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Businesses United States Apple Technology

Apple and Amazon Become Top US Solar Users, Besting Target and Walmart (venturebeat.com) 76

Posted by msmash from the where-things-stand dept.
Apple has spent nearly a decade dramatically expanding its use of solar energy across the United States, and the effort has paid off. From a report: The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) reports today that Apple now has the most installed solar capacity of any U.S. company, followed by Amazon, as both companies vaulted over prior industry leaders Target and Walmart. But there's a catch. In the Solar Means Business 2017 report, Apple ranked fourth behind both of the top brick-and-mortar retailers and Prologis, an industrial warehouse company, while Amazon ranked tenth, below such retailers as Kohls, Costco, Ikea, and Macy's.

The SEIA's just-published 2018 report showed Apple and Amazon surging as measured by megawatts of installed solar capacity, with Apple at 393.3MW to Amazon's 329.8MW. Target jumped from 203.5MW in 2017 to 229.7MW in 2018, and Walmart from 149.4MW to 208.9MW, but the year-over-year gains from their digital-first competitors were comparatively huge.
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Apple and Amazon Become Top US Solar Users, Besting Target and Walmart More

Apple and Amazon Become Top US Solar Users, Besting Target and Walmart

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  • No-brainer (Score:5, Funny)

    by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Thursday July 25, 2019 @11:20AM (#58985286) Homepage Journal

    This is a no-brainer move for businesses. Solar is guaranteed to pay for itself and save them money, and they have buildings to put it on. They would be crazy not to do it.

    • Re:No-brainer (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Shotgun ( 30919 ) on Thursday July 25, 2019 @11:27AM (#58985324)

      Screw the buildings. They have parking lots to put them over. Get the sun off of that asphalt.

      • Ah! so make the parking lots more like buildings.

        • and you can park your car in the shade underneath the solar panel arrays, no more getting in a hot car where its 150 degrees inside the car when its 95 degrees outside

          • When it rains, much of the walk to the building is covered.
            When it snows, no clearing off your car.

            There's a whole lot of upside and not a lot of downside; this is the type of green energy project that should be pushed.

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Ah! so make the parking lots more like buildings.

          In a normal parking lot, anything over the height of the light standards is wasted space.

          Put on a roof to hold the solar, leave the sides open, and you turn the area of your parking into a solar farm.

          Throw in some rain-water management, and you can do a lot, like maybe using it as a source to flush toilets or water the landscaping.

          Hell, for less than $600 I have a small 80W solar panel and a solar generator/battery pack, and a bunch of high capacity USB batte

          • Hell, for less than $600 I have a small 80W solar panel and a solar generator/battery pack

            Can you or anyone else give more specifics on what these panels and solar backpacks are (brands, models, specs)?

            Sounds like it might be a fun and reasonable experiment to start if I knew what to look into to start with....

          • You can also add a desiccant based A/C system [youtube.com] as well. This type of A/C is twice as efficient as normal compressor designs, especially factoring in the heating subsystem that can be easily done from the roof.

            A large campus could not just get solar power, but have a very economical water chilling system as well.

          • Ignoring the power outage part, and assuming 12 hours per day of enough sunlight to keep that solar panel working at its max output (and further assuming that your electric rates are similar to mine), your setup will save you around $0.10 per day. If you are recharging something to the limits of the system all the time.

            So you hit breakeven on the investment in 13 years or so...hope your solar panel is still working in 2032.

            Now, I can see the point if you have frequent power outages. Barely. But otherwi

      • Re:No-brainer (Score:4, Interesting)

        by hey! ( 33014 ) on Thursday July 25, 2019 @11:56AM (#58985434) Homepage Journal

        While that's a good idea, it's not quite as easy to do because that involves adding a costly structure where one did not exist before. What businesses are doing is converting waste roof space that existed anyway into a productive resource.

        • "While that's a good idea, it's not quite as easy to do because that involves adding a costly structure where one did not exist before. "

          Image Google "parking lots with solar panels" and you'll see that they don't look very expensive.
          Don't forget, they pay for themselves.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by hey! ( 33014 )

            They're not expensive and they do pay for themselves, but that's not how a business calculates where to invest. A business is always looking at the next highest marginal return investment. So if a business was considering putting solar on the roof and making a new solar installation in the parking lot, it does the roof first because that costs less and returns the same revenue (i.e., has a higher rate of return). Then they'll do the parking lot, but maybe they'll do other investments that are *intermedia

          • Lots of things don't look very expensive. Why not google how expensive they are rather than just looking at pictures? For the cost of a foundation you could buy more solar panel. For the cost of supports you could buy more again.

      • They can put them over delivery trucks which roam outside all day as well

    • Anyone with a flatish room and no shade nearby. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I currently get up to 10 hours of sunlight and 6-8 of those usable if I move my small portable solar panel around (used for a fountain pump and charging some batteries, not a permanent installation due to tree cover on the property.)

