While Southern Company and Georgia Power pour money
down that nuclear pit by the Savannah River and Progress Energy can’t
afford to fix its Crystal River nuke, Google’s
wind and solar projects are already online on time,
all for less than the cost overruns so far at Vogtle
or the fix-it price at Crystal River.
“We look for projects like Spinning Spur because, in addition to
creating more renewable energy and strengthening the local economy,
they also make for smart investments,” Kojo Ako-Asare, Google’s
senior manager of corporate finance, said in a
blog post.
Ako-Asare added that wind farms offer “attractive returns relative
to the risks.”
Moore’s Law for solar is about decreasing price per Watt,
or more Watts per dollar.
Here’s an example of a common confusion, to think it’s about efficiency:
“The curve will obviously become asymptotic at some point, ie,. the rate
of improvement will flatten out, so we end up with a sort of squashed
“S” shape curve, because you can’t get more than 100% efficiency —
36 watts/m2 or so.”
And indeed efficiency probably will flatten out soon.
But it’s not solar
efficiency that’s improving by Moore’s Law: it’s price per watt.
That can keep improving for a long time.
“Just to give you perspective,” Resh said, “in Washington, D.C.,
where I live, when I installed solar on my house six years ago, the
average install cost was about $14 a watt. Today it’s about $4 a
watt.”
Here’s another comparison, this one just for solar panels.
In 2005 the first set of solar panels we got cost $670 each
and produced 170 Watts DC each, or $4.94/Watt.
In 2011 our second set of solar panels cost $562 each
for 235 Watts DC each, or $2.39/Watt.
That’s more than 50% price decrease for solar panels in six years.
(I can’t compare inverters or support structures directly,
because those were sized so differently, but those have also
come down in price, helping lower the overall install cost).
Year
price /Watt
price /panel
Watts /panel
Dimens.
square inches
Watts /100 sq in.
Model
2005
$4.94
$670
170W
50×39″
1950
8.7
KC 170
2011
$2.39
$562
235W
39.1×64.6″
2525
9.3
Sharp ND 235 QCJ
2012
$1.32
$310
235W
39.1×64.6″
2525
9.3
Sharp ND 235 QCJ
Meanwhile, the Watts per surface area hardly changed, from about
Continue reading →
Many people are unfamiliar with Moore’s Law, and
how it affects solar power.
Moore’s Law doesn’t occur
in many technologies or industries,
but it’s there in solar photovoltaic (PV).
For those of us whose whole working lives have been
affected by Moore’s Law, seeing it turn up in another field
is like a flashing neon sign pointing to the future.
A future of distributed solar power sunrise
over the crumbling industrial relics of coal, nuclear, and natural gas plants.
A future with much less control by monopoly utilities,
which is why they fight it.
If they even see it coming; Bill Gates didn’t, back in the day,
but Jeff Bezos of Amazon did.
They both surfed that tide,
and Moore’s Law made both of them among the richest humans on the planet
while changing the world for all of us.
Steve Jobs even used it to put a computer in your pocket
more powerful than big companies could buy a few decades ago.
What does Moore’s Law for solar power mean for electric power?
This chart shows the telltale symptom of Moore’s Law in solar electricity:
65% compound annual growth rate in solar power plants
deployed for the past 5 years:
That 17 GW installed in 2010 is the equivalent of 17 nuclear power
plants — manufactured, shipped and installed in one year. It
can take decades just to install a nuclear plant. Think about that.
I heard Bill Gates recently call solar “cute.” Well,
that’s 17 GW of “cute” adding up at an astonishing pace.
Bill Gates should recall that Moore’s Law made formerly “cute” PCs with his
“cute” operating system Windows expand into every company in the world
and made him the second richest human on the planet.
Growth of computer software markets,
like for the U.S. as shown in the graph on the right,
is a symptom of the original Moore’s Law.
Software runs on hardware, and these hardware market curves
are driven more directly by Moore’s Law:
Lots of interesting detail; room for improvement in marketing and high level presentation: Valdosta-Lowndes Prospector website.
