Activity 3.2.3.1 Solar Power and Energy Policy

Six-Point Critical Analysis of Current Event

My blog posting is available online at: https://brendansix73.wixsite.com/envr1301

1. Exploratory

The city of Dalton in Georgia built the largest solar panel assembly plant in the Western Hemisphere which was a $150 million investment. The U.S. is the second largest market for solar behind China driving massive demand to build projects across the southeast. The cost of installing solar panels has fallen by 70% in the past decade and now costs are competitive with traditional forms of energy like natural gas. Facebook plans to have a goal of reaching 100% renewable energy for all of their operations by 2020. The company that provides Facebook's access to solar Walton EMC making their solar projects jump from less than 1% to 15% - 20%. The solar panels were placed on a 1,400 acre solar farm in Early County that powers the facebook data center 200 miles away. The 1,400 acre solar farm consists of 355,124 solar panels from Dalton.

2. Diagnostic

Facebook is working on a new data project 45 miles east of Atlanta, and the data center will represent more than 90% of Facebook’s energy demand. Paul Clements, Facebook’s company director of energy and infrastructure said that the same amount of electricity used to power this data center would be equal that of a small to midsize city even with a energy efficient design. Clements says that "We have to have access to 100% renewable energy for our facilities. If we're unable to achieve that, we won't locate in that region," so if these demands aren’t met then the facility won't be built.

3. Cause and Effect

The solar farm project brought in needed tax revenue to Early County where the poverty rate was about 27%. June Merritt, a chairman of Early County Board of Commissioners, estimated at $8 million will be generated from taxes over 25 years. He also stated that “Of that, $5 million will go to the school system,” and Silicon Ranch would offer scholarships to those who want to pursue a career in the solar industry. Merritt also states that “There's no downside. I don't see how it could be,” since solar panels don’t produce any air pollution, citizens don’t have to worry about any problems in their health.

4. Priority

The most important issue is the amount of land used to produce enough electricity to store the data in the data center. Another issue is that people who are unknown to the idea solar energy and own large amounts of land can be bought out by nuclear power plant or coal company stated by Singletary “Had there been a golden opportunity to sell a piece of his land for a nuclear plant or a coal plant, Singletary says he probably would have taken that, too.” While the south has an abundance of land its easy for companies with large amounts of money to buy these plots of land and convert them into power plants or other types of plants.

5. Application

Probe for relationships and connect theory to practice. (How does this apply to you? How is this related to culture as we have studied so far?)

As time has passed companies have become less skeptical about using renewable energies such as solar panels. Because of the booming business of solar panels and how cheap they are to manufacture, companies have taken advantage of building solar farms to switch over to a cleaner rentable energy source. As more and more air pollution accumulates in our atmosphere from fossil fuels, solar panels can help bring a alternative source of energy and provide clean and safe air.

6. Critical

As time passes and technology becomes more advanced, will it require more and more electricity to contain all of the data? And if this is true, and it already requires 1,400 acres of land to produce the electricity for a data center equivalent of a small to midsize town how much land would it require as more and more data needs to be stored and the amount of electricity needs to keep up with it.

Work Cited:

Hsu, A., & Kelly, M. L. (2019, June 24). How solar grew in Georgia despite lack of mandates on renewable energy. National Public Radio. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2019/06/24/733795962/how-georgia-became-a-surprising-bright-spot-in-the-u-s-solar-industry

Silicon Ranch. (2017). Silicon Ranch Hazlehurst II Project on Georgia Farm Bureau TV [Video]. Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/217896697