Can the Sun Realistically Power Datacenters? 237
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.
Obligatoriness Extraordinaire (Score:3)
As soon as they come out with them super whamodyne batteries, our problems will be solved.
Proceed....
Re:Obligatoriness Extraordinaire (Score:5, Insightful)
But there is always the desire to be completely self-reliant. In this area, I always liked the idea of using the excess power during the day to lift water to a lake high up, and running hydro at night to power the datacenter. This is of course expensive, especially since power companies have excess power at night anyways, since the cycle time to stop / start producing base power won't allow the company to shut down X generators at night.
Re:Obligatoriness Extraordinaire (Score:5, Interesting)
Sadly, there just aren't enough places with lakes to store anything like the amount of power we'd need to store. You also have to deal with transmission loss between the solar site and the point of use. There was this proposal a while back [greentechmedia.com] to use massive, carved granite/stone blocks to store power but it doesn't seem to have achieved much mention beyond its initial proposal.
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You also have to deal with the transmission losses from the coal plant to the site where it is used (*facepalm*)
If the whole grid is solar you only need to store about 100% of max usage.
Re:Obligatoriness Extraordinaire (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly, there just aren't enough places with lakes to store anything like the amount of power we'd need to store.
This is actually a silly concern. Electricity demand is highest in the middle of the day when the sun is shining. That is also when the spot price for power is highest. It makes no sense at all to store that power to sell it in the middle of the night, when prices are far lower.
Storing solar power is an issue in niche applications, and it is an issue in a future fantasy world where 100% of our power is solar. But it is not an important issue in the real world, and is unlikely to be for a long, long time.
Re:Obligatoriness Extraordinaire (Score:5, Interesting)
The example of Prineville in TFA is a good one. Here in Oregon we have a lot of base load provided by hydroelectric. We have had squabbles between the Hydro guys and the Wind guys at night in winter when the Hydro guys need to keep the turbines spinning to keep the dam levels safe, and the wind guys have to stop feeding into the grid and that hurts their bottom line.
Summer during the daytime is when Oregon fires up more of the of the coal and natural gas plants, so solar fits in well to cover these peaks times and seasons when the rain isn't falling, the snow has stopped melting, and the AC is running.
Other regions are not nearly as lucky as Oregon to have good wind and hydro options, but lets not disqualify a technology just because it isn't a perfect fit everywhere.
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Storing solar power is an issue in niche applications, and it is an issue in a future fantasy world where 100% of our power is solar.
Very true, and not even a real issue in a 100% renewable scenario. The entire state of South Australia ran on 100% renewable power for a full working day for the first time last week. The bulk of that was wind generation, with rooftop solar adding a significant contribution.
There have been several instances in recent months when wind energy has accounted for all, or nearly all, electricity demand in South Australia. Last Tuesday, however, set a new benchmark – the combination of wind energy and rooftop solar provided more than 100 per cent of the state’s electricity needs, for a whole working day between 9.30am and 6pm. There were several periods in South Australia from Saturday September 27, and over the following days, when wind generation was greater than total state NEM demand.
In reality, renewables contributed well over 100 per cent because they were generating and consuming their own electricity from rooftop solar – the state has 550MW of rooftop solar, with nearly one in four houses with rooftop modules.
That meant that “true” demand by consumers on that day, i.e. the amount of electricity being used by consumers, including rooftop solar, was in fact considerably higher than NEM demand — up to 20 per cent according to the Australian Photovoltaic Institute — because of the contribution of rooftop PV to total electricity supply.
http://reneweconomy.com.au/201... [reneweconomy.com.au]
Re:Obligatoriness Extraordinaire (Score:5, Insightful)
So, bottom line is there are a lot of ways to look at the numbers, but to be truly autonomous with no grid support, you need a lot of capacity.
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You also touched on another key factor. When the fuel is free, efficiency of generation can be a very low priority. Sure it costs more to build a bigger array, but not nearly as much as trying the infinity cost of doubling your solar panel efficiency if the tech don
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And take up more land.
Increased solar means increased habitat destruction.
Unlike Gas and Oil plants that produce plant fertilizer :-)
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Unlike Gas and Oil plants that produce plant fertilizer :-)
They produce bullshit?
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But keep sucking on that sweet sweet tail pipe o crude
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Nobody said they had to generate it all directly on site. And when the roads and every other manmade surface are producing power, habitat destruction will be the straw man it always was.
Re:Obligatoriness Extraordinaire (Score:4, Insightful)
data centers generally aren't lacking for available roof space so no taking up any more land.
Above the atmosphere, at the equator, the average insolation (that is, the amount of incoming solar energy, averaged over the course of a day) is about 400 watts per square meter. At the bottom of the atmosphere in an ideal location (like the Sahara) it's closer to 300 W/sq. m. In most places where people want to have data centers, the number is closer to 200 W/sq. m...or worse. And the efficiency of commercial solar panels runs about 20%, so you're down to 40 watts per square meter.
