>They have *zero* oil but a lot of "hot" and available water. Oil stuff they have to purchase on the open market with hard currency,let's call this expensive, whereas with hydrogen from geothermal and elctrolysis they can produce what they need internally and keep the icelandic buck at home. Let's call that not nearly as expensive and as time goes on gets even better. How is this not economical for them?
Well since you asked: There's this thing called "trade", whereby you sell something you have a lot of, and thereby cheap, to someone that has little or none of it, and thereby expensive to them.
And they do the same thing in exchange.
And voila! You're BOTH happy and better off.
Very basic, but often overlooked.
In contrast, if you take something that has some value, and do something inefficient with it, like throw 70% to 90% of its value away in transforming it into something that has to be stored in 10,000 psi-proof containers, then you are going to be a lot less happy.
And "keeping money at home" is a super crowd-riler-upper for demagogues, but according to economists is a very stupid idea. Examples of countries that have "kept money at home": Old USSR, Albania, Libya, Egypt, old China, North Korea, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, old India. Examples of countries that have bled trillions of $ to other countries: USA, Canada, Germany, Japan. Which countries are doing okay?
(1) Why is the "video" not a video, but just a few stills? (2) Why does the video not show the "hand" letting go of the object?
A cynical person might suspect
(1) The "video" was selected from a larger sequence, some frames of which might not show the hand acting so gracefully.
(2) They didnt show the hand letting go of an object because they havent figured out how to undo the effects of surface tension, which spell doom for nano-manipulators.
When they show the "hand" in full-frame unedited video, picking up and letting go of several objects, then maybe they'll have some credibility.
>175 Watt panel for $810/each >If I can buy that, I'm sure Google can get a cheaper price.
Are you sure a company that can undercutr everybody else will: (1) Make panels that will last xx years? (2) Still be in business in XX years? (3) Even if in business, will honor the warranty?
>Most PV panels are warrantied for 25 years. That is, they are gauranteed to produce >90% rated peak power for 25 years. Typical >total lifespan is about 40 years (with output dropping to ~80% peak).
Since nobody's actually run them for that long, especially the newer panels, I dont want to bet on it. Look at the poor extrapolated reliability of: Space Shuttle, B-52, C-141, C5A's wings, Firestone 721 radials, my water heater, my mother-in-law's roof, most disk drives, etc, etc, etc.... I don't trust any extrapolated estimate as they ALL seem to be way optimistic.
>PV systems require virtually no maintenance. Think window washers. 100 service people? that's just silly. maybe 1 person full-time, more likely contracted as needed a couple times a year.
Ever run a data center with 100UPS's? Inverters and batteries fail. Solder joints fail. Panels fail. Hail strikes. I wild-guessed it at 5 minutes maintenance per panel per day. Try to get off LA smog or SF salt spray off a panel, without streaks or scratches, in less than two minutes. Maybe 5 minutes is a bit high, but even if you plug in much lower numbers for maintenance, the net result is still very bad.
That's 8,888 180 Watt panels to get to 1.6MW peak.
Total cost for the panels: $7,821,440. Now, let's say for spending that much money google is able to negotiate a modest 5% discount to bring the cost per panel with discount down to: $7,430,368.
I'm going to stick with the above assumption that wiring and converters at this level will come in around 20% of the cost. Which is $1,486,073.
Now let's assume they can get the whole thing installed at a price of $500 per panel on average. That's $4,444,400.
There, my total cost for installation is now: $13,360,441.
It's hard to estimate how many watts per day one of the 180 watt panels will produce because it depends a lot on local weather patterns and how they're positioned. But over a 24hour/365 day period I'm going to go ahead and assume an average hourly production ballpark figure of 25 watts per panel. So that's 25 watts x 8,888 panels: 222.2KW hours. Multiply it by 8,760 hours in a year: 1,946,472 KW hours/year.
>The best I could find for electric rates is Sacramento [jea.com] at $0.111/kwh.
That's kinda high, when I looked at the LA area utility tables, you can buy power for 0.028
>At that rate, google will save $216,058/year.
make that $50K using the actual cost of wholesale power.
Solar panels last much longer than 15 years. Here's a company [premierpower.com] that claims a lifespan of 30+ years and they have a 25 year warranty. Here's a guy who talks about a 21 year old panel still producing at near it's peak rating. [otherpower.com]
>From personal experience I can say many older panels lose some efficiency and after 12-15 years their output drops to ~80% of the their original peak output. But let's assume the gradual loss of output will coincide with a gradual increase in the grid power price, offsetting each other.
Well, I was assuming a quadrupling of the cost of power over 15 years, so I'm way ahead of you on being generous in that way. And I FORGOT to factor in panel aging factor, so I overestimated there too.
>So let's say a 30 year life, $216,058/year comes to $6,481,740. Subtract that from the installation costs and you get: $-6,878,701. Not nearly the $120M loss you estimate.
You forgot to take into account what you could have done with the money. Compute what you can make with 3.5% compounded interest.
You forgot to take into account the cost of maintenance. Just Windexing each panel once a day with cheap labor will kill all the money saved.
You forgot to take into account failures. I assumed a conserbvative 5% a year.
