Sean’s blog

Solar power in Malaysia – the residential area solar roof

March 15th, 2011

‘Part two’ has some better images that should make things a bit clearer!

I keep suggesting this as a ‘real’ solar power alternative whenever someone says (as they invariably do) that solar power cannot produce enough energy to compete with traditional sources. Alternative power sources are in the news at the moment, as Japan’s earthquake and tsunami woes are compounded by exploding, non-productive nuclear power stations. Malaysia is also planning to have the first nuclear power station in South East Asia, led by Minister Peter Chin, a man who responded to requests for reassurances that wind-borne fallout from Japan would not fall on Malaysia with “don’t speculate”. Perhaps I’m confused. I think it is his job to give the Malaysian people the information they need to reassure them about their safety and that of the people they care about. He seems to believe his job is to reassure speculators that they can go ahead and build a nuclear reactor in Malaysia come what may.

It’s reasonably obvious to most people that  plonking a few solar panels on the roof of a house that was designed to shed rain is not going to solve anybody’s power supply problem. The best that can be hoped for from an expensive one-off installation like this is to shave a few pennies off one’s electricity bill in good weather. Malaysia, although it’s near the equator, doesn’t have quite as much sun as you’d expect – it mostly has punishingly sweaty heat. It’s not bad though. Figures in this article are taken from an insolation map at Wikipedia from which I reckon that Malaysia has an average insolation of 200W/m². The good thing about Malaysian sun is that it’s about the same all year round. The worst thing about sun in the UK – for example – is that it’s best in the summer, when everybody wants to go outside and not use any electricity, and worst in the winter, when everybody wants to stay indoors and turn the heating on.

I’ve been toying with this idea for quite some time. Solar obviously needs large expanses of plan area because the power density of solar radiation is low, compared to that of a traditional power station furnace. Dedicating land to such a project makes its price prohibitive. The great thing about solar photovoltaics is that they don’t need dedicated plan area, as evidenced by their current most likely deployment – plonked on your own house roof. One house’s roof is too small a scale to create a solar power station though, so on a recent visit to a coal-fired power station near Pontian in Malaysia, I noticed that the dry end of the coal yard was covered by a huge roof, far, far above the coal heap below. Why not do this for solar?

On a family holiday in Kuala Terengganu a few weeks ago, we spent a delightful afternoon on Pulau Kapas, where tucked away behind a fence by the jetty is a combination diesel / solar power station. There are several solar arrays on short legs fixed to the ground, but the diesel generator shed itself is shaded by a single, separate ‘sun roof’ that is entirely covered on its top surface by solar panels. This is how I think Malaysia could implement solar power stations – by combining them with residential / commercial developments. A standard (modern) Malaysian house is like a large concrete solar oven. Why not shield it from solar radiation, and at the same time convert that radiation to usable power?

Here’s an image taken from Google Maps of the housing development where I live which I’ve crudely edited to show how I think solar panels could be added to such a development. (The picture is a few years old, and the built-up area has since more than doubled). The 7 solar roofs in the image, 180×50=9,000m², 60×40=2,400m², 80×40=3,200m², 100×40=4,000m^2, 60×40=2,400m², 75×40=3,000m², 90×40=3,600m² have a total area of 27,600m². Using baseline figures of 1KW/m² for peak insolation and 200W/m² for average insolation, power input from the sun is 27.6MW peak, 5.5MW average. Using a photovoltaic efficiency of 10%, peak electrical output is 2.76MW, average is 550KW.

The price of the work is likely to be dominated by the expense of covering such a large area in solar panels. Searching online for solar panels in early 2011, I see a minimum price of USD1.65/W for a minimum order of 10 panels. I think this could be cheaper for a purchase of thousands of panels, but let’s use that. Working backwards from the peak power output, the cost of solar panels for an installation such as the one shown here would be 2.76M * 1.65USD = 4.6million US Dollars, or about 14million Ringgit.

If the output of the solar roof was sold to the national grid as though from a power station, and we thank the government in advance for mandating that power from solar should be bought by the grid at commercial residential rates (about 40sen per KW/h), then this installation’s nominal average income from the grid should be RM220 per hour, or about RM37,000 per week, Rm1.9m per year. At that rate the investment would take about 8 years to pay off the cost of the solar panels alone. I see notes online to the effect that the solar panels are around half the cost of the project, so let’s say the project’s build cost is equal to around 15 years’ operation. If the price per Watt for panels is lower than that quoted, this timespan is reduced. The same goes for an increase in efficiency from 10%.

The way I envisage this working on a personal level is that I would buy a house in such a development and live in it. I would buy electricity from the national grid at residential rates. The ‘solar roof’ would be owned and operated by a power generation company, not related to me in any way. There would be a legal right on the deeds of my house for the power company to use so many plan square metres in the void immediately above my house (say 2metres to 5 metres above my house, weight per square metre and thickness restricted to avoid cynical development) in return for that right, the power generation company would pay each homeowner a small monthly ‘rent’ of RM10 or so.

There are additional benefits. The solar roof would function as a shade for the houses below, reducing the need for air conditioning. If designed carefully, the void between the bottom of the solar roof and the roof of the house below may encourage air-flow, further reducing need for forced cooling. If the solar roof were also function as a rain roof with its own guttering and downpipes, the houses beneath would be exposed to less weathering and hence require less maintenance. It would even be possible to supply local hot water either from solar-heated tanks or from the power conditioning / storage equipment’s cooling system, reducing the need for expensive-to-run bathroom water heaters.