      Having done some back of the envelope calculations based on square footage, solar coverage if the property was stripped of trees and zoning allowed it, I could have 50-75KW of solar placed over the property, with at lest 6 hours of wintertime solar and up to 10-12 hours during t

    • And it has the advantage of also being a secondary,backup power source.

    • "This is a no-brainer move for businesses. Solar is guaranteed to pay for itself and save them money, and they have buildings to put it on. They would be crazy not to do it."

      BTW, nuclear power plants are shutting down all over the place, because the cooling water in the rivers is too hot.

      Didn't they tell us that they were the solution because they would produce power even when the sun doesn't shine?
      They forgot to tell us that they can't when the sun does shine.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lgw ( 121541 )

      This is a no-brainer move for businesses. Solar is guaranteed to pay for itself and save them money, and they have buildings to put it on. They would be crazy not to do it.

      You'd be amazed how slowly big companies move, even when it's clearly in their interest with no tradeoffs. As far as I can tell from my career, decisions are made based on the internal politics of who proposes the idea, and little else.

      I know Amazon has started with solar panels on the rooves of distribution centers, but they basically never retrofit old distribution centers with anything, which is likely why they're so far behind other retailers.

    • I wouldn't call it a no-brainer. Solar Energy has a big upfront investment, with equipment that will not last forever (plan 30 years). So there is a fair amount of calculation to see if going Solar is worth the investment or not. There is equipment, amount of land needed to cover, how much is your energy needs....

      Until the last decade solar energy was too expensive, and it is finally becoming affordable. Now an other question for these companies, is it better to invest now, or wait an other 10 years for

      • When done on a commercial or industrial scale, installing a solar panel runs around $150 total (materials, installation, inspection, labor), as opposed to putting six panels on a house (which can cost around $2000 to $4000 per panel).

        If included in the purchase of new residential housing, since you already have to get the electrical and physical inspection, and it can be included in the design of entire subdivisions or apartment buildings, it runs around $200 per panel.

  • Solar... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 25, 2019 @11:29AM (#58985330)

    ... is just nuclear energy at a distance

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      well, so is geothermal. fission in that case

      • well, so is geothermal. fission in that case

        Approximately half of all geothermal heat is due to radioactive decay (fission or otherwise). The rest is the residual heat still left over from the gravitational collapse of the material that formed the earth.

    • When you think about it so are fossil fuels. After all, every element was created by a nuclear process. We are all made up of stars.

  • It's not green (Score:2, Informative)

    by xonen ( 774419 )

    It just shows how much energy they actually use c.q. waste.

    They still pollute on a large scale, but make it sound like they are saving the planet.

    • Any form of power generation comes at a cost to the environment. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

      That said, over the life of the panels, each solar kWh is far less polluting than the fossil fuel energy they typically replace. Anybody who says otherwise is spreading FUD. The point isn't to find magical unicorn energy with no drawbacks, it's to find the most efficient / economically advantageous choice for a given application, and if you've got a big empty rooftop, solar is getting affordable enough

  • Solar and wind much cheaper (Score:3)

    by WillAffleckUW ( 858324 ) on Thursday July 25, 2019 @01:17PM (#58985856) Homepage Journal

    the cold hard fact is that renewable energy like combined solar, wind, and geothermal can easily meet energy demands for growing companies, and do so at far far lower prices than for any fossil fuel energy.

    additionally, renewable energy systems are highly resilient to catastrophic weather events, and can usually be brought back on line within hours, while fossil fuel energy systems can be shut down for months after such events.

    • additionally, renewable energy systems are highly resilient to catastrophic weather events, and can usually be brought back on line within hours, while fossil fuel energy systems can be shut down for months after such events.

      I don't think this is true, at least not as stated. A solar or wind farm isn't more resilient to catastrophic weather than a coal power plant, in fact it's less resilient. Winds or floods that could knock a coal plant out would simply demolish more-fragile solar and wind farms.

      What solar and wind bring to increase resilience isn't that they're in any way "tougher", but that they're, of necessity, distributed. You can put a gigawatt of coal power plant in a few dozen acres of land, but doing the same wit

      • Cases in point: Florida, Virgin Islands, Texas, Puerto Rico - the solar and wind was back online in days - normally they just ship the wind turbine blades before a storm, and put plywood on the solar panels, and have it back quickly. Flooded coal plants cause the retention ponds to overflow, and the fuel to be impacted, and pipelines and trucks require functional roads and pumps to work.

        Roofs don't take up real estate for apartment buildings. Here on campus we have a number of buildings that have solar roo

  • I was hoping to attend one of these Amazon conferences in 2020 [urtasker.com]

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