If you use inverters or horrors, batteries, the cost of maintenance will kill you.
> And who knows, the panels may last 40 years.
Yes, and Paris Hilton may become a Sunday-School Superintendent. But not many people will put money on either possibility.
There's always a tradeoff between risk and reward. Most folks if they had the option of putting $7 million in the bank and assured a 3.5% return, or spending it on a field of pholtovoltaics with, depending on whether you beleieve you or me, very negative returns or only -100% negative returns, I suspect 98% will go for the bank (2% of people are totally crazty)
I wish the numbers were better, but there they are.
>Explain to me again why you're claiming that a fifteen year lifespan is an "educated estimate" when many panel manufacturers warranty them for 25 or 30 years? Your suspicions mean bupkis to me.
Because I've been on this planet for many years. I've seen all kinds of supposedly wonderful products that were insufficiently tested and didnt live up to the "estimated lifetime". See: space shuttle, wings of: C141, C-5A, B-52; Laptop batteries, smallpox vaccinations, Goodyear 721 radial tires, Dodge Durango ball joints, Ford brake switches, paint jobs on Ford and Dodge cars 1985-1995. Now we have hard disk manufacturers claiming 100,000 MTBF hours! Sheer nonsense.
A 25 year warranty means what? Do you expect to be able to find what happened to Shell or Isophoton pholtovoltaic company or their distributors in 15 years? And the warranty is likely to be, like those 20-year 40-gal water heater warranties, pro-rated.
And even if those panels last 25 years, if you look at the math, they can't even keep up with paying their interest or maintenance costs, so extra life just means more losses.
>Thank you for encouraging the dickhead attitude that too often drives our stock market.
>A company actually did something good without an obvious short termprofit incentive? STRING 'EM UP!
Well, I'm a feel-god warm fuzzy kind of guy. But publicly-traded companies and their officers have signed papers promising to do good by their stockholders. Now one could argue that there "might" be more than $66 million of unmeasureable goodwill generated by blowing this chunk of change. But the SEC and stack analysts are kinda hard-headed folks and might look unfavorably on such a IMHO bone-headed move.
And there are *plenty* of things they could have done that do have both warm fuzzies and a payback for somebody. Preventive health care, ECFE, vaccination, sex ed, etc, etc, etc, etc....
>Wow, so many things wrong with this, it's hard to know where to begin.
>If you bothered to check with some of the agencies that are doing sanity checks on photovoltaics (i.e. the SEIA), you'd see that they run at about 80% efficiency for about 300 days of the year.
What the heck does that mean?
>The first cutoff of 160 watts to 15 to 30 is a HUGE error.
Please look over my spreadsheet and point out where the error is. if it's that huge, it should be easy to spot.
>However, this fails to take into account the actual lifetimes of these devices. They're twenty years.
Nobody knows that for sure. I made an educated estimate of 15 years, which I suspect is not too far off.
>Incidentally, a surprising number of those setups have been busted for being large scale grow-ops.
I don't see how this helps your argument. If a "grow-op" you mean growing herbs under lights, using solar power is ridicuoulsly inefficient:: you're capturing about 10% of the sun, then converting it into light at maybe 10% efficiency. So the plants get 1% of whay they 'd get if you had just put in a glass roof. Just crazy.
>Go figure. Someone's got the capital to make this feasible.
Er, that's a counter-argument, if people need a 10,000% profit business to pay for solar power.
>I also find that price to be frightfully high.
Yeah, me too. What part of $780 a panel * 10,000 = $7,800,000 do you have trouble with?
Okay, that's interesting info on the govt subsidies. But as you say, that just moves the costs onto the taxpayers. And with the numbers looking so dismal by my reckoning, it's hard to believe even with 50% subsidies the company can come out ahead.
Not to mention the hard to figure opportunity costs, and the social cost of all this disinformation.
>What part of "Do no evil" do you not understand?
By some people's measurements, it's "evil" to blow $XX million that could have been applied to so many other "good deeds" that have an actual measureable social benefit or even return on investment. For instance, giving the money for preventative health care for kids, or early childhood family education, is not only warm and fuzzy, but can be shown to pay back many $ saved in costs later on for every $ invested. As distinguished from being a total waste of money. See the difference?
I suggest since the guys at Google are measureably really smart, they have absolutely no excuse for doing something so dumb, if not "evil".
Well hooray for Iceland. Too bad the article did not mention the LOW EFFICIENCY of making hydrogen by electrolysis, or the difficulties in storing and transporting huge quantities of the stuff. I hope some Icelandic economist gets a Nobel Prize for pointing out the true costs of oil versus hydrogen. A little more sanity is needed if we're going to survive.
>1. Google will probably get tax deductions or other government incentive for this.
Okay, then the taxpayers should revolt too.:)
>2. You do realise that much of Google's good will around the world is the 'Do no evil' motto? Corporations do charity work and similar things all the time to gain publicity and good will.
Then I'd suggest they give the $67 million to charity, instead of flushing it down the toilet.
>It also saddens me that people still propose the same thinking that is feeding oppression, pollution and exploitation around the world on a massive scale.
