Solar Musings

Greetings from the Mojave Desert! I'm at the Joshua Tree Music Festival this weekend (currently taking a between-set, post-shower break), prior to flying out of Palm Springs for Microsoft's Hardware Engineering Conference. I'm posting this writeup via the Wi-Fi antenna located a short distance from my vehicle and fed, I'm guessing by the bandwidth and 'ping' times I'm seeing, by DSL. Cingular (EDGE) and Sprint (EV-DO, believe it or not, see for yourself!) both also have solid cellular coverage here at the Joshua Tree Lake Campground.

Last year, I told you (twice, actually) about my positive experiences (ironically, at other music festivals) using my SunPower 24-element solar cell array to keep my camper's (an '81 Volkswagen Adventurewagen) battery charged. We've upgraded vehicles (we now own a 2001 Volkswagen Eurovan Camper) but I'm still happily using the SunPower panel. Right now I've got it sitting above the driver's 'cab' at a slight tilt to the south; when the sun's directly overhead, I can pull 5 amps of charge current out of the panel and even now, at 5PM and with the sun at a greater-than-45 degree angle away from the vertical, I'm still getting a 1.5 amp reading from the ProStar 15 charge controller.

Ironically, on the way down here I passed by a massive solar cell array just northwest of Four Corners, off highway 395. A bit of Googling uncovered its identity; it's Solar One (the Wikipedia entry is an interesting and recommended read), a thermal solar power plant capable of generating 10 MW of electricity and developed by the Department of Energy, Southern California Edison, Los Angeles Dept of Water and Power, and California Energy Commission. Solar One was originally completed in 1981 and operational from 1982 to 1986; it was resurrected as Solar Two in 1995 using a more advanced energy storage medium and was decommissioned in 1999. Now it operates as an Air Cherenkov Telescope, measuring gamma rays hitting the atmosphere under the management of the University of California, Davis….which is right down the freeway from my Sacramento office. It's a small world after all.