200 watts is (optimistically) about the draw of a single server, so you're looking at powering one server for every five square meters of rooftop. If you want to run on rooftop solar, then you're going to have to design a data center with very short racks and very wide aisles.
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An interesting thing about tracking panels. You might see more of them if battery systems came in to play. Right now, there is no incentive to pay for tracking systems, but rather plunk that extra money into more capacity because feed in tariffs and production credits don't care what time of day the power is produced, so why bother. Just put in more pane
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My installer said that tracking systems aren't really worth it for domestic situations. They cost about the same as 2 extra panels, and provide roughly the same amount of energy - so why not buy 2 extra panels and not have to deal with maintenance of motors, etc.
I thought that a tracking system could be set up to forego motors and use bi-metallic strips to drive the panel movement throughout the day - have the panels point east when "cold", i.e. in the morning, then bimetallic strips would warm with the sun
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Not just grid capacity, but battery banks. Conventional lead-acid batteries don't last a while. I've been reading good reports on Ni-Fe (Iron Edison is the main brand) batteries, while not as dense, have a 20+ year life.
Of course, there are charge controllers to make sure you feed the power to the batteries at the right voltage and amperage. Too many volts, and lead-acid batteries will boil.
With a source of fuel like propane or natural gas, going off-grid is doable, since a lot of heavy hitting appliance
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Ni-Fe batteries have a long life and more tolerance for discharge levels, but poor efficiency compared to lead-acid. Doesn't mean they wouldn't be useful, but you'll need LOTS more panels to replace what you take out.
My last set of lead-acid cells (12 x BPSolar 2-volt 1100ah) lasted 8 years of domestic use before the first one failed.
You're right about the controller - a good controller makes all the difference.
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Since most of the world's population are concentrated towards the equator that just indicates you either do not understand that your objection is mostly irrelevant or you are pretending to misunderstand to push an invalid point. True - solar is going to really suck in Alaska, Siberia and probably even Seattle but in a lot of places it's a nice addition to the energy mix in daytime when people are working and using up a lot of electricity.
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And, you fail to also read well documented fact that German solar capacity factor is less than 10% overall, equivalent of about 2.4 full sun hours.
http://euanmearns.com/german-p... [euanmearns.com]
Your ignorance is intentional.
Re:Obligatoriness Extraordinaire (Score:5, Informative)
Read the post again - it's insOlation, which is correct, not insUlation, which was your assumption.
Solar PV capacity planning, at least in domestic situations, is based on the amount of energy captured/generated by a panel at its PEAK capacity, and is generally calculated at 5 hours/day in temperate zones, less in frigid, more in tropical, with modifiers for local conditions and climate. Panel output throughout, for example, a clear sunny day in the mid latitudes corresponds closely to a steep-ish bell curve (more like a sine wave, though). Low output at either end of the day because the incidence of the sun's rays to the panel are more oblique.
Panels are getting better at "catching" oblique insolation, but obviously they're much better between the hours of 9-10am and 2-3pm. There is a significant amount of energy captured outside these times, but it's not really useful when calculating the number of panels needed. It's better to state that you'll capture a minimum of x on sunny days, rather than a maximum.
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http://www.solarpanelsplus.com... [solarpanelsplus.com]
He is just willfully ignoring it.
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Pffft,I live in germany.
I see how much sun we have, actually I don't need the 'scientific' links I showed you, to know that I'm right.
Alome today, in mid Octobre we had roughly 8 hours full sunshine.
Re:Obligatoriness Extraordinaire (Score:5, Informative)
The best solar PV plants in Germany have a capacity factor of about 13%.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org]
These are the plants in the best locations. That comes to an average solar insolation of 3.12 full sun hours/day. If you had 5 hours you should have closer to 20% capacity factor. I'll let you think about why they don't see 20%, and why the average capacity factor overall is 9.5%, and try to reconcile it yourself. When you get stumped, I'll gladly explain.
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A, I infact read insUlation, my bad.
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I always liked the idea of using the excess power during the day to lift water to a lake high up, and running hydro at night to power the datacenter.
The version I like is using excess power to pump air into an enclosed space, natural or artificial. Then at night, release the compressed air to drive a turbine. It seems more flexible than large water works. And in case of massive failure, you just get a loud noise instead of a million gallons of water everywhere. Datacenters and standing water door poorly together.
A different variation is what they're doing at Solar Two in California. It's a "solar thermal" plant, but unlike other thermal plants that
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Not quite.
You need about double that to allow for losses pushing the power into storage and getting it back out.
And you need some additional capacity for generation and storage to allow for days when you run at less than 100% efficiency. E.g. cloud cover or winter.
So 1MW/h becomes 3MW/h becomes 6MW/h becomes maybe 10MW/h and you might have 1-2 days best case backup for bad weather.
