Pepsico in Modesto CA, not sure if they have solar.
A Bunch Of Tesla Semis Were Spotted At Frito-Lay's Site In Modesto
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A Bunch Of Tesla Semis Were Spotted At Frito-Lay's Site In Modesto
Yep 25 acres of panels, about 2.5mln to be conservative. Then 8 megapacks- several million more. The storage kills it for us, we will just net it out, supply solar to grid, until storage drops in 3 years
I think 10,000m2 is only 2.5 acres. In theory this may work - I just don't know where we could even put our solar panels.
15 MWh is only 4 Megapacks, still $8.8M with installation. Could just buy twice as many semis and swap them...
Thanks. They do have solar, though they could do more since their roof is not all covered yet.
10,000 square meters (m^2), not a square 10,000 meters on a side. 10000 for Euro/US equivalency.
1kW/square meter * 10000 * 20% efficiency = 2MW
Well I suppose, if you want to do things like service it...
Yeah 4-6x 10,000
North Brookfield 2.5MW Solar Project
Doggydogworld
Active Member
Battery swap is better. Cuts cycles in half vs. stationary, and cycles are your #1 fuel cost in good sun areas. Unstored solar is a couple cents per kWh in the SW US (El Paso did a 1.5 cent PPA a few years back). Swap also cuts round-trip efficiency losses in half.
It's more flexible, too:
- with modules a 300 mile truck can become a 200 or 400 miler
- when a truck goes in for service its batteries can stay out on the road
- trucks that make multiple short runs can swap mid-day with no downtime
- long fixed routes can do destination swap without downtime
Of course straight net metering is even better if you can get it. It doesn't scale, though, so places with good sun are phasing it out.
SageBrush
REJECT Fascism
That is saying that somewhere between 0.16 -- 0.25 of the land area has solar panels.
My solar handbook says 5 - 10 acres per MW, although I think the numbers may have been calculated back when PV efficiency was lower
In either case, I come up with covering ~ 0.5 of the land area with panels when I think about shade. The photo looks that way to me too, if I ignore the un-utilized green area between the two large sections of panels. I think part of our large range of results here depends on panel inclination. I was using somewhere in the 20 - 25 degree angle.
Would you take me through your calc ?
SalisburySam
Active Member
It seems unlikely that the Semi will be available anytime in the next few years in the numbers your company needs. Production ramping is fairly slow both because it’s hard to do so and for early users to give feedback on issues, problems, and immediately needed improvements if any. Then the backlog of orders has to get satisfied. Could be a several year long wait before being able to get into the delivery queue and firms like yours have to do something today. Interesting read, thanks for sharing your company’s thinking.
petit_bateau
Active Member
For ground mount arrays if you used 100kW per acre including provisions for utilities, access, security, shade effects, maintenance access, etc that seems about right for smaller arrays. Clearly roof mount is denser, but that isn't going to be sufficient for most fleets.
A Megapack has about 3,800 kWh, approx.
For Semis I'm expecting about one Megapack per every ten or so Semis, and the maths tend to support that. That way an unreinforced 'thin' pipe (electrical supply) can trickle in enough energy during the time when the Semi is out on the road; store that energy in the Megapack; and then discharge it fairly promptly into the Semi(s).
If the Semi has 900-1000 kWh pack (we are still unsure) but in practice uses (say) 300kWh for an average daily drive (the current opinon being 850kWh for 500-miles), then in principle from an energy (kWh) perspective the ratio is approx 10:1 assuming you cycle the Megapack daily from 10-90% SoC. The Megapack seems to have a 1.5MW inverter so that - ignoring tapering - it could dump out 3MW in 2-hours (ie. ten Semis). Allowing for tapering that would be very reasonable for a 8-hour Semi charge cycle overnight. In fact you could probably do a lot better than that and get two shift use of the Semi if you tried a bit harder.
To recharge 3MW (3,000 kWh) over 24-hour period (note, it doesn't have to stop drawing from grid during the 8-hour Semi charge period) you need to be able to import electricity to site at 125 kW (ignoring loss terms for simplicity). A 240V x 100A x 1ph supply is 24kW so that won't cut it for a 10 Semi fleet (but would for a single Semi loner, with a Powerpack sized storage solution). A 440V x 100A x 3ph supply will do 76kW so is only halfway there. Implication is that a 10-Semi fleet needs one Megapack and a 200A 440V 3ph electrical supply to get a matched solution. That is quite a reasonable feed to get at 415V/440V. If one wants more than that the distribution network operator (aka electrical 'utility') will likely be looking at an 11kV feed to site.
