Posted on 09/17/2012 5:11:59 AM PDT by Rebelbase
Huge, ugly and cluttered, it is almost the antithesis of Apple's iconic design style.
Apple has almost finished work on a massive solar farm next to its data centre in North Carolina, hoping to boost its green credentials - but scarring the landscape with a 100-acre eyesore at the same time.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
It’s not because it’s green, it’s because it’s free!
It’s free until the government decides to tax it. Then What?
I’m all for economic sense, but if your math is indeed correct, it likely only makes sense because you, the taxpayer, are subsidizing the purchase of those panels with tax breaks.
That being said, you have to pay your taxes anyway, so it makes sense to buy them - then vote Republican.
IF your math is accurate.
“Apple murdered literally millions of plants and animals”
Murdered?
Animals?
Dirt and pebbles don’t taste very good, and from your post that must be what you eat.
That is ugly. all that to power a single Iphone?
Talk about a useless, make-work endeavor. Glad that I don't own Apple, if they're this willing to flush $$$$$ down the john.
I think myrabach lost a zero in the payback calculation.
20 years is more likely.
$5000/kw panel installed
8 hr/day opeation (taking into account cloudy days)
Cost savings from utiltiy - $0.13/kw-hr
Daily savings - 8 x 0.13 = $1.04
Months to pay off panel - 5000/(1.04x30) = 160 months or 13.3 years.
I think my numbers may be optimistic on the installation but the payoff is certainly not 2 years.
Panels are rarely 100% efficient. Most of the day they obtain about 40%, and morning and evening 25%. Toss in the fact that the majority of consumer electricity use is at night when the sun isn’t hanging around and the savings dwindle to maybe 25%. Which mean solar probably never will payback before the solar cells fail.
Well I pay @$3000+/yr for electricity here in NC, so maybe my calculation isn’t as exact, but that seems like 2 years to me? Even if the government taxes it, it still seems like a bit of a savings. I believe I can sell any overages back to my electric company co-op?
“Where are they going to put all that cr@p when the enterprise goes belly-up (as it will)?”
I was thinking along the same lines as soon as I saw the first pics of their “solar farm”.
It may work at first. But I sense that before long, problems will start developing, taking out small groups of panels at first, then more, then....
As Soul of the South posted in #5, Apple’s farm is probably destined to become a huge non-working “monument to green energy”. A North Carolina Solyndra.
Apple probably would have done better to clear the property and plant tobacco. More return for the stockholders!
Ah, I see the problem. My analysis was for a 1kw of power (10 light bulbs; not even enough for a teenagers hair dryer) and was a generic analysis of the payoff.
If you want to power you whole home you need probably a minimum of 20kw. Your installation cost would be $100,000.
Your payoff is now 33 years at $3000/year.
Sounds like the new Greenpeace ship. It is pure and clean and doesn't use fossil fuels, it has sails instead.
With a backup electric motor system. (and I have to whisper this part; but diesel engines provide power to the electric motors)
Who told you the math behind this? It won’t be two years. You’ll be lucky to get a 20 year return.”
You would have to get a huge tax credit or some other way that somebody else is paying for it then.
Solar is very expensive and very long payback if at all; from all I have seen.
I don’t have the analysis at my fingertips, but we did look at the price for systems to to the entire house, and it wasd no where near $100,000, I think the most expensive was @$14,000. Maybe I”m incorrect, but I thought the drawback to either solar or wind for home was that you still had to use public electric, which then was cost prohibitive. But I’ve only done cursory research on this and it seems my numbers should be closer to the $14K range, paid of in 4.1 years with a 21.2% annual ROI. Still not bad.
Combined federal and State solar credits are about 50% of the cost. So a 5kw system at $25,000 would get about a $12,000 tax credit, leaving about $13,000 to pay.
Unreal. And people wonder why we are 16 trillion in debt.
Thanks
I will try again, you got the wrong conclusion. My post is mean to show the hypocrisy of the Liberals and the Environmentalists.
Environmentalists work like the devil to “protect the trees” whenever a factory or a shopping malls needs to be built. The do this to stop industry from moving forward.
However, when its time to for boondoggle green energy solar projects, liberals couldn’t care less. Environmentalists are more than happy about clearing the land and installing these horrible unnecessary eyesores.
“Amazing. I guess they don’t have hail storms in NC the same as we do here in Virginia!”
LOL! I was thinking they better not build something like that in Colorado because we get some massive hail storms sometimes with REALLY big hail. I’ve gotten two free replacement roofs from big hail storms during the last 35 years here.
When they were testing the radar cross section of the SR-71 (then called Oxcart by the CIA that owned it) at Area 51, they had this thing called “toot and scoot”. When a Soviet satellite was coming over they had to scramble to cover up everything and hide the evidence. So perhaps they can hire a thousand folks to wait around until there’s a hail storm coming and then have them scramble out to cover the collectors. See how easy it is to hire a 1,000 folks and “stimulate” the economy with other people’s money?
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