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Porsche Builds Photovoltaic Pylon, Offsetting Luddite Position On Self-Drive (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Porsche has just completed an impressive 25-meter high photovoltaic pylon. The construction, lonely in its current position and strongly resembling the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, comprises 7,776 solar cells and is capable of generating up to 30,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year. From 2017 it will power the elite car manufacturer's new Berlin-Adlershof Porsche center. Porsche is keen to show a progressive stance on its new range of electric vehicles, considering that it has no intention of joining the movement towards self-driving.
Why would any poor benighted fool pay money for a Porsche that didn't need to be driven? The entire point of their ridiculously inflated price tags is they're a joy to drive.
Just because many think self driving cars are a good idea, doesn't mean there are not valid reasons for not wanting to be a part of it.
It's not being a luddite to enjoy driving a car. And guess what Porsche's pride themselves of being?
(Hint : DRIVERS CARS)
Don't you know? All opposition to systems that remove self ownership is herecy!
30000/year is 3.42/h, one panel typically 0.250 at peek. Even at 10% efficiency you only need about 12x12 panels. Far from the mentioned "7,776".
Hear hear!
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for self-driving cars. Personally, I want one. But I also enjoy my little roadster with the manual transmission. I'd love to get a Tesla Roadster (0-60 4 seconds solo in the carpool lane? W00t!). And I'd want a switch that would turn self-driving on and off.
So when I'm going to work, yeah, I'd probably turn on self-drive and read a book. But if I was going out to visit my sister in Colorado? Yeah, there are some stretches of road that are fun to drive and I'd want to flip that switch.
How is it "Luddite" for a company to understand that there is no point in building something that their market would have zero interest in? A Porsche (or, unfortunately "Porch" according to all the idiotic citizens of the USA around me) is supposed to do one very important thing, and do that well; be a wonderful car to drive. i.e. A true "driver's car." And they are. And yes, for the record I do own, and do drive classic air-cooled rear-engine Porsche cars, in motorsports and on the street. 4-seasons. All weather. Because they are utterly brilliant when it comes to do what they were designed to do very well. Porsche wouldn't find any interest in a self-driving car any more than Ferrari or Lamborghini would. In fact, if anything, it would hurt their brand harm.
Or maybe just do their brand harm... If my keyboard had been made by Porsche, it would have given me tactile feedback that I had made an error!
Porsche's photovoltaic pylon discovered to be consuming megawatts of electricity from the grid when nobody is looking, and spewing large amounts of nitrous oxide into the atmosphere.
"capable of generating up to 30,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year"
This is an average power of 3.42 kW for those who hate people who twist units to create big, impressive sounding metrics.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
What I'm trying to say is:
YOU MUST CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL PYLONS
In all seriousness though, this is pretty cool, when do the rest of the world get them?
So why did they put their giant shield in front of several of the solar cells? Seems a waste.
Modern app appers know that ONLY apps can app apps, so anyone driving a Porsche is still a LUDDITE because they should be apping apps!
Apps!
how is choosing one technology over another 'luddite'?
did they threaten to destroy self driving cars? if not, they are not luddites.
another example of typical overpriced 'education' is usa, resulting in careless ignorant exaggerated use of words, from people, journalist and editors, whose job is to use words.
You must construct additional pylons.
>"Porsche Builds Photovoltaic Pylon, Offsetting Luddite Position On Self-Drive "
Luddite Position? Whose stupid-ass opinion is THAT and why it is in the title? Quite a few people have *NO* interest in self-driving cars, and that is especially true in the higher-end sports-cars markets. It wouldn't make any economic sense for Porsche to pursue a path that doesn't intersect with their goals and customer wishes.
What next? A comment about how Kawasaki has a Luddite Position on not pursing research on self-driving motorcycles??
How about Titleist having a Luddite Position on not pursing research on a self-playing robotic golf club? Or maybe Samsung not wanting to pursue a self-watching TV?
http://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg...
Selecting Berlin, for a 2-axis tracking mount, a 1kW panel outputs on average over the year 1300kWh, or 15% or so of nominal expected power.
This is questionably above 900kWh (11%) for a non-pointed much simpler static mount.
However.
7776 'solar cells' - these are not solar panels.
The pictured thing looks very much like a simple fixed vertical panel.
This would come out to 700kWh or so/kWp of panel.
If we assume they talk of germany - 'up to 30000kWh/year' would mean you'd need 42kW of solar panel.
This would be around 230m^2.
Checking https://vimeo.com/154154924 - it gives dimensions of 25*5.5m. This is 137m^2.
This sort of vertically oriented panel is relatively insensitive to position on the earth - as it gets worse as you go towards the equator.
Ew. I think I see what they're doing.
