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Petra’s pole panels a solar power no-brainer

By John Dodge | Sep 23, 2009 |

Some ideas are just plain no-brainers. There are an estimated 150 million wooden utility poles in the U.S. just reaching up toward the sun. And that doesn’t count metal poles and high tension line towers (or trees for that matter!?).

Why not put solar panels on every last pole and feed the juice back into the grid? They’d be out of everyone’s way.

A no-brainer

A no-brainer

That’s what Petra Solar is doing with its Sunwave solar panels which can produce up to 200 watts each. Putting one (or several) on 100 million poles could potentially yield 20,000 megawatts.

But we’re only at the beginning of this type of technology. In July, Petra won a $200 million and three and a half year contract to put Sunwaves on 200,000 utility poles in New Jersey. And the panels can be used on rooftops as well.

Petra is a sponsor and exhibitor of GridWeek, a conference in Washington this week about the smart grid. Petra CEO Shihab Kuran is a speaker at the conference.

I’m trying to think of obstacles to this, but outside of the usual suspects such as cost, reliability, yield and maintenance, I really can’t come up with any. Who could the sight of these panels possibly offend?

Why didn’t I think of this?

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  •  
    1

    mike_krieger

    09/23/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Petra's pole panels a solar power no-brainer

    Killer idea - I guess the cost of the inverters will be the big thing here. I imagine they'd have to go up to transmission voltage...

  •  
    2

    John Dodge

    09/23/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Petra's pole panels a solar power no-brainer

    Not sure how it ties into the grid, but there is a residential AC module (inverter)....will find out

    http://www.petrasolar.com/downloads/SunWave-AC-Module.pdf

  •  
    3

    Brandon Stafford

    09/23/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Petra's pole panels a solar power no-brainer

    In my estimation, the usual suspects that you mention (cost, reliability and maintenance) are huge obstacles. In most of the US, photovoltaics are marginally competitive with grid power, even when the panels are deployed in large arrays on the ground. You can use one inverter for many panels, and when the capacitors break down after ten years, you only have one inverter to replace.

    Putting panels on poles does get you unobstructed sun, and telephone poles are already sort of ugly, so I'd expect fewer complaints about appearance, but I doubt those advantages are enough to outweigh the disadvantages of cost incurred by separate inverters up on poles.

  •  
    4

    John Dodge

    09/24/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Petra's pole panels a solar power no-brainer

    Inverters covering several of many panels makes sense, but I suspect that would raise line cost...will talk to Petra about it.

    I still like the simplicity of the idea....and cost of solar is going down while the cost of oil, coal and dirty power is likely to rise over the long term.

  •  
    5

    nickbk

    09/25/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Petra's pole panels a solar power no-brainer

    Why not just put panels on the buildings that are usually just a few feet
    away from the poles, have lots more space for more panels and would use
    one large inverter instead of dozens of small ones?
    The cost of installing, maintaining panels and inverters would be far less
    and the panels would be even closer to the final point of load.

    Next thing, someone will come up with a wall-plug inverter so that solar
    calculators can power your home and claim its a good idea.

  •  
    6

    aroc

    09/26/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Petra's pole panels a solar power no-brainer

    What about the opportunity for stealing or vandalizing the panels - sort of like the old country high-schooler (mentality at any rate - happens in suburbs a lot, also) pastime of knocking over roadside mailboxes? This could possibly add greatly to maintenance costs.

    Maybe that could be minimized if the panels were put near the tops of the poles, and that would have the added advantage of being less obtrusive visually, although the downside is the need for climbing the pole for maintenance.

  •  
    7

    HeadScratcher7

    09/26/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Petra's pole panels a solar power no-brainer

    Good point. aroc. I say make it a federal crime to vandalize such panels just like it is for mail boxes. And in the event one is shot, hopefully it will be wired such that one damaged cell won't take the whole panel offline. With the advent of smart grids, you could potentially have these panels report back damage when it occurs.

    The only really big potential problem I see, is that they are likely fixed mounted to the pole. In an area that gets high winds, or even hurricanes, this could cause a massive financial loss unless they were really built tough.

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John Dodge

John Dodge has answered the call of journalism for 33 years, most of the time covering technology, engineering and business. While he's run magazines, newsweeklies and web sites, reporting and writing always took up half his time. He has have plied his craft at the WSJ, Boston Globe, PC Week (now eWeek), EDN, Design News, Electronic Business, Bio-IT World, Health-IT World, the Lowell Sun, Haverhill Gazette and Newburyport Daily News. He would have like to have been around when Boston supported seven or more newspapers (1940s) and while steam locomotives still pulled trains, but that era was nearly over by the time he raced into the world. That said, he has been blogging and shooting and editing video, writing for web and other online contents tasks for years now.

He has won numerous journalism awards in the past two years, including two Eddie Golds, one Neal finalist and the IEEE Award for Distinguished Journalism all for his reporting and coverage of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

Besides his family and myriad hobbies, reporting and writing is why he gets up in the morning. His personal blog focuses on netbooks and is called The Dodge Retort.

John Dodge

John Dodge prides himself on completely independent journalism. His opinions, observations and reporting are not influenced by any financial holdings. He holds no shares in computer, electronics, software or Internet companies. He also has no business affiliations with organizations except with those for which he creates content as a freelancer.

Dana Blankenhorn

Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for nearly 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the Interactive Age Daily for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age's "NetMarketing" supplement, and dozens of other publications over the years.

Dana Blankenhorn

Dana Blankenhorn has been a technology reporter since 1982, a business reporter since 1978, and a writer for as long as he can remember. His Schwab IRA has a few tech stocks in it, most notably some Intel and Applied Materials bought over 10 years ago. But the vast majority of his tiny fortune (emphasis on the word tiny) is invested in mutual funds. He presently writes for no one else but ZDNet, SmartPlanet and himself. But if you've got an opportunity let him know. If he takes the gig he"ll first add it to this disclosure page.
The Thinking Tech blog focuses on technologies such as virtualization, smart electric grids, enterprise 2.0, open source, data center management, green technology and the intersection between the innovation and application of these advancements.

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