar energy delivered to you at night, not just for a couple hours after the sun goes down like normally happens at new solar salt plants.
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!
In most parts of the world solar power is already cheaper than being connected to the grid.
No super richness involved.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
It's not quite an order of magnitude. In most regions, the cost of the batteries for a given daily power drain are going to be less than the cost of power. In that a kilowatt hour of batteries is $200, and in most places you'd pay a good deal more than $200* for a kilowatt hour a day for five years. Of course, there's also the costs of the panels and all that other equipment, but I'm just saying that your component pricing seems out of whack.
EDIT: This is reportedly what Tesla pays for batteries now, pre-gigafactory. By the time anybody tried to actually build a battery-backed solar datacenter, costs would be lower. They seem to drop at ~6-8% a year
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.
The molten salt is only good if you convert the heat through a steam cycle that is only about 30% efficient. When you consider you are cooling the salt as you extract energy from it you will drop this efficiency even more as time goes on until heat is put back into it.
I don't want to do a sig now
I agree it is cheaper to buy it from the power company today. That said, we might be a bit closer than most people think. LCOE (Levelized Cost of Energy) of new solar PV is around 10 cents per KwH. Right now, energy storage is in the ballpark of 30 cents per KwH. Get one third of your power without storage and the rest has to cycle through storage, and you are looking at an average cost of around 30 cents per KwH. About the only place that would save money right now is Hawaii.
Going forward, Solar PV's price has been falling by around 8% a year for decades and I don't see that trend stopping any time soon. Battery costs have been falling even faster, but let's use 8% for those as well. By 2020, we will be looking at 20 cents a kwh. By 2025, it should be down to 13 cents, and by 2030 about 8.5 cents. Remember, that's for a system with solar PV and storage to take you through the night.
That's assuming no big tech breakthroughs, just the incremental 8% a year we have been doing.
Wait, you mean I'm only getting 30% of my unlimited[1] free sunlight, and it has the same problem as any other technology that turns a turbine, like, uh, almost every competing technology?
The point of solar salt is that it can generate power for hours, days, or even a week after the sun goes down.
I might have to quadruple my infrastructure, but I can use 3 of the four tanks to provide power during all the dark hours and rainy days Arizona has.
Yuma Arizona has 313 sunny days a year.
[1]Offer only valid until the inevitable heat death of our sun.]
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.
I recently saw that India is taking an innovative approach to solar installations. They are installing the panels over irrigation canals. This has a few benefits... less evaporation of water because of shading and the government already owns the land for the canals so no land needs to be acquired and no land is taken out of food production. They have thousands of miles of canals.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Except Hamilton brings a very keen perspective from an unexpected source, and 2012 is not that far in the past as solar cell efficiency hasn't made an exponential increase in the past year and a half so his points remain quite valid.
Have a Day!
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.
What a fucking dumbass. You can't supersize a big mac. You can only supersize the drink and fries.
Beyond that, it's been about a decade since they got rid of supersizing.
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.
What a disgusting waste...
Its not unlimited, you can only build a collection grid so big and the sun sets at night. When you quadruple your infrastructure you also quadruple your cost and considering the cost of solar that isn't an attractive option.
I don't want to do a sig now
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.
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.
The area is suitable for farming some plants. Mostly cotton and alfalfa, some grains. Anyone who's driven I-8 to San Diego (or, I suppose, from San Diego) has seen what passes for farming between Yuma and Phoenix.
What a disgusting waste...
Sarcasm? My meter is busted today.
I can't think of much better to have done with 2,000 acres west of Gila Bend AZ than have built a massive solar salt plant.
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.
Who cares that the sun sets at night? I can already keep my salt at generating temperature overnight. If I wanted to be less reliant on gas to power overnights, I can have redundant salt tanks at the cost of increasing my infrastructure -- since the salt is a battery that charges by sunlight. Heck, I can keep my spare salt tank holding at generating temperature offline for a week without sunlight.
The cost of solar, at least in my neighborhood, is already plainly, obviously commercially viable.
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'm at about the same latitude as North India. From May through September, the sunlight here is so intense that almost no garden vegetables will grow without shade protection.
If that shade protection should happen to generate electricity, so much the better.
And then there's the house, where every watt that falls on the roof would be a lot more appreciated in electrical form than in heat input to the attic. Where it leaks through to the house below and negates the air conditioning.
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.
Where I am today it was 12C at 5am and 20C at 9am. One guess as to where the heat came from.
I really don't get why people pretend to be stupid just as part of a shell game to fool people into accepting their politics - or in this case a cowardly attack on some technology seen as a proxy for the other side's politics instead of going for the politics directly. It's pathetic.
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.
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..
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.
> 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.