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Can the sun realistically power data centers? Excepting for the regions which burn primordial elements - it's powering all data centers today.
There's no datacenters powered by fusion reactors. And the fission reactors split apart heavy elements, not primordial elements. Though I imagine there are plenty of datacenters in France, powered by long-gone supernovas rather than the Sun. Everything else is just indirectly solar-powered, like you said.
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Re:Obligatoriness Extraordinaire (Score:4, Informative)
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Primordial elements are those that formed prior to the formation of the earth, and include the heavy elements used in fission reactors.
And "green clouds" have been something to run from, since World War 1.
Re:Obligatoriness Extraordinaire (Score:5, Interesting)
We're already harnessing the power of the sun without "batteries" in the traditional sense. Most of the recent plants built (and under construction) here in Arizona are molten salt, which provides full power for three hours after the sun is "off" -- well into peak residential hours -- on residual heat.
We're still nowhere near 24/7/365 coverage, but we're making strides.
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Yeah, yeah, super duper experimental....
Maybe you'd like to visit the 280MW Solana plant I've got here just outside of Phoenix? They're molten salt and churn out power three hours after dark (or six on other references).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki [wikipedia.org]
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Oh, snap! You've got me with your clever, "It just went online and works great, but it's not 'proven' so na-na-na-na!" line of reasoning.
APS agreed to pay 14c/kWh for Solana's power, and Solana (for cocktail napkin purposes) makes 1 million MHh/year, giving it 14 years to return the 2BN it cost to build, before operating expenses. It's the largest plant by far currently online in Arizona, and no large plants have been operating for 14 years here yet, so the answer is, "We'll see."
The first kWh of electric
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$2B for 250 MW isn't that bad if it has a high capacity factor. Of course, equipment lifetime and maintenance costs become a big deal. Reliability as well, if the plant shuts down it takes a long heat up period before it can produce electricity again. It also appears to require gas backup, how often is uncertain. The biggest question is lifetime of major costly components. If they last 5 years, not a good deal. If they last 15, then its probably a wash. All those things fall in t
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"OK Google, remind me in 15 years to gloat."
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Is more than one century not enough? (Score:2)
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
At least the infrastructure is in place (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:At least the infrastructure is in place (Score:5, Interesting)
If you have solar panels on a rooftop that would otherwise be cooked by the sun, aren't you also saving on the amount of power required for air conditioning?
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All else is not equal. If you didn't have solar panels up there, you could put some light-colored paint on the roof, which reflects much of the sunlight. Solar panels tend to be quite dark, and get quite hot since they aren't anywhere near 100% efficient.
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Any idea what percentage of the sunlight that would normally get reflected back into space now gets turned into heat?
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If you have the cash on hand solar is a good investment. It's safe, guaranteed to pay back in a few years, and ethical.
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I just installed solar panels. Works out to a guaranteed 7% return on investment with no risk. The return should increase in future years as electricity prices rise.
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guaranteed to pay back in a few years
Gonna need to see the math on that one.
Please show your work.
Retail price sucks so rapid payback (Score:2)
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
Quick random thoughts (Score:2)
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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, no
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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
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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.
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In most parts of the world solar power is already cheaper than being connected to the grid.
No super richness involved.
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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-gi
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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
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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.
Q: Can the sun power clouds? (Score:5, Funny)
A: Yes. It's called "evaporation." Next question, please.
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The Sun could have powered clouds, if it hadn't been absorbed by the mighty Oracle.
Solyndra (Score:2)
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 [reuters.com] even though it was
Sure, the sun can power data centers (Score:2)
The sun is powering data centers all over the place right now... albeit from light it shined down on earth millions of years ago.
Greener than Sun (Score:2)
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
Need to integrate with pasture based farming. (Score:2)
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 t
Headline asks the question (Score:2)
Can the Sun Realistically Power Datacenters?
Therefore the answer is: No
Can the sun realistically power datacenters? (Score:2)
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
Can realisticly run the airconditioning (Score:2)
QUIT WHINING (Score:2)
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
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We don't have a farmland shortage. We do have a need for vast amounts of cheap power.
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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 farming very productive, high value (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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
Yes, it does. The light either hits corn or panel (Score:4, Informative)
> 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.
News just in - trees create shade too (Score:2)
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.
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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.
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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
photons ~ energy (Score:2)
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.
Re:Feed 250 hungry people, or 20 Americans (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
Grass and other plants are solar powered, silly (Score:2)
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
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Gras and crops grow just fine underneath solar panels.
Perhaps you should once look on a field where that what you call impossible is actually happening?
I guess if you once where in a park you had noticed that, surprise surprise, underneath the trees gras and weeds are growing.
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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... [google.com]
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What a disgusting waste...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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fat Americans who supersize Big Macs eat beef (Score:3)
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.
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Congrats on winning today's "Dickhead of the Day" award.
Re:Of course... (Score:4, Informative)
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