Clearly it will be very attractive to self-generate solar. Global average solar capacity factors are now 14%, trending upwards about 1% every 4 years. Using 14% we get that 100kW (i.e. one acre ground mount) would deliver 100 x 24 x 365 x 0.14 = 122,640 kWh, i.e. an average of 336 kWh per day. So a 10-acre solar array would be a fair match for a ten Semi fleet, with one 3,800 kWh Megapack.
This handily is an acre of solar per Semi.
Done like that the electrical supply capability can be somewhat reduced depending on the seasonal and daily variation in the solar resource. But for most northern cities (i.e. where most relatively affluent humans live) the daylight hours reduce to approx 6h only* at the Winter solstice, and that is before taking into account poor winter weather. The 6h is for 44N, i.e. Bordeaux or Boston. However at (say) 32N San Diego has a minimum winter day of 11h, much more helpful, so expect to see adoption work from the US southern states northwards.
It is very difficult to run a private wire network across public or third party land. That is so in almost all of the world, and I don't expect that to change much. So the solar array needs in practice to be contiguous with the overnight charging depot. Expect to see a lot of 10-Semi 10-acre 1-Megapack clusters around the edges of townships fringeing big cities, as they can get going faster than big grid reinforcement can be brought in to the 100-rig fleet depots.
A 10-acre site is going to struggle to get a meaningful wind turbine. Get to a 100-acre site and you can reasonably start to get a cluster of MW-class wind turbines. (Please spare me the distributed wind hopium as that is only applicable ib fairly exceptional use cases).
A lot of farms have a 100A 415V 3ph supply. So if they put 10-acres to solar they could reasonably run a 10-rig fleet right through the middle of winter, i.e. in mid-winter half the energy is coming from the grid and half from self-generation.
Go buy your edge of town farm in the commuter belt, and start trucking !
No calc there, I roughly measured the reportedly 2.5MW site using the scale on Google maps.
Here is better measurement using Google Earth. Right around 40000 square meters (2013 panel tech, ground mount, 42 degrees north lattitude)
petit_bateau
Active Member
That is helpful.
So from this image 40,000 m2 = 10 acres for 2.5MW, which is 250 kW per acre. That is better than the 100 kW per acre figure I used.
But if I look at that image about one third to one half the land is not occupied by arrays, for a variety of reasons. You've cropped the yellow line quite close around the actual array limits.
So the real density in the image is about 150-125 kW/acre if one was trying to come up with a generic figure ?
SageBrush
REJECT Fascism
The reasons matter. Could the land have been utilized for PV ? If not, is that typical ?
When I look at the photo, I see the spacing between the rows as being about the same height* as a row. This matches up with my trig calc and calculators available on the web for a design in which the panels are angled 20 degrees and shading is avoided when the sun reaches 20 degrees.
If the panels are angled at 30 degrees then row spacing increases to 1.5x the row height.
So I'm tempted to say that 033 - 0.5 of land area can be used for rows, but this does not include land used for motorized access.
*By height I mean the distance on the map, not the elevation above ground
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We are counting on much lower numbers but have set aside 10 acres for panels. Only counting on 1mw but we’ll see what costs/production is once we get bids late fall winter.
I followed the mowed contour and dropped the interior unused space, otherwise it's 50000 meters square. The site was a former apple orchard. There are other arrays in the area now.
This article references a 3.6MW slightly sloped site from 2014.North Brookfield - TransAlta
I think the 250000 square meter, 62 acre figure is for all 5 installations.
10.4 MW 2021, 400,000 square meters, 100 acres (over selected). Which aligns with 5-10 aces per MW reported here: Land Use & Solar Development | SEIA
I think the 250000 square meter, 62 acre figure is for all 5 installations.
10.4 MW 2021, 400,000 square meters, 100 acres (over selected). Which aligns with 5-10 aces per MW reported here: Land Use & Solar Development | SEIA
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
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