Yes, flushing $67 million down the tubes is opressing the stockholders, the taxpayers, polluting the environment (They could have bought 2,000 hybrid cars with that money, several million tons of CO2 wasted there), and exploiting the gullibility of the public.
>10,000 * 30w. * 8760 is a wee bit more than 263,000... Think you dropped lots of zeros on those calculations.
That was watt-hours per panel. Multipled up later on.
Here's my spreadsheet, this time not all in one paragraph!
panel 160 watts
price $1,300.00 retail
discount 40% quantity and wholesale discounts
net $780.00 cost per panel
watt discount 5% allowable tolerance
raw watts 152
degradation 10% spec degradation over time
avg degra 5%
raw watts 144.4
night factor 0 oops, done later
raw watts 144.4
diode factor 97% schottky series diode loss
raw watrs 139.6267778
angle factor 3% loss due to sun angle delta during year
raw watts 135.4379744
sun hrs 5.5 avg Socal sun hours per day
sun factor 23%
raw watts 31.03786914
avail 95% panel availability
raw 29.48597569
panel failure rate 5% per year
time to replace panel 1 hour
panels failing per year 500
wiring 2% wiring losses
raw watts 28.89625617
inverter eff 90% Dc to AC converter efficiency
raw watts 26.00663056
hrs 8766 hours in a year
watt hrs/pan 227974.1234 watt hours to load
kwh 227.9741234 kilowatt hours to load
cur elec cost $0.03 current socal kwh price
inflation 4 Assumption of inflation in 15 years
fut elec $0.11 final elec cost
avg elec $0.06 average cost over years
elect $ $12.77 avoided cost per panel per year
watts out 1,600,000.00 target watts out gross
panels 10000 computed
$/yr saved $127,665.51
cost panels $7,800,000.00
inst cost 10% installation
equip 20% wiring, inverters, etc
tot cost $10,140,000.00 total cost of all equipment
yrs 15 years of service
panels/person 100 number of panels per service person
persons 100 computed
pay $20,000.00 pay per service person per year (LOW)
pay/yr $2,000,000.00 total pay
yrs tot 15
pay $ $30,000,000.00 total payroll over the years
system cost $40,140,000.00 equipment plus payroll
lost interest 3.5% interest possible in low-risk investments
TOT SYS COST $67,803,187.28 cost plus lost interest
Income $1,914,982.64 from avoided electricity costs
Tot loss $65,888,204.64
Ooops, my first calculations were a bit loopy, here's a better one, taking into account solar panel degradation, tolerances, heat factors, ACTUAL california electricity costs, now and projected, real compounded interest costs, costs of servicing and installation. Mostly concervative and real-world numbers. Still, they're losing many tens of millions-- the income from avoided electricity is barely 5% of the losses.
Actually, the numbers are much worse than this-- solar power is unreliable, and most utilities charge considerably more, like twice as much, for unscheduled power. That power has to be bought on the fly, on the spot market, or requires the starting up of gas powered generators, which are very pricey to run. I couldnt figure out how to calculate this, but obviously it would only make the numbers worse.
Spreadsheeet summary:
panel 160 watts
price $1,300.00 retail
discount 40% quantity and wholesale discounts
net $780.00 cost per panel
watt discount 5% allowable tolerance
raw watts 152
degradation 10% spec degradation over time
avg degra 5%
raw watts 144.4
night factor 0 oops, done later
raw watts 144.4
diode factor 97% schottky series diode loss
raw watrs 139.6267778
angle factor 3% loss due to sun angle delta during year
raw watts 135.4379744
sun hrs 5.5 avg Socal sun hours per day
sun factor 23%
raw watts 31.03786914
avail 95% panel availability
raw 29.48597569
panel failure rate 5% per year
time to replace panel 1 hour
panels failing per year 500
wiring 2% wiring losses
raw watts 28.89625617
inverter eff 90% Dc to AC converter efficiency
raw watts 26.00663056
hrs 8766 hours in a year
watt hrs/pan 227974.1234 watt hours to load
kwh 227.9741234 kilowatt hours to load
cur elec cost $0.03 current socal kwh price
inflation 4 Assumption of inflation in 15 years
fut elec $0.11 final elec cost
avg elec $0.06 average cost over years
elect $ $12.77 avoided cost per panel per year
watts out 1,600,000.00 target watts out gross
panels 10000 computed
$/yr saved $127,665.51
cost panels $7,800,000.00
inst cost 10% installation
equip 20% wiring, inverters, etc
tot cost $10,140,000.00 total cost of all equipment
yrs 15 years of service
panels/person 100 number of panels per service person
persons 100 computed
pay $20,000.00 pay per service person per year (LOW)
pay/yr $2,000,000.00 total pay
yrs tot 15
pay $ $30,000,000.00 total payroll over the years
system cost $40,140,000.00 equipment plus payroll
lost interest 3.5% interest possible in low-risk investments
TOT SYS COST $67,803,187.28 cost plus lost interest
Income $1,914,982.64 from avoided electricity costs
Tot loss $65,888,204.64
$67,803,187.28
.
