Free energy, costly collection, the solar future

With the financial climate the way it is at the moment (read: screwed) one would be forgiven for thinking that some of the more costly environmental impact reduction efforts might be put on hold. Intel however is steadfastly forging ahead with it’s planned solar powered augmented data centres. The chip behemoth unveiled a new test photovoltaic  installation in New Mexico containing an array of 64 solar panels generating 1okW of electricity (about four homes worth) costing around $200,000. Built in a parking lot north of Intel’s Rio Rancho manufacturing plant, it’s one of the top five largest arrays in the sun drenched state. Intel however hopes this honour will be short lived in the near future as more and more companies, including Intel itself, take advantage of the large solar resource that is New Mexico. Intel’s own adgenda for this test is to learn from the experience and expand the technology to larger and larger arrays viable for it’s business and cutting it’s energy impact and cost.

The current installation will pay it’s way back within 15 to 20 years at current energy prices, of course with increasing price of current energy supply solar panels may look ever more enticing. The problem with solar power as it stands now is that you have to stump up a lot of capital at the beginning and wait for the pay back over many years. This requires long term planning and a financial security which makes Intel’s experiment all the more surprising in our financially fragile current state. This is however not the first time that Intel has sunk significant funds into solar power. Intel’s investment arm put some $20m into the Chinese solar energy company Trony Solar Holdings last October. Cadol Cheung, MD of Intel Capital in Asia Pacific was quoted as saying: ”The world economy is in a very difficult position, but innovation is the way to help the companies out of financial crisis.” The investments in solar power are however not only important for Intel. Solar power in solar rich locations is an incredibly important energy sauce and requires heavy investment to really capitalise on. Currently photovoltaic cells reach a maximum efficiency of 40.8% [NREL] under experimental (read: not real world) conditions with a concentrated light of 326 suns (1 sun is the average amount of light that reaches Earth from our Sun in one sunny day). This means that a lot of work is needed to be able to produce good energy transduction efficiency for real world, practical applications.