permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

At the website listed below, someone posted:
> the array is 130 x 300 = 39,000 square feet.
> Times 12 watts/sq.ft. @ 13% net efficiency Polycrystal PV = 468,000 watts.
> 
> $30,000,000 / 468,000 watts = $64 per watt. This is ten times the cost of
> residential PV and you would expect there to be some kind of volume discount
> on half a Megawatt purchased at one lump sum.

So some other people are thinking it might be a little expensive, too. Even
if it's feeding into the grid, it's still costing 10x more than it should.
But I guess this isn't really news that the government wastes money.

Toby

On 2/21/07 12:49 PM, "Mitra Ardron"  wrote:

> It seems this is how stories get started and go out of control ...
> Toby only guessed there are 1000 people in the building, and but he
> made teh assumption that the  system is off-grid, which seems hardly
> likely, nor sensible given their location.
> 
> http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/story?id=47438
> 
> First, a little analysis - check the photo on the article, presuming
> each window is 2.5m square, and you get 64 * 12 * 2.5^2 * 4 = 19,200
> sq meters, which presumably handles a lot more than 1000 people.
> 
> But all of that is irrelevant, since presumably the system is
> grid-interactive! And they are still either feeding to, or sucking
> from the grid.
> 
> The real question is how much power they are getting, and at what
> price per installed watt, and I presume that this will be a
> competitive tender, on a high profile project that everyone is going
> to want, so they'll probably get a sweetheart deal.
> 
> - Mitra
> 
> 
>