Random Thoughts of Chris Tilley

Talk about coincidences I was googleing my own name to see where this blog placed and found EI Solutions. The president used to be another Chris Tilley.

They are putting in a 1.6 MW Solar Power system at the Google campus in Mountain View,CA. They have a cool Google Earth video of what the installation will look like. The coolest feature is their use of the solar panels for creating a shading structure for the parking lots.

This started me thinking of the huge parking lots at the attractions. I used Disneyland as my example not to single them out or otherwise embarrasses them but simply because when thinking of southern California attractions Disneyland came to mind first. These numbers are very rough and there could well be other factors that I am not including. What I did was use Google Earth to measure the two large parking lots at the south end of the park. It came out to 1.46 million sq ft. That is 7.43 times the area in the Google system. That works out to over 11 MW.

The other side of the equation is the cost. Google is going to save $393,000 per year in energy cost and expect to pay it off in 7.5 years. That would work out to roughly $3 million. These number are even more rough. So the theoretical Disneyland system would cost $22 million and save them 2.9 million a year. There are a ton of assumptions in these numbers but it would certainly grab my attention and cause me to look in to it properly.