If you cover a vertical panel of 25*5m in solar panels, and point is south/north, then you get 17000 out of the south-pointing, and 4290 out of the south.
This is (in Berlin) 21300.
If however, we put this in the sunniest part of Spain, we get about 28000, which could hit 30000 with optimistic assumptions.
It's a truly terrible design though from most aspects.
If we take 50kWp of solar panels in this design, and simply lay them out flat pointed southish and inclined, we get not 21000 in Berlin, but 48000.
Putting it in the sunniest part of spain gets you 78000.
The numbers for this also work for '7776' solar cells. Conventional solar cells used in panels produce about 6W for the cream of the crop.
Cayenne.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I'll see your Cayenne, and raise you a Panamera.
My god, it's hideous. Who thought "Hey, you know, we don't have a real competitor to the Maserati Quattroporte, so let's stretch out a 911 and put 4 doors on it...
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
People are getting so distracted by the word "luddite" that they've neglected to ask the important question: to what extent does having all of the solar panels mounted vertically affect their efficiency?
Granted, it looks cool, but I presume that most solar arrays are mounted horizontally (or at an angle determined by their location's latitude) so that they are as close to perpendicular as possible to the sun. Unless this installation is *really* far from the equator, it seems like they will be generating less electricity than they might have this way.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Porsche styling suffers deeply from "make it look like a 911" syndrome. Which is sad considering what has resulted when they let non-911 cars have their own character (Carrera GT, 944)
30,000 kWh is enough for an average household (or three if you are really penny-pinching). So it will not "power Berlin-Adlershof Porsche center" - most likely, it will power its lobby and reception desk (unless it's winter, or rains, or...)
Label the first post redundant.
That's a rather bold description over such a stupid issue. Do you think that ship builders who aren't starting to build their hulls out of titanium screen doors are also luddites?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
If you actually think that Porsches' position on so-called 'self-driving' cars is a Luddite attitude, then you don't at all get what Porsche is all about in the first place. It's a driver's car, not just transportation. If you don't understand that, then you've either never driven one, or, like someone with no sense of taste being handed a glass of truly fine wine or well-aged single-malt whiskey, you just aren't capable of 'getting it'. For some people an automobile is just transportation; enjoy your Fords, or Chevys, or Toyotas, or Hondas, or whatever other pedestrian brand of car you care to name; Porsche is not for you, never was, never will be. Neither for that matter are BWM, or Audi, or to a certain extent, Mercedes. Likewise you'd never own a Ferarri or a Lamborghini, even if someone gave it to you as a gift. You'd probably sell it and buy an SUV.
I look forward to your comments filled with hate, outrage, insults, lengthy descriptions of my sexual deviances, and my dubious parentage, along with being slammed down to neg one at a velocity of 0.99C. Nothing quite starts off my mornings like having the villagers, with their pitchforks, scythes, and burning torches, come to batter down my door.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Is it really news that matter?
In Italy you produce that amount of energy with two 6kWp solar roofs.
Of course we don't get the Porsche Logo on top. That's definitely a minus.
New Porche cars must be warped in next to this pylon, right?
-- "This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
Calling 'self-drivers' luddites is just an ad-hominem attack. The people who do this just want us all to give up more and more control in our lives for what? More precious time with their fucking cell phones?
Some people's priorities.....
> Porsche ... Luddite Position On Self-Drive
Hey cretins, Porsche builds sports cars (or at least supposed to build sports cars ... wink, wink, Cayenne...) Anyhow, a self-driving sports car is like a male-bot who bangs Rachel Weiss in your stead. Next time one will suggest Ferrari build draisine rail cars?
an AI in charge of one of them squashed beetles could cause..
they're bad enough when driven by a human.
or, as i prefer to call you, metal beetle people - car drivers are an abortion of history, they're not "human" in the real sense of the word.
The Beetle is made bij VW, not Porsche (although they belong to the same concern).
Average power doesn't make much sense for a solar system - they work during the day in a sort of parabolic curve (for a cool graph see the last image here where a partial solar eclipse "eats away" part of that curve). The PV system that produced the graph in that image I linked to, is at my vacation home in Greece and at 10kW nominal power it produces about 15MWh per year, or half the amount of this Porche pylon (which does not look like the Monolith to me). Given that Berlin is not as sunny as Greece, it would mean this pylon is more than twice my 10kW installation, I guess at least 25-30kW nominal would be needed to generate 30MWh per year.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
up to 30,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year.
Enough of this science jibber-jabber. What's that in homes?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Impossible. The company that owns porsche never cheats like this.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
That doesn't seem much. Perhaps they're trying to tell people: "Look, solar isn't good for anything, keep driving your gas guzzler!" -- Looks like they're using low-yield solar cells.