Sorry, I slipped a digit early in the calculations. They only need to spend $12 million on this boondoggle, with possible payback of $4.5 million, losing a net $7.5 million, then with interest taken into account, losing $12.9 mil. Still not a very good deal.
And that's best case, using real-world costs, like triple the cost per panel and double the cost for infrastructure, and oh, we ignored maintenance and labor and opportunity costs, it's an even worse deal for the stockholders.
Now your average square yard (or square meter, close enuf) solar panel can, if at right angles to the Sun, on a clear day, can put out maybe 160 watts.
So they could be planning on having 1,600,000 / 160, or ten thousand solar panels.
That's a pretty big number.
Now let's see if this is cost effective in any way:
Let's say they can get a quantity discount and can bargain the price down to, say, $1,000 each. (Current prices, with installation, are somewhere around $4,500, so we're being generous).
And let's also assume all the ancillary folderol of DC to AC converters costs only another 20% (probably closer to 40% in real life).
So we're talking about $1,200 per panel, $120,000,000 for the whole shebang. Chump change for Google.
Actually, literally "chump Change".
Becuz those panels, over a 24-hour average, although they can peak out at 160 watts each, if you take into account unavoidable things like "night" and "clouds", the average power is closer to 15 to 30 watts.
Now scientists tell us there are about 8760 hours in a year. Thirty watts for a year is about 263,000 watt-hours, or lets round it up to 300 kilowatt-hours. Multiply it by the number of panels, and that's an impressive 3,000,000 kilowatt hours. At a rate of 10 cents each, they can save $300,000 a year. If we are extremely optimistic, and assume the panels will last 15 years, they will save $4,500,000 over their lifetime.
"Good for the environment", at a first glance. "Gives you warm and fuzzy feelings", for sure.
Of course, if you do the math, $120 million spent, a return of $4.5 mil, that's not so good if you're an accountant.
It's actually worse than that, as if you keep the $120 million in the bank, it will garner at least $54 million at just 3% interest, risk free, leaving $174 million in the bank.
So Google will lose about $170 million on this project.
But if you are a STOCKHOLDER in the CORPORATION, you should be apalled. One Hundred Seventty Million Dollars down the drain. Your Money.
Even if energy prices QUADRUPLED over the next 15 years, they will still lose over $120 million. Yipes.
Is a "peoples Jamanzbxvcnzbcnbzochira". OpenOffice spellchecker doesnt have this word.
Is run by your basic wild and crazy guy.
Who, next to North Korea, probably has the worlds worst messed-up economy.
Not to mention a traditional culture which isnt real hot on modern concepts like freedom, equality for women, or much of anything we can identify with.
If one were to guess what will happen to these laptops:
35% will "disappear" before they get to the schools.
35% will "disappear" between the school's loading dock and the classrooms.
30% will be used just once, in rote fashion, to pull up "www.khadaffi.gov", so look at heroic photos of the great leader wearing various styles of classy italian sunglasses.
100% of them will "disappear" or "break", or really break within a month.
This is not all that basically different from that scene in "Airplane!" where they're showing the natives how to burp Tupperware.
Wow! A company's bigwig claiming their product, not yet shown to anyone, is somehow better than an existing product, that's been out for years, looks great to the average eye, but that somehow, although everybody wants it, has several fatal flaws! And before an IPO!
Seriously, isnt there some restriction on making "forward looking statements" before a stock offering?
So am I buying light? I'd say I'm buying information transport services. I don't want the light, I don't need the light, in fact I can't see the light and get the service I want. One could say the light is incidental to the data delivery. One could even claim you're not buying the light, but the dark pauses that carry the information.
One way around it-- they could switch to infrared LED's, then you're not getting visible light.
If they claim you're still getting heat, challenge them to feel the end of the fiber and detect any heat coming out.
It does make Ben Franklin, or was it Faraday, apropos to today. Back then he was showing some govt official batteries and electromagnets. The official asked "What good is it?" Reply: "Soemday, you'll tax it".
I understand your concern, but the physics of the situation make the problem unlikely.
First of all there are just a few bolts, and several billion cubic miles of space.
Secondly, the bolts have NO means of "accelerating", they are constrained to orbit at the same speed as everything else at that level, so the relative speeds of the objects tends to be miniscule.
Now there *is* a big problem if the satellite is in a "spy" orbit, a north - to - south mostly "polar" orbit. Then the relative angles are wicked.
It's a psychological thing. Like walking by a streetlight and having it go on or off. If it happens again within an hour or so, you're SURE it had something to do with you. Even if it's the same streetlight. Even if you know when the bulbs get old, they overheat and cycle on and off. Every week or so I hear two Bob Dylan tunes back to back on my iPod. Not too surprising, I only have about 60 tunes on there and Senor Zimmerman "sings" four of them.
Well, you get points for actually looking at the data. But I'd subtract the points as you didnt think things through:
Is is it likely they set off a bunch of conventional explosives over a period of several minutes? What would be the point? And how to syncronize them so their waves add up at a particular point far away? Not bloody likely.
