Hewlett-Packard Installing Solar Systems At Operating Sites
by John Laumer, Philadelphia on 11.29.07
Reports indicate the new roof-top SPV system at an HP facility in San Diego California USA will have up to a 1 Megawatt capacity, which puts it at roughly 63% of the Google system recently installed. HP has been working on reducing the company's greenhouse gas footprint since May of 2006, per this announcement.
HP signed a contract with SunPower to install 5,000 solar-power panels in its San Diego facility. The installations will cover 10 percent of the energy used by the facility and save HP $750,000 in power costs over 15 years, the company said in a news release.It also signed an agreement to buy wind energy from Airtricity, which has wind farms in the U.S. and Europe. Airtricity will provide wind energy to HP's Ireland facilities in 2008, an effort that will save the company $40,000 for fiscal 2008. The investment will reduce HP's carbon-dioxide emissions by 40,000 tons and make 90 percent of HP's energy use in Ireland renewable, the company said.
TreeHugger strongly recommends reading the original HP press release on this in its entirety. You can find it here.
Via::InfoWorld, "HP expands green agenda with investments" Image credit::Sunpower, Project at Tiffany's
I was told by one of the employees at the HP San Diego site that they get a discount out of this from SunPower for putting solar panels on their own personal home. Given the numerous sunny days that we enjoy here in San Diego, I hope that a good number HP employees take advantage of that.
what would be nice to see is some sort of "encouragement program" for employees to support the CleanGreenCommuterMachine (green cars)....seeing as socal commuters insist on having their own transportation and less ridesharing....purchase incentives for hybrid/electric vehicles?
t
Terry & others: check this out: there are 111 million residential units in the US, with roughly 70% being single family homes
http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/STTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=01000US&-qr_name=ACS_2006_EST_G00_S2504&-ds_name=ACS_2006_EST_G00_
A SMALL solar power unit for a home (panels, convertor) can run around $20,000.
So why not a government "encouragement program" of $10,000 per home (1/2 cost of small unit). If 50 million homes take advantage of it, it would still cost less than the oil war...oops, I mean the war for "Iraqi Independence" (what does W want, another $100 billion or something to continue it?)
Food for thought,
Tom-tom
HP should be congratulated for taking the initiative.
But it's important to remember that whenever you cover a white roof surface with a black solar cell array, it actually takes more than a CENTURY for the cooling effect from the avoided CO2 to compensate for the added heat load from the sun. From outside the atmosphere, the solar array looks like a huge black solar water heater- except it dumps all the heat back into the air. In other words, solar panels INCREASE global warming in the short term, because they make the earth just a little bit darker. Similar incogruities occur all the time, for example, a highly insulated home eventually saves energy, but takes more energy intitially to construct. It takes time to recover the sunk cost of doing the right thing.
Fortunately, there are simple solutions. I assume HP's roof's are currently white or silver- but in any case, they should make sure to paint their parking lot or other black roofs white, to actually impact global warming this century. See my article for more details:
http://www.genuineideas.com/ArticlesIndex/blackAndWhite.htm
gregb makes a good point. I don't understand why reflectivity is rarely talked about in climate change discussions.
Unlike other geoengineering approaches, it's cheap and reversible in a short time, while being very predictable and having a positive local effect.
Imagine if asphalt could be made white, or light gray, like cement.
And what is the net heat contribution of 200 million cars parked in the sun? Each is a little greenhouse, and mitigation is super simple; plant trees in parking lots for shade. Lose about 5% of parking spaces, and come back to a cool car while the trees trap some CO2. In the parking-lot riddled US, this could actually be significant.
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