Tag Archives: energy

Facebook Solar Array Demonstrates Impotence of Solar Power, Importance of Power Management

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The debate over the so-called “environmental impact” of data centers provides an easy target for environmentalists to pick on — big creepy corporations like Facebook and Apple.  While these folks sleep at night with their hot water tanks cranked to the max and half the lights in their houses still turned on, companies that run big data centers get needled for using a lot of electricity.   Yet just try to take away these people’s iPhones and Facebook games–then stand back and watch the intellectual dishonesty spill out like a broken water balloon.

The answer, of course, is solar power. Clean, silent, low-maintenance, and emissions-free.  Well, sort-of.  But Wired tells us today that solar farms aren’t efficient. Based on their figures, I decided to extrapolate a few solar farm scenarios.

Facebook’s data center is a 100-megawatt consumer, and its solar array, which spans acres and acres in the Oregon outback, puts out a mere .05 megawatts at an average energy conversion efficiency of about 14%. Apple’s planned N.C. solar farm will cost 180 acres of God’s green earth and will put out just 3.5 megawatts at typical efficiency (Apple will require at least 70 MW at their N.C. data center). Using those ratios, and keeping in mind that these are the best, most efficient solar generators on the planet, we could estimate that:

  • A typical .3 kw household would require 0.154 acre of this top-of-the-line solar technology. That would fill a typical suburban lot, and leave no room for the house. Underground housing, anybody?
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  • A typical 3.5 acre city block, containing 16 households, would require 2.5 acres of solar array. Yep–two and a half football fields. (BTW, forget about trees in that neighborhood.)
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  • New York City, some 325 square miles in size, if it were filled only with these houses, would require a solar array the size of Chicago, which weighs in at about 250 square miles.
  • The United States would require about three states the size of Texas filled only with solar farms and nothing else to fulfill its electricity needs. The distribution system for this electricity (power lines, AC turbines, etc.) would require a further two states the size of Colorado.

My conclusions:

  • Mass-market electrical consumption cannot be serviced by solar generation without regulated rationing. Most Americans would not be in love with this idea.
  • The obsession with solar energy has as much to do with politics as it does with shrinking the fossil fuel industries.
  • Data centers should concentrate, if they believe fossil and nuclear power generation are harmful to humanity, on reducing their consumption of electricity.

Wind Efficiency Vs. Gas&Oil: What I’ve Learned

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As a business owner, I define high-efficiency as the ability to get things done with either the highest operating margin or the lowest operating loss.  With this in mind, and considering the amount of philanthropic hubbub surrounding wind power and the equal-in-volume guilt talk surrounding the use of fossil fuels, I decided to get to the bottom of the efficiency question.

Because for me, the debate begins and ends with three points:

- No fossil energy source appears to be in short supply.  According to reputed agricultural economists, the supply of crude in the U.S. is somewhere near 180 billion barrels, with more not discovered. At our present rate of consumption, that’s a sufficient supply for nearly 40 years, assuming no non-domestic sources were to be used during that time period.

- The ultimate decision point for energy production isn’t energy diversity, or even the environment (read the excellent current thinking on “carbon-in-carbon-out“), but the ability of energy to be harnessed at a low cost in human effort and a likewise low cost in human damage.  Diversity, on the other hand, is a false rationale for wind because it attempts to apply a social-science paradigm to a non-social process, while the environmental impact of fossil fuels is a false rationale because it isn’t fully understood, and environmental impact (large electromagnetic fields, noise, and visual impacts) of wind turbines and transmission systems is largely ignored and improperly dismissed as harmless.

- Fossil fuels, most notably natural methane and propane gasses, are institutionally mislabeled as nonrenewable, despite the natural occurrences of what many scientists agree are in fact, spontaneously-sustainable natural deposits and man-made sustainable gas tactics such as biogas. I would prefer the industry to begin referring to gas as semi-renewable until a better understanding of its supply system is developed.  The most notable example of propaganda covering potential gas renewability is the CNG (compressed natural gas) movement.  I have dealt personally with those invested heavily in this budding industry, and they agree that the estimates as to a tight natural gas supply (10 years or less) are blowhard figures motivated more by “science-for-political-gain” than by any form of truth.  These guys wouldn’t be investing so heavily in CNG if they thought they’d be out of business in 10 years.