More likely you're looking at the raw seismograph output. Seismographs are usually a weight on a spring, so even a sharp step impulse results in lots of after-ringing. To get the original signal back, yo have to put the boingy-boingy stuff through three integrators (analog or digital) to reconstruct the original signal. I have an old analog op-amp schematic around here somewhere that shows the input (looks much like your damped sine wave boings) and the reconstructed output (looks like a cliff with just a minor bounce).
"Lost bolts" are not a collision hazard. They just float around. When the Shuttle fires its retrorockets, the bolts stay behind in orbit. In a few months their orbits decay and they reenter, making a nice streak across the sky.
Even wheile they're in orbit, they're not a significant hazard. Due to the tyranny of orbit mechanics, anything at their altitude will be moving mostly in the same direction, at much the same speed.
Now if somebody was crazy enough to launch in the opposite direction, THEN the bolt would be a heck of a hazard!
Nano-sats are a particularly poor idea.
A satellite needs a certain amount of power if it is to communicate. An antenna has to be of a certain minimum size if it is to pick up or transmit a signal. A solar panel has to have a certain undiminishable size to pick up enough energy to run the satellite. These are very basic and mostly unmoveable limits.
There's also the problem of space-wind and drag. A satellite's mass goes down as the cube of its linear dimension, but the drag only goes down as the square. Below a certain size a satellite will have very little mass and intertia, while still having significant cross-sectional drag. Below a certain size satellites don't stay in orbit for very long, they get dragged down by atmospheric drag and solar wind.
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Well since you asked: There's this thing called "trade", whereby you sell something you have a lot of, and thereby cheap, to someone that has little or none of it, and thereby expensive to them.
And they do the same thing in exchange.
And voila! You're BOTH happy and better off.
Very basic, but often overlooked.
In contrast, if you take something that has some value, and do something inefficient with it, like throw 70% to 90% of its value away in transforming it into something that has to be stored in 10,000 psi-proof containers, then you are going to be a lot less happy.
And "keeping money at home" is a super crowd-riler-upper for demagogues, but according to economists is a very stupid idea. Examples of countries that have "kept money at home": Old USSR, Albania, Libya, Egypt, old China, North Korea, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, old India. Examples of countries that have bled trillions of $ to other countries: USA, Canada, Germany, Japan. Which countries are doing okay?
Hmm, a few questions for these guys:
(1) Why is the "video" not a video, but just a few stills?
(2) Why does the video not show the "hand" letting go of the object?
A cynical person might suspect
(1) The "video" was selected from a larger sequence, some frames of which might not show the hand acting so gracefully.
(2) They didnt show the hand letting go of an object because they havent figured out how to undo the effects of surface tension, which spell doom for nano-manipulators.
When they show the "hand" in full-frame unedited video, picking up and letting go of several objects, then maybe they'll have some credibility.
>Some of your estimates are just plain wrong.
>175 Watt panel for $810/each
>If I can buy that, I'm sure Google can get a cheaper price.
Are you sure a company that can undercutr everybody else will: (1) Make panels that will last xx years? (2) Still be in business in XX years? (3) Even if in business, will honor the warranty?
>Most PV panels are warrantied for 25 years. That is, they are gauranteed to produce >90% rated peak power for 25 years. Typical >total lifespan is about 40 years (with output dropping to ~80% peak).
Since nobody's actually run them for that long, especially the newer panels, I dont want to bet on it. Look at the poor extrapolated reliability of: Space Shuttle, B-52, C-141, C5A's wings, Firestone 721 radials, my water heater, my mother-in-law's roof, most disk drives, etc, etc, etc.... I don't trust any extrapolated estimate as they ALL seem to be way optimistic.
>PV systems require virtually no maintenance. Think window washers. 100 service people? that's just silly. maybe 1 person full-time, more likely contracted as needed a couple times a year.
Ever run a data center with 100UPS's? Inverters and batteries fail. Solder joints fail. Panels fail. Hail strikes. I wild-guessed it at 5 minutes maintenance per panel per day. Try to get off LA smog or SF salt spray off a panel, without streaks or scratches, in less than two minutes. Maybe 5 minutes is a bit high, but even if you plug in much lower numbers for maintenance, the net result is still very bad.
>12million up front and roughly 4million pay-back each year?
Sorry if I was unclear. That's $4 million pay-back after 15 years.
No joy.
180 Watt Solar Panels ($880 each) [mrsolar.com]
That's 8,888 180 Watt panels to get to 1.6MW peak.
Total cost for the panels: $7,821,440. Now, let's say for spending that much money google is able to negotiate a modest 5% discount to bring the cost per panel with discount down to: $7,430,368.
I'm going to stick with the above assumption that wiring and converters at this level will come in around 20% of the cost. Which is $1,486,073.
Now let's assume they can get the whole thing installed at a price of $500 per panel on average. That's $4,444,400.
There, my total cost for installation is now: $13,360,441.
It's hard to estimate how many watts per day one of the 180 watt panels will produce because it depends a lot on local weather patterns and how they're positioned. But over a 24hour/365 day period I'm going to go ahead and assume an average hourly production ballpark figure of 25 watts per panel. So that's 25 watts x 8,888 panels: 222.2KW hours. Multiply it by 8,760 hours in a year: 1,946,472 KW hours/year.
