Archive For The “Hardware” Category
Yesterday Nanosolar announced it has started to sell cheap solar panels at a materials cost of roughly $1/W and a finished panel cost of ~$2/W: http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN1846022020071218. As a reference point, coal powered electricity is about $1/W when considering the fully burdened cost of the plant and operations. When a new technology is within a factor…
Last week Google announced their Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (RE<C) initiative. This is a two pronged effort combining external investment with internal Google research. The external investments include $10M in Makani Power, a startup aiming to harness high altitude winds. Makani explains that high altitude winds have the highest energy density of any renewable…
Google announced a project in October 2006 to install 9,212 solar panels on the roof of its headquarters complex. Currently over 90% of these panels are installed and active. They expect the installation will produce 30% of the peak power requirements of the headquarters buildings. For example, as I post this, they report 0.6 MW…
Ted Wobber (msft Research) brought together the following short list of SSD performance data. Note the FusionIO part claiming 87,500 IOPS in a 640 GB package. I need to run a perf test against that part and see if it’s real. It looks perfect for very hot OLTP workloads. A directory of “fastest SSDs”: http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-fastest.html…
I love commodity parts and I like cars, so this one caught my interest. The Tesla Roadster (http://www.teslamotors.com/) battery pack is made up of many cells exactly the same as the IBM T60P that I’m typing this on. Laptop battery configurations differ dramatically, but most contain multiple 18650 form-factor batteries http://www.molienergy.bc.ca/specs/ICR18650G.pdf). The 18650 designator comes…