[0x12]

> No details about the planned solar panel array or its potential power output are known at this time

Taking the 171 acre figure we can compute at least the limits of what it could do.

171 acres is about 700,000 square meters. At a solar incidence of about 1 KW / square meter and an efficiency of 23% that's 161 MW peak power and an average of 4.7 sun hours per day will give about 750 MWh of usable electricity every day.

This calculation ignores shading effects and assumes that the panels will be stationary rather than tracking, you could probably easily deduct another 50% to account for those effects, so say 375 MWh give or take and 80 MW peak. Likely these figures are still very high, think of it as the maximum amount of solar power that you could extract at that location from incident sunlight without further accounting for conversion losses (solar panels produce DC, you'll need inverters if you want AC power, some data center equipment can run on 48V DC but you'd still need a conversion step for that) and so on.

I wonder how big a chunk of the total power requirements for a datacenter that size will be covered by this PV system, to be 100% effective it would have to be sized at least 6 times larger than the total power consumption of the DC, using the grid as a storage system.

[markbao]

To add some perspective:

WolframAlpha measures an average US household's yearly consumption at 12,000 KWh, or 32.8 KWh per day. The upper bound in the parent comment with the 50% fudge factor, 375 MWh per day, would power (375 MWh/32.8 KWh) = 11,430 households day-for-day, or 22,860 households day-for-day without the fudge factor.

[maxerickson]

I think you dropped 1,000.

(I would expect 161 nominal megawatts to produce more than 1 megawatt-hour in an hour)

[0x12]

Ah, yes, apologies. KWh should have been MWh, I'll edit the comment above. Thanks for the correction.

[brudgers]

Maiden NC, is rated at 4.78 - 4.92 kWH/m2/day for PV's

High Resolution Map of KiloWatt Hours per day across the US: http://www.nrel.gov/gis/images/map_pv_national_hi-res.jpg

[brc]

nitpick : the grid is not a storage system.

You can feed to, and take from the grid, but it's not a battery.

The Grid is like an open water pipe with holes in it - you can put water back in, or take water out, but you can't store water in it. The power stations are pumping in at one end, and the users are taking out all along the pipe.