>The best I could find for electric rates is Sacramento [jea.com] at $0.111/kwh.
That's kinda high, when I looked at the LA area utility tables, you can buy power for 0.028
>At that rate, google will save $216,058/year.
make that $50K using the actual cost of wholesale power.
Solar panels last much longer than 15 years. Here's a company [premierpower.com] that claims a lifespan of 30+ years and they have a 25 year warranty. Here's a guy who talks about a 21 year old panel still producing at near it's peak rating. [otherpower.com]
>From personal experience I can say many older panels lose some efficiency and after 12-15 years their output drops to ~80% of the their original peak output. But let's assume the gradual loss of output will coincide with a gradual increase in the grid power price, offsetting each other.
Well, I was assuming a quadrupling of the cost of power over 15 years, so I'm way ahead of you on being generous in that way. And I FORGOT to factor in panel aging factor, so I overestimated there too.
>So let's say a 30 year life, $216,058/year comes to $6,481,740. Subtract that from the installation costs and you get: $-6,878,701. Not nearly the $120M loss you estimate.
You forgot to take into account what you could have done with the money. Compute what you can make with 3.5% compounded interest.
You forgot to take into account the cost of maintenance. Just Windexing each panel once a day with cheap labor will kill all the money saved.
You forgot to take into account failures. I assumed a conserbvative 5% a year.
If you use inverters or horrors, batteries, the cost of maintenance will kill you.
> And who knows, the panels may last 40 years.
Yes, and Paris Hilton may become a Sunday-School Superintendent. But not many people will put money on either possibility.
There's always a tradeoff between risk and reward. Most folks if they had the option of putting $7 million in the bank and assured a 3.5% return, or spending it on a field of pholtovoltaics with, depending on whether you beleieve you or me, very negative returns or only -100% negative returns, I suspect 98% will go for the bank (2% of people are totally crazty)
I wish the numbers were better, but there they are.
Because I've been on this planet for many years. I've seen all kinds of supposedly wonderful products that were insufficiently tested and didnt live up to the "estimated lifetime". See: space shuttle, wings of: C141, C-5A, B-52; Laptop batteries, smallpox vaccinations, Goodyear 721 radial tires, Dodge Durango ball joints, Ford brake switches, paint jobs on Ford and Dodge cars 1985-1995. Now we have hard disk manufacturers claiming 100,000 MTBF hours! Sheer nonsense.
A 25 year warranty means what? Do you expect to be able to find what happened to Shell or Isophoton pholtovoltaic company or their distributors in 15 years? And the warranty is likely to be, like those 20-year 40-gal water heater warranties, pro-rated.
And even if those panels last 25 years, if you look at the math, they can't even keep up with paying their interest or maintenance costs, so extra life just means more losses.
Well, I'm a feel-god warm fuzzy kind of guy. But publicly-traded companies and their officers have signed papers promising to do good by their stockholders. Now one could argue that there "might" be more than $66 million of unmeasureable goodwill generated by blowing this chunk of change. But the SEC and stack analysts are kinda hard-headed folks and might look unfavorably on such a IMHO bone-headed move.
And there are *plenty* of things they could have done that do have both warm fuzzies and a payback for somebody. Preventive health care, ECFE, vaccination, sex ed, etc, etc, etc, etc....
>If you bothered to check with some of the agencies that are doing sanity checks on photovoltaics (i.e. the SEIA), you'd see that they run at about 80% efficiency for about 300 days of the year.
What the heck does that mean?
>The first cutoff of 160 watts to 15 to 30 is a HUGE error.
Please look over my spreadsheet and point out where the error is. if it's that huge, it should be easy to spot.
>However, this fails to take into account the actual lifetimes of these devices. They're twenty years.
Nobody knows that for sure. I made an educated estimate of 15 years, which I suspect is not too far off.
>Incidentally, a surprising number of those setups have been busted for being large scale grow-ops.
I don't see how this helps your argument. If a "grow-op" you mean growing herbs under lights, using solar power is ridicuoulsly inefficient:: you're capturing about 10% of the sun, then converting it into light at maybe 10% efficiency. So the plants get 1% of whay they 'd get if you had just put in a glass roof. Just crazy.
>Go figure. Someone's got the capital to make this feasible.
Er, that's a counter-argument, if people need a 10,000% profit business to pay for solar power.
>I also find that price to be frightfully high.
Yeah, me too. What part of $780 a panel * 10,000 = $7,800,000 do you have trouble with?
Not to mention the hard to figure opportunity costs, and the social cost of all this disinformation.
I suggest since the guys at Google are measureably really smart, they have absolutely no excuse for doing something so dumb, if not "evil".
Well hooray for Iceland. Too bad the article did not mention the LOW EFFICIENCY of making hydrogen by electrolysis, or the difficulties in storing and transporting huge quantities of the stuff. I hope some Icelandic economist gets a Nobel Prize for pointing out the true costs of oil versus hydrogen. A little more sanity is needed if we're going to survive.
Okay, then the taxpayers should revolt too. :)
>2. You do realise that much of Google's good will around the world is the 'Do no evil' motto? Corporations do charity work and similar things all the time to gain publicity and good will.
