新月直播

新月直播's 1 MW solar array began operation this year on March 4th, 2013, about 6 months ago.

新月直播 students,

新月直播's 1 MW solar array began operation this year on March 4th, 2013, about 6 months ago. 聽After a rough start, see my first email, it has been smooth sailing.

On Monday August 19th we finished producing our first GWh.

1 GWh is a lot of energy. 聽The average LADWP house uses 14.8 kWh per day so the energy produced by our array as of August 19th was enough to power 185 of our neighbor's houses for a year. 聽For other equivalencies, especially regarding climate change, you can punch in 1 GWh = 1000000 kWh here,



If you want to log in yourself to the monitoring website you can go to here,


Login ID = oxysolar
Password = 1600solar

The app can be found, for the iPhone, at the Apple's App Store by searching for AlsoEnergy.

If you do login you will discover that we are now up to 1.16 GWh, about 15% of college use over the same period. 聽I've been tracking these numbers carefully over the summer. 聽Overall we are producing about 10.1% more energy than I predicted. 聽Whether this is due to sunny days, clean panels, conservative assumptions, simplistic assumptions or something else is an interesting puzzle. 聽We have two physics students who are working on independent projects to measure soiling rates over the coming year so hopefully we can start to understand the behavior of our array. 聽BTW if you have any interest in getting yourself or your students involved with the solar array I would be happy to help.

On the financial side, with a lot of help from facilities personnel, I was able to get the data and information I needed to make a robust calculation of our savings. 聽Over the last 5 electric bills (up through August 5th) the solar array has saved the college $113,706.51. 聽At the end of our first full year of operation I should be able to make a first prediction of the payback period on our $3.4M "loan" from the endowment.

The college is focused on water use this year. 聽Oddly there are several connections between water and electricity. 聽The AlsoEnergy website claims that we have saved 582,300 gallons of water so far. 聽I'm dubious about the actual number but the connection is definitely real. 聽According to this website,



coal fired power plants account for the majority of the United States' freshwater use. 聽To the extent that we are offsetting the use of coal fired produced electricity we are also saving fresh water. 聽Additionally California uses a huge amount of electricity to pump water around the state. 聽According to this website,



"In California, the State Water Project (SWP) pumps water almost 2000 ft over the Tehachapi Mountains! The SWP is the largest single user of energy in California. It consumes an average of 5 billion kWh/yr, accounting for about 2 to 3 percent of all electricity consumed in California." 聽Saving electricity saves water and vice versa.

Enjoy the sun!

Contact Sustainability
Office of Sustainability

1600 Campus Road M-6
Los Angeles, CA 90041