Solar Power Sources

Any time we start to believe that fossil fuels are running out or we see their costs going way up, renewable sources of power, such as solar, come to the forefront of people’s minds—including mine. So I started thinking about the feasibility of the sun providing the primary source of power for companies.

How It Works

There are different types of solar-powered systems. Two such systems, solar thermal and solar photovoltaic, use solar panels to convert the sun’s energy. Solar thermal uses the sun’s energy to heat water, which then is converted to electricity. Solar photovoltaic uses the sun’s energy to “knock loose” electrons and then convert the created energy into electricity.

Solar-generated electricity can be used directly, stored in a battery for later use, or put back into the public power/utility grid and drawn back out when insufficient electricity is being produced to meet the user’s needs. (When solar energy is put into a public-utility grid, the user/producer’s utility meter will actually spin backward.) Power companies in 40 states have programs that will buy the electricity that you produce through solar.

Weighing Our Options

My colleagues and I tried to figure out if enough energy could be produced by the sun to power our collocation facility, which serves about 200 corporate customers and houses all of our Internet equipment—mail servers, Web servers and other customers’ servers. A lengthy research effort revealed that there is not a lot of information available about the viability of converting offices to solar power.

As an alternative, our VP of finance used a proven residential-based model and estimated the cost of installing solar photovoltaic panels that will provide 24/7 power would be around $600,000. We also got a quote from a roofing company that installs solar photovoltaic panels. Its estimated price is $375,000 for a system that produces only enough power for the facility during the day. We would have to tap into commercial power at night.

Another concern was whether we would have enough roof-top space to accommodate all the solar panels we would need. This was not an issue, since it was determined that we would only need to use 50 percent of our 5,000-square-foot rooftop.

The good news: It appears that a large facility like ours can be powered with solar. The bad news (at least for my company): The current 20- to 30-year payback makes installing panels to power our collocation facility cost-prohibitive.

Looking Ahead

Solar technology is improving, and the cost of creating solar panels continues to decline. It’s already dropped 90 percent over the past 20 years, according to a representative of the Solar Energy Industries Association (www.seia.org). One exciting development comes from SUNRGI, a company that recently announced its proprietary technology could reduce the wholesale cost of producing solar energy to five cents per kilowatt hour. That’s competitive with the wholesale cost of producing energy from fossil fuels.