Then I'd suggest they give the $67 million to charity, instead of flushing it down the toilet.
>It also saddens me that people still propose the same thinking that is feeding oppression, pollution and exploitation around the world on a massive scale.
Yes, flushing $67 million down the tubes is opressing the stockholders, the taxpayers, polluting the environment (They could have bought 2,000 hybrid cars with that money, several million tons of CO2 wasted there), and exploiting the gullibility of the public.
That was watt-hours per panel. Multipled up later on.
Here's my spreadsheet, this time not all in one paragraph!
panel 160 watts
price $1,300.00 retail
discount 40% quantity and wholesale discounts
net $780.00 cost per panel
watt discount 5% allowable tolerance
raw watts 152
degradation 10% spec degradation over time
avg degra 5%
raw watts 144.4
night factor 0 oops, done later
raw watts 144.4
diode factor 97% schottky series diode loss
raw watrs 139.6267778
angle factor 3% loss due to sun angle delta during year
raw watts 135.4379744
sun hrs 5.5 avg Socal sun hours per day
sun factor 23%
raw watts 31.03786914
avail 95% panel availability
raw 29.48597569
panel failure rate 5% per year
time to replace panel 1 hour
panels failing per year 500
wiring 2% wiring losses
raw watts 28.89625617
inverter eff 90% Dc to AC converter efficiency
raw watts 26.00663056
hrs 8766 hours in a year
watt hrs/pan 227974.1234 watt hours to load
kwh 227.9741234 kilowatt hours to load
cur elec cost $0.03 current socal kwh price
inflation 4 Assumption of inflation in 15 years
fut elec $0.11 final elec cost
avg elec $0.06 average cost over years
elect $ $12.77 avoided cost per panel per year
watts out 1,600,000.00 target watts out gross
panels 10000 computed
$/yr saved $127,665.51
cost panels $7,800,000.00
inst cost 10% installation
equip 20% wiring, inverters, etc
tot cost $10,140,000.00 total cost of all equipment
yrs 15 years of service
panels/person 100 number of panels per service person
persons 100 computed
pay $20,000.00 pay per service person per year (LOW)
pay/yr $2,000,000.00 total pay
yrs tot 15
pay $ $30,000,000.00 total payroll over the years
system cost $40,140,000.00 equipment plus payroll
lost interest 3.5% interest possible in low-risk investments
TOT SYS COST $67,803,187.28 cost plus lost interest
Income $1,914,982.64 from avoided electricity costs
Tot loss $65,888,204.64
Ooops, my first calculations were a bit loopy, here's a better one, taking into account solar panel degradation, tolerances, heat factors, ACTUAL california electricity costs, now and projected, real compounded interest costs, costs of servicing and installation. Mostly concervative and real-world numbers. Still, they're losing many tens of millions-- the income from avoided electricity is barely 5% of the losses. Actually, the numbers are much worse than this-- solar power is unreliable, and most utilities charge considerably more, like twice as much, for unscheduled power. That power has to be bought on the fly, on the spot market, or requires the starting up of gas powered generators, which are very pricey to run. I couldnt figure out how to calculate this, but obviously it would only make the numbers worse. Spreadsheeet summary: panel 160 watts price $1,300.00 retail discount 40% quantity and wholesale discounts net $780.00 cost per panel watt discount 5% allowable tolerance raw watts 152 degradation 10% spec degradation over time avg degra 5% raw watts 144.4 night factor 0 oops, done later raw watts 144.4 diode factor 97% schottky series diode loss raw watrs 139.6267778 angle factor 3% loss due to sun angle delta during year raw watts 135.4379744 sun hrs 5.5 avg Socal sun hours per day sun factor 23% raw watts 31.03786914 avail 95% panel availability raw 29.48597569 panel failure rate 5% per year time to replace panel 1 hour panels failing per year 500 wiring 2% wiring losses raw watts 28.89625617 inverter eff 90% Dc to AC converter efficiency raw watts 26.00663056 hrs 8766 hours in a year watt hrs/pan 227974.1234 watt hours to load kwh 227.9741234 kilowatt hours to load cur elec cost $0.03 current socal kwh price inflation 4 Assumption of inflation in 15 years fut elec $0.11 final elec cost avg elec $0.06 average cost over years elect $ $12.77 avoided cost per panel per year watts out 1,600,000.00 target watts out gross panels 10000 computed $/yr saved $127,665.51 cost panels $7,800,000.00 inst cost 10% installation equip 20% wiring, inverters, etc tot cost $10,140,000.00 total cost of all equipment yrs 15 years of service panels/person 100 number of panels per service person persons 100 computed pay $20,000.00 pay per service person per year (LOW) pay/yr $2,000,000.00 total pay yrs tot 15 pay $ $30,000,000.00 total payroll over the years system cost $40,140,000.00 equipment plus payroll lost interest 3.5% interest possible in low-risk investments TOT SYS COST $67,803,187.28 cost plus lost interest Income $1,914,982.64 from avoided electricity costs Tot loss $65,888,204.64 $67,803,187.28 .
