Apple building 171 acre solar panel farm to power NC data center

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/10/apple-building-171-acre-solar-panel-farm-to-power-nc-data-center.ars

by shawndumas • 15 years ago

67 16 15 years ago

0x122• 15 years ago

> No details about the planned solar panel array or its potential power output are known at this time

Taking the 171 acre figure we can compute at least the limits of what it could do.

171 acres is about 700,000 square meters. At a solar incidence of about 1 KW / square meter and an efficiency of 23% that's 161 MW peak power and an average of 4.7 sun hours per day will give about 750 MWh of usable electricity every day.

This calculation ignores shading effects and assumes that the panels will be stationary rather than tracking, you could probably easily deduct another 50% to account for those effects, so say 375 MWh give or take and 80 MW peak. Likely these figures are still very high, think of it as the maximum amount of solar power that you could extract at that location from incident sunlight without further accounting for conversion losses (solar panels produce DC, you'll need inverters if you want AC power, some data center equipment can run on 48V DC but you'd still need a conversion step for that) and so on.

I wonder how big a chunk of the total power requirements for a datacenter that size will be covered by this PV system, to be 100% effective it would have to be sized at least 6 times larger than the total power consumption of the DC, using the grid as a storage system.

maxerickson• 15 years ago

I think you dropped 1,000.

(I would expect 161 nominal megawatts to produce more than 1 megawatt-hour in an hour)

0x122• 15 years ago

Ah, yes, apologies. KWh should have been MWh, I'll edit the comment above. Thanks for the correction.

markbao• 15 years ago

To add some perspective:

WolframAlpha measures an average US household's yearly consumption at 12,000 KWh, or 32.8 KWh per day. The upper bound in the parent comment with the 50% fudge factor, 375 MWh per day, would power (375 MWh/32.8 KWh) = 11,430 households day-for-day, or 22,860 households day-for-day without the fudge factor.

brudgers• 15 years ago

Maiden NC, is rated at 4.78 - 4.92 kWH/m2/day for PV's

High Resolution Map of KiloWatt Hours per day across the US: http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/map_pv_national_hi-res.jpg

brc• 15 years ago

nitpick : the grid is not a storage system.

You can feed to, and take from the grid, but it's not a battery.

The Grid is like an open water pipe with holes in it - you can put water back in, or take water out, but you can't store water in it. The power stations are pumping in at one end, and the users are taking out all along the pipe.

nobody3141• 15 years ago

Comparing it to the installed Sarnia plant at roughly the same latitude.

That is 96.6 ha (239acres of cells) 80MW capacity and (estimated) 120,000 MWh over a year.

So this plant should achieve around 70% of that, so 85,000 MWh /year or 235MWh/day

goodweeds2• 15 years ago

I actually drove through Sarnia a couple of months ago trying to find the site, but couldn't find it. Has it been completed yet?

juiceandjuice• 15 years ago

> http://www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/international...

I can't imagine any scenario where Greenpeace would actually be happy besides companies never using any sort of energy at all.

To replace coal (7PWh) with solar energy, you'd need the entire state of New Jersey (~22e9 m^2) filled solar panels averaging 20% efficiency and the equivalent of 4 peak hours of sunlight over the year. With the area of Pennsylvania you could start to approach the total energy consumption of the US. Maybe those environmental impacts would be worth it?

stdgy• 15 years ago

Perhaps this is a silly question, but do we have any information on available roof space across the United States? I'd be interested to see what kind of power output could be produced if we were able to add solar panels to a large majority of the nation's buildings.

Though I suspect that kind of distribution would significantly increase costs for duplicate components and may fall victim to low efficiency transfers into the grid. Afraid I don't know enough about how today's systems operate.

Derbasti• 15 years ago

You know, I recently rode my bike through some villages in Germany. Just about every house had solar panels on their roof. My parents have solar panels on their roof. They produce more electricity than they use and only need very little oil and some wood for heating in winter. And they are no exception.

Germany currently produces 20% of its energy using regenerating resources (water, sun, wind).

It's not like you have to put all the solar panels in huge parks. Just put them on roofs. My uncle works at a big company and they just put solar panels on their roofs. That company now produces more energy than they need. Solar panels are already efficient enough to usually provide more energy per area than people or businesses consume in the same area.

The next step would be to have batteries in every household, to save on energy losses during 'transportation'. Also, solar panels are getting more efficient and cheap every year.

gallamine• 15 years ago

For the curious, here's a link to the Google Maps satellite view of the plant: http://g.co/maps/sk9vn

cwe• 15 years ago

Don't know enough about this project, but are the putting them on the roof of this datacenter as well? Seems like a no-brainer.

goodweeds2• 15 years ago

This would be a great trend, datacenters becoming their own utilities. It would help them better control opex and reliability. I wonder if utilities will try and prevent this sort of self-sufficiency from otherwise potentially lucrative customers.

hugh3• 15 years ago

Sunlight is one of the least reliable forms of power out there. If the grid goes down then... well, you're screwed unless it just happens to be daytime and sunny.

jayfuerstenberg• 15 years ago

Knowing Apple's recent interest in glass and materials science I can't help but wonder if even their solar farm will be awe inspiring and functionally ahead of the curve in some way.

Apple building 171 acre solar panel farm to power NC data center

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