2y ago

More than 260 sites owned by The Warehouse Group are set to be powered by solar farms

www.indianweekender.co.nz /Pages/ArticleDetails/7/22492/new-zealand/hundreds-of-the-warehouse-group-sites-to-be-powered-by-solar-farms

8 comments

This is really cool, TWG is subsidizing the construction of the solar farm(s).
Assume that TWG stores collectively use 500MWh/yr, as long as Lodestone feeds more than 500MWh/yr into the grid, the power is offset. I hope they account for transmission losses, as the solar installation is not on TWG stores but in some other location. So maybe rather than 500MWh Lodestone will need to feed in 550MWh.
- If there are non-TWG power consumers near the farm and other power producers nearer TWG, transmission loss is irrelevant - power is power
Just checking I understand this right, a solar farm company and The Warehouse are working together to make the solar farms produce as much electricity as all the stores use?
Didn't some power company get in trouble recently for telling customers they were using green energy, when it's not actually possible to distinguish where electricity comes from in the national grid?
- I guess if the stores only ever use the same amount of energy that they feed to the system, then they can say they are 100% self sufficient in electric. Of course after dark they need a different source, but if they’d already fed that extra night time requirement into the system during daylight hours, then does the self sufficiency determination still apply?
  
  Another big thing here - do these solar farms already exist or are they already planned? Does The Warehouse claiming to use solar actually increase the amount of solar in the grid, or is it just greenwashing?
  
  Except the grid can't store energy like that - if you generate twice the energy you consume, then someone else uses that energy and the base load generators slow down ever so slightly to accommodate. When it's dark and you need that energy back, something else has to generate the power for you.
  Net metering is a book keeping device, not actually how power generation works.
- This issue really irks me. It's like the Dutch(?) trains that are run 'completely on solar power' when in reality, they just use the equivalent amount of solar power. Using this logic you can just separately assign factories etc with equivalent power usage and say they are 'completely run on solar power' without referencing the other blocks, and voila, suddenly everything is green and run on a single solar panel. Dishonest accounting.

8 comments