Occidental's 1 MW solar array just finished, today, it's first year of operation. 听Happy 1st Birthday Solar Array!
swag外流 community,
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Occidental's 1 MW solar array just finished, today, it's first year of operation. 听Happy 1st Birthday Solar Array!
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In its first year the array produced 1.81 GWh of electrical energy. 听This is a LOT of energy. 听The average LADWP house uses 14.8 kWh per day so the energy produced by our array in its first year was enough to听power 334 of our neighbor's houses for a whole year. 听For other equivalencies, especially regarding climate change, you can punch听in 1.81 GWh = 1810000 kWh听. 听For instance, 1.81 GWh of green electricity, is equivalent to taking 266 cars off the road for a year. 听More locally听1.81 GWh was 12.5% of the total electrical energy used by the college over the last year. 听We haven't seen annual electrical usage this small since 2002.
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On the financial side of things, our electrical bills have been lower this last year due to the energy generated by the solar array. 听Every month I am able, with help from Facilities, to do a detailed and robust calculation of our savings. 听Over the last year the solar array saved the college $241,000. 听This is a little smaller than the $283,000 I had predicted bumping up my predicted payback period from 12 to 14 years. 听Recall that the panels are warrantied for 25 years. 听The payback period calculation, however, assumes a conservative 4% inflation rate for electrical rates, based on national averages. 听The LADWP has been increasing rates at more than 6% for the last decade. 听If I were to put 6% in we would be back to a 12 year payback. 听So we will have to see. 听So far the solar array has paid back 6.5% of the money we borrowed from the endowment (~$3.4M). 听
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1.81 GWh was 9% more than my simple solar model predicted. 听As I said in my last email an excess might be due to sunny days, clean panels, conservative assumptions, simplistic assumptions or something else. 听Understanding the output of the array is important; in order to maintain it properly we need to understand it. 听To that end I am aware of 3 student proposals submitted, 2 in physics and 1 in math, to the URC. 听With their help we could make some headway on this problem.
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If you want to monitor the array yourself you can log into our听,
Login ID = oxysolar
Password = 1600solar
The app can be found, for the iPhone, at the Apple's App Store by searching for AlsoEnergy.
In other news,
1) We made it onto听.
Login ID = oxysolar
Password = 1600solar
The app can be found, for the iPhone, at the Apple's App Store by searching for AlsoEnergy.
In other news,
1) We made it onto听.
听
2) In October Facilities weeded around the array and cleaned all of the panels. 听I did a simple analysis and found that the combination, with a little rain thrown in to confuse the matter, produced at 30% bump in our energy production. 听If you are interested I'd be happy to send you a memo I wrote about this. 听30% was much larger than I was expecting and got me to thinking about an optimal cleaning schedule. 听Ramin Naimi, in Math, and I got talking about this one day and did manage to come up with an algorithm to maximize $. 听However it doesn't include rain. 听Hey, you've got to start somewhere! 听Anyway the array has posed some fun and practical puzzles to solve.
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3) On 3 separate occasions we popped a fuse on the big 500 kW inverter. 听The reason for this is still under investigation. 听It is worrisome!
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4) Martifer went bankrupt! 听I am assured this is just an opportunity to get their finances in order. 听In fact Martifer was up on the hill just a few weeks ago trying to track down the fuse problem.
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5) In October the DWP shut us down for a couple of days for electrical work nearby. 听In total I estimate we were down for the equivalent of 11 full array days or about 3% of the year. 听97% uptime isn't too bad.
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6) On December 13th Facilities reported one of the panels had been broken. 听This was fixed within a day. 听It appeared to be some sort of projectile but we could never find it.
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7) The solar array cannot help us in a power outage, such as the one we experienced yesterday. 听In fact, for safety reasons, if the normal AC shuts down the array's inverters automatically cut power coming from the array.听
Enjoy the sun because it produces lots of electricity for us but enjoy the rain too because it keeps our panels clean.