You a certainly reducing the land footprint if you build a solar installation as a single tall tower, instead of an array of smaller panels covering a field.
However the pylon is going to create a large shadow. If a company minimizes land costs by buying a small plot of land and building a tall photovoltaic tower on it, then they are capturing sunlight that would otherwise fall on their neighbours' land. If the neighbours needed the sunlight for growing crops or for their own solar power installation, then they might even view this as "theft" of "their" sunlight.
The monolith is said to be "capable of generating up to 30,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year". Let's ignore the "up to" part of that; with 8766h/year, that's 3.5kW, a little less than available from a single European 220V 16A plug.
The Volkswagen Beetle is an original design of Ferdinand Porsche. Yes, that guy Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche, whose engineering company was called Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche G.m.b.H., and which later turned into the Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche Aktiengesellschaft or Porsche AG for short. The Porsche AG at first was building performance versions of the VW Beetle with newly shaped car bodies and improved engines, which were called Projekt 356 or Porsche 356.
Doing the maths, that works out at a continuous average of 3.4KW, which is slightly more than a single 13A socket in the UK. If we multiply by 3 (an overcompensation) assuming that those 30,000 KWh are collected during 8 hours of each day, that is still only enough to simultaneously run 3 kettles.
John_Chalisque
If you stick self drive in a porsche you have pretty much lost 99% of its bragging rights.
Umm, you are aware that having self drive in a car and actually driving it yourself are not mutually exclusive options, right? You can put self drive technology on a car intended to be primarily driven by a human.
It wouldn't make any economic sense for Porsche to pursue a path that doesn't intersect with their goals and customer wishes.
Just remember Henry Ford saying. "If I asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse". You can't ignore your customers but customers are in many cases demonstrably poor at figuring out what they really want particularly when we are talking about new technology. Porsche customers might say they want a driver's car but NOBODY really knows what self driving tech will bring to the party so in truth they really don't know if they want it or not. It might be that some of the tech will hugely appeal to people who want to drive their car but do it better and safer. Nothing wrong with driving the car but having a computer to help keep you safe and alive.
If you actually think that Porsches' position on so-called 'self-driving' cars is a Luddite attitude, then you don't at all get what Porsche is all about in the first place. It's a driver's car, not just transportation.
Being a driver's car doesn't mean self driving tech would be useless. So instead of actually steering the car you have the self driving tech as a sort of careful watcher to help insure the driver doesn't crash the car. Think of it like stability control or traction control or ABS on steroids. Hell, Porsche developed a rear drive sports car which is a ridiculous thing to do and they put all kinds of electronic driving aids to keep the car pointed in the right direction. What would be bad about self driving tech that helps you avoid crashes when you are driving said ridiculous rear engine car faster than is objectively prudent?
Not 1x4x9. Not black. Not cubic. Not a monolith. Not full of stars. Fail.
...capable of generating up to 30,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year.
Gee - is that in everyday use, or only when it knows it's hooked up to a test station in a garage?
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Why would any poor benighted fool pay money for a Porsche that didn't need to be driven?
Self driving technology is orthogonal to whether or not the car has controls for a humans to use. You can have a car that is primarily driven by a human with self driving tech available OR you can have a car that is primarily self driven with controls for human override OR you can have a vehicle without human controls at all. For a Porsche I would see the first option being used. The car is primarily human driven but self driving tech is there to keep the human out of trouble and (someday) to be available for taking over the controls if desired. If you're driving your car 300 miles on the highway in traffic are you REALLY getting a lot of driving enjoyment? Self driving options would be nice to have at that point. Or sometimes people driving fast cars drive them faster than is objectively prudent and self driving tech could help keep them from wrapping the car around a phone pole. Some people who buy Porsches and drive them fast aren't as good of drivers as they believe they are. The 911 has a well deserved reputation for punishing drivers who don't really know what they are doing.
So yeah, if Porsche isn't looking into this stuff then they are being Luddites. The utility of self driving tech goes well beyond turning cars into taxis without human drivers.
With over a quarter billion automobiles registered in the US, I find your initial assertion to be wildly incorrect.
If cars were so unaffordable, please explain how 'normal people' are getting to work, going shopping, etc. without an 'unaffordable' automobile? Are they taking public transportation? Walking? Working from home?
Wait, are you trying to lay the groundwork that car ownership is a right, and should be subsidized, just like healthcare?
Ken
Nissan GT-R already does that. It is boring on the track.
If you believe that they you are either an incredibly jaded Formula 1 driver or you have never actually driven one on a track.
That is why for a VERY long time there were no cup holders in the car. You shouldn't be drinking your coffee - you should be *driving*.