And that's best case, using real-world costs, like triple the cost per panel and double the cost for infrastructure, and oh, we ignored maintenance and labor and opportunity costs, it's an even worse deal for the stockholders.
Now your average square yard (or square meter, close enuf) solar panel can, if at right angles to the Sun, on a clear day, can put out maybe 160 watts.
So they could be planning on having 1,600,000 / 160, or ten thousand solar panels.
That's a pretty big number.
Now let's see if this is cost effective in any way:
Let's say they can get a quantity discount and can bargain the price down to, say, $1,000 each. (Current prices, with installation, are somewhere around $4,500, so we're being generous).
And let's also assume all the ancillary folderol of DC to AC converters costs only another 20% (probably closer to 40% in real life).
So we're talking about $1,200 per panel, $120,000,000 for the whole shebang. Chump change for Google.
Actually, literally "chump Change".
Becuz those panels, over a 24-hour average, although they can peak out at 160 watts each, if you take into account unavoidable things like "night" and "clouds", the average power is closer to 15 to 30 watts.
Now scientists tell us there are about 8760 hours in a year. Thirty watts for a year is about 263,000 watt-hours, or lets round it up to 300 kilowatt-hours. Multiply it by the number of panels, and that's an impressive 3,000,000 kilowatt hours. At a rate of 10 cents each, they can save $300,000 a year. If we are extremely optimistic, and assume the panels will last 15 years, they will save $4,500,000 over their lifetime.
"Good for the environment", at a first glance. "Gives you warm and fuzzy feelings", for sure.
Of course, if you do the math, $120 million spent, a return of $4.5 mil, that's not so good if you're an accountant.
It's actually worse than that, as if you keep the $120 million in the bank, it will garner at least $54 million at just 3% interest, risk free, leaving $174 million in the bank. So Google will lose about $170 million on this project.
But if you are a STOCKHOLDER in the CORPORATION, you should be apalled. One Hundred Seventty Million Dollars down the drain. Your Money.
Even if energy prices QUADRUPLED over the next 15 years, they will still lose over $120 million. Yipes.
If I owned any Google stock, I'd be pissed.
In case you slept thru Social Studies, Libya:
This is not all that basically different from that scene in "Airplane!" where they're showing the natives how to burp Tupperware.
Seriously, isnt there some restriction on making "forward looking statements" before a stock offering?
One way around it-- they could switch to infrared LED's, then you're not getting visible light.
If they claim you're still getting heat, challenge them to feel the end of the fiber and detect any heat coming out.
It does make Ben Franklin, or was it Faraday, apropos to today. Back then he was showing some govt official batteries and electromagnets. The official asked "What good is it?" Reply: "Soemday, you'll tax it".
And putting zeolite into oil doesnt seem to have anything to do with the title, unless you know somewhere where oil is marketed as "food".
And the article isnt clear, but what may be going on isnt chemical manipulation at all, but just simple mechanical filtering.
Otherwise okay.
First of all there are just a few bolts, and several billion cubic miles of space.
Secondly, the bolts have NO means of "accelerating", they are constrained to orbit at the same speed as everything else at that level, so the relative speeds of the objects tends to be miniscule.
Now there *is* a big problem if the satellite is in a "spy" orbit, a north - to - south mostly "polar" orbit. Then the relative angles are wicked.
It's a psychological thing. Like walking by a streetlight and having it go on or off. If it happens again within an hour or so, you're SURE it had something to do with you. Even if it's the same streetlight. Even if you know when the bulbs get old, they overheat and cycle on and off. Every week or so I hear two Bob Dylan tunes back to back on my iPod. Not too surprising, I only have about 60 tunes on there and Senor Zimmerman "sings" four of them.
Is is it likely they set off a bunch of conventional explosives over a period of several minutes? What would be the point? And how to syncronize them so their waves add up at a particular point far away? Not bloody likely.
More likely you're looking at the raw seismograph output. Seismographs are usually a weight on a spring, so even a sharp step impulse results in lots of after-ringing. To get the original signal back, yo have to put the boingy-boingy stuff through three integrators (analog or digital) to reconstruct the original signal. I have an old analog op-amp schematic around here somewhere that shows the input (looks much like your damped sine wave boings) and the reconstructed output (looks like a cliff with just a minor bounce).
Even wheile they're in orbit, they're not a significant hazard. Due to the tyranny of orbit mechanics, anything at their altitude will be moving mostly in the same direction, at much the same speed.
Now if somebody was crazy enough to launch in the opposite direction, THEN the bolt would be a heck of a hazard!
Nano-sats are a particularly poor idea. A satellite needs a certain amount of power if it is to communicate. An antenna has to be of a certain minimum size if it is to pick up or transmit a signal. A solar panel has to have a certain undiminishable size to pick up enough energy to run the satellite. These are very basic and mostly unmoveable limits. There's also the problem of space-wind and drag. A satellite's mass goes down as the cube of its linear dimension, but the drag only goes down as the square. Below a certain size a satellite will have very little mass and intertia, while still having significant cross-sectional drag. Below a certain size satellites don't stay in orbit for very long, they get dragged down by atmospheric drag and solar wind.