S. Meghan Duke gave a lengthy presentation of the GIS website Valdosta-Lowndes Prospector, at the 19 June 2012 VLCIA meeting. Chairman Roy Copeland wanted to know (5:21) whether it showed at the top the industrial parks VLCIA has spent so much time and effort developing, maybe by age, size, in alphabetical order? She indicated you could do all those things, but they didn’t necessarily crop up without somebody selecting filters that caused them to crop up. However they are featured properties, and whenever they are updated, updates show up. Project Manager Allan Ricketts said he’d heard good reactions so far. Executive Director Andrea Schruijer said they could feature parks or whatever through facebook and twitter, too. And yes, they have a floodplain overlay, among many other overlays.
He said you can get it as close to him as Quarterman Road.
I can attest to that because I have 3 megabit per second DSL,
due to being just close enough to Bellsouth’s DSL box on Cat Creek Road,
but most of Quarterman Road can’t get DSL due to distance.
There are some other land-line possibilties, involving cables in the ground
or wires on poles.
Then there are wireless possibilities, including EVDO, available from Verizon,
with 750 kilobit per second (0.75 Mbps) wide area access from cell phone towers.
Verizon’s towers could also be used for WIFI antennas,
for up to 8 Mbps Internet access, over a wide scale.
Internet speed and access —John S. Quarterman
Regular Session, Lowndes County Commission (LCC),
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 8 May 2012.
Video by Gretchen Quarterman for Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange (LAKE).
…Lafayette, Louisiana,
Bowling Green, Kentucky,
Lagrange, Georgia,
and
Thomasville, Georgia.
They use it for
public safety,
education (Wiregrass Tech, VSU),
and
It attracts new industry.
If you want knowledge-based industry,
they’re going to be expecting Internet access not just at work,
but at home, whereever they live.
The Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority will hold a Regular Board Meeting on Tuesday, April 17, 2012 at 5:30pm in the Industrial Authority Conference room.
The agenda doesn’t say much. I guess that one time they put a lot of information in it was a one-shot. And if you want to see any old agendas, you’ll need to wait until they finish fixing their website. Or look in the LAKE blog….
The VDT has a story this morning about an Industrial Authority meeting
last night,
Two new industries announced
by Kay Harris.
That’s a bit of a surprise, since they didn’t have that date on their
own web page and they didn’t post an agenda.
Also, I saw both VLCIA Executive Director Andrea Schruijer
and their Chairman Roy Copeland speak Monday night, and neither
of them said a word about their meeting date being changed to the
next night.
Here’s some irony in the VDT’s story:
Schruijer also discussed the Authority’s plans to move ahead with the
Strategic Planning Process right after the first of the year. Following
the Community Assessment which was conducted over the summer, the next
phase is a full fledged commitment to begin the planning process.
The intention, according to Schruijer and Copeland, is to include
community partners in the process as the assessment showed that many
in the community think that the various entities work at odds with
each other, rather than on the same page, when it comes to economic
development.
If you like facebook, twitter, eBay, blogs, other social media, or even
Google or Yahoo,
you won’t like the so-called “PROTECT IP” Act, which is coming up to
a vote in the Senate any day now.
It would let big corporate copyright holders impose monitoring,
take down websites, and cut off funding, all without need for a court order.
There’s still time to oppose it.
In one way, though, PIPA is much worse: while SOPA is still in the
House committee stage and has been the target of extraordinary public
opposition, PIPA is already out of committee and poised for consideration
of the full Senate. That means PIPA is a few dangerous steps further
along in the process of becoming law. And with only a few weeks to go
in this legislative session, the Senate may try to rush the bill through
before the public has a chance to respond.
“We look for projects like Spinning Spur because, in addition to creating more renewable energy and strengthening the local economy, they also make for smart investments,” Kojo Ako-Asare, Google’s senior manager of corporate finance, said in a blog post.