That wasn't a Porsche thing. That was a German thing. I owned several VWs which were decidedly NOT "drivers cars" which didn't have cup holders either. Hell I owned an '85 Sirocco which was sporty but utterly lacked cup holders.
And in my opinion it's MY freakin' car and if I want to drive it and drink coffee then Porsche can take their opinion and shove it.
What? Who told you that?
I meant rear engine not rear drive. Typo.
Rear wheel drive is still best for sports cars.
Rear drive is great. Rear engine is mostly stupid outside of drag racing.
They build high performance cars that just so happen to be street legal, who the fuck wants a self driving race car? Does that not defeat the entire purpose of owning a high performance machine? The one point that makes auto racing a sport is the skill of the driver. If you remove the driver, you remove the sport.
Some of Porche's current offerings I could see getting the self drive treatment. Like the Panamera and whatever the heck they call their SUV/XUV/whatever they are called this week. I could see people who want the Porsche label for name only, but want a sedan or minivan totally picking the self drive option. They could rebadge these models as the Porsche PINO edition and all the hipsters would fall over themselves to get one. At least until they find out it means Porsche In Name Only.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Unless I'm missing something 30,000 kwh per year is only about enough to power 3 homes (average usage of 11,000 kwh per year). And in relation to electric cars it's even less impressive, you would need two to three of these pylons and a year to charge a single Tesla Model S battery.
"The construction, lonely in its current position and strongly resembling the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, comprises 7,776 solar cells and is capable of generating up to 30,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year. From 2017 it will power the elite car manufacturer's new Berlin-Adlershof Porsche center."
The hell it will. It'd be a stretch to say it will power the hand driers in one of the executive washrooms at the new Berlin-Adlershof Porsche center.
30,000 kilowatt hours is about 108 gigajoules. 108 gigajoules over a period of 3.154E7 seconds is an average power of 3.4 kilowatts, or about 4.5 horsepower.
This is pure marketing puffery.
I suggest you visit a Porsche (it is with a 'c') dealer and see one in real life. The Panamera might be a bit of an 'acquired taste' but it is certainly not hideous. And for being a stretched 911 ? ehm, the 911 has the motor in the back, then Panamera has ample boot space in the back and not a motor.. Furthermore it is an absolute joy to drive: supercar performance and handling in a luxury car..
With over a quarter billion automobiles registered in the US, I find your initial assertion to be wildly incorrect.
95% of the people don't live in the US, and Americans are not "normal". Most people can't afford a car.
Is there a way to gather energy from small boats in the sea, using the wind, sails and a nice IA to make them come and go charging batteries?
This is a silly fallacy. It's a statistical manipulation to hide information by mashing disparate groups together, like saying half the world's population has ovaries.
The most egregious one I've seen was someone trying to explain technology didn't cut down the amount of time we spend collecting food because some 20% of the earth's population are farmers. In developed countries where agriculture uses advanced farm management techniques and powered machinery, we expend under 2% of our labor time producing food, including the cost of all that machinery and the fuel for it; low-development countries with subsistence farming tend to expend 18% or more. Taken as a whole, the statistic of how many farmers are working to feed 100% of the earth's population drastically weakens my argument; examined as developed vs developing, we see the countries using developed technology expend *much* less labor per unit food, which firmly supports my argument.
Your argument paints the world as one socio-economic unit. It's the kind of argument people use for pulling away from China, citing low pay and poor working conditions, while ignoring the low cost-of-living and the bare fact that a loss of jobs means more starving, homeless Chinese people. Treating Burkina Faso as if it's America with some people's rights getting infringed is a grand delusion.
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They are a pioneer in bringing hybrid powertrains including high energy flyweel systems to sport cars.
Hardly luddite.
I myself have some strong objections and concerns with a driverless car transportation system:
1) coexistence with regular cars will be hard
2) ceding control of a car to an outside authority means they are a huge attack target in the security sense. We should have 0 tolerance for improper access to a system that could create pileups on demand, drive people (like, say, 'enemies' of the state) into walls and so on. I'd rather not have my car operate under any external authority.
3) privacy is totally out the window
IANAPhD but tokamaks... don't think they'll ever be more than expensive toys for grad students to grind their theses out on. Q is too feeble and they're stuck with D-T for fuel... lots of neutrons that turn the whole thing into crumbly, radioactive junk.
And with it the Aiur will be reborn.
Wow, they built a big solar panel! What's next, a big windmill?
Sadly, you started exporting the same coffee back to us and now they put cup holders in our cars too. Sadly, you started exporting the same coffee back to us and now they put cup holders in our cars too.
So you're really saying that your coffee actually sucked worse than ours and that you couldn't get a date. Got it.