The timescales for projects like this to make a sizeable contribution to power supply in already built-up areas is long. It is almost certainly not possibly to retro-fit such a project to an existing development. It would have to be designed in before building commenced. In areas such as East Malaysia where development is still at an early stage, the relative contribution from new development would be much greater. A modest-sized development such as that shown here could be generating a few MW of excess power during office-hours.

I’d be interested to know what you think. Particularly, I’d be interested to know whether you could see yourself living in such a development. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask, and I’ll do my best to answer or – hopefully – someone who knows will see your question and help out. The worst part of a development like this is that it doesn’t offer the same opportunities for trimming off fat in the form of commissions, leakages and ‘contingencies’ that a mega-project like a dam, nuclear or fossil-fuel power station offers. It’s totally transparent (!), so it won’t attract get-rich-quick speculators. It needs massive public support to make it a reality. Will that come?

Posted in Bolehtics, Breaktime, Life, Money, Useful | 2 Comments »

Royal Mail airsure track and trace: “Sorry. There is no data …”

March 4th, 2011

Living in Malaysia, I’ve come to accept a little bit of ‘post tax’. I receive somewhere around 4 out of 5 items mailed unrecorded to me from overseas. I don’t mind the occasional credit card going astray – it never seems to result in fraudulent transactions. Toys and clothes for the kids sent by relatives that never turn up make me think there must be very happy children somewhere.

What does bother me is post sent (mostly to her grandchildren) by my mother going astray. She’s elderly and lives in the UK where almost all mail arrives next-day and so far as I know if you put something in the post the addressee will receive it. She gets distressed by extended delivery times – it’s frequently a month before letters and parcels she posts arrive here in Malaysia. She is almost inconsolable when presents for her grandchildren go missing. I was distressed by ‘post tax’ the first couple of times it happened, but now it just seems reasonable – given how unreliable everything else is.

My mother sent a small gift to my kids – something they’d asked her for on the telephone – on 16th February 2011. She didn’t want it to go astray, so she paid extra for Royal Mail airsure. She was excited about the prospect of knowing where the parcel was en route, so she dismissed paying more for postage than the items themselves cost as “a small price to pay for knowing the parcel will arrive”. I checked a few times and got the “Sorry. There is no data currently available for this tracking reference. Please try again later.” response.

The parcel arrived on 3rd March 2011. A note to people selecting premium delivery methods to Malaysia: post here is delivered to a post box by the roadside, not through a letterbox in a front door. We live in gilded concrete cages in walled compounds with remotely-operated security gates that would make an ex-convict shudder. Royal Mail airsure is not ‘signed for’ – only barcoded. The postman does his best : he puts mail in a letterbox which is more conveniently placed for ‘post tax’ than it is for the addressee to collect it.

Royal Mail’s tracking system still has the “Sorry. There is no data…” message the day after I received the packet. I’ll call my mother tonight to tell her I’ve got it, but I’m not looking forward to telling her that the expensive mail option she chose was worthless. What annoys me more than anything else is that tracking a parcel and putting the data online is such a trivial, simple matter that it simply boggles my mind as to how Royal Mail has failed to do it. My expectations of the local post service updating their end of the data were already low – we frequently use tracked mail here and missing or tragically late updates are normal (although delivery of tracked items given to Pos Malaysia has been 100% for us). Is it also ‘normal’ for Royal Mail to fail at such a simple task? How can there be not even an “accepted for delivery in the UK” update?

I’m extremely disappointed. Royal Mail’s own description of airsure doesn’t help:

Airsure^® can be up to one day faster than Airmail. Your item will receive priority handling at home and overseas and benefits from an online tracking facility so you can check your mail’s progress along the way.  We work closely with our international partners to ensure and maintain a high quality of service for our customers.  For that reason, Airsure^® is only available to selected destinations.

I guess marketing something on the basis of “up to one day faster!“* should serve as a heads-up that perhaps you should save your money and avoid the pain of misplaced hope. When you also factor in the fact that track and trace doesn’t work, it appears to me that you’re paying a large amount of money for Royal Mail to share with their ‘selected destinations’ for precisely … nothing. I’ve asked for a response from Royal Mail using their web-based Customer Service form. I’ll update this article with any useful information I receive.

* Aren’t Internet Service Providers currently in hot water for precisely this kind of optimistic wording in service descriptions? ‘up to one day faster’ when a packet can only arrive one day or the next is – in plain English – “either one day faster or not faster at all”, or even “not really any faster at all, given the timescale”.

Posted in Broken, Life, Money | No Comments »

Malaysian maps and a geographic locations API … kind of

March 3rd, 2011

I’ve been wanting to add some Malaysian mapping facility to spider.my for some time. I often go to JUPEM’s website – the “Department of Survey and Mapping Malaysia” to see what they have to offer. I’m invariably sorry when I do that – their website takes forever to load and doesn’t work properly in Firefox, it has been developed for Internet Explorer. What I really want is simple API access to their data. They have a ‘Map Explorer’ served using compressed SVG files and viewed in an Adobe SVG viewer component for Internet Explorer (doesn’t work at all in Firefox). That looks OK (if I start up VirtualBox, an old copy of WinXP and Internet Explorer), but I don’t want presentation, I want data.

I notice that the UK’s Ordnance Survey has a free public API – exactly what I expect from JUPEM! I sent them an email from their ‘feedback form’ asking for it and remain optimistic. In the meantime I wrote my own API just so I can get a few noddy projects off the ground. I know I can use Google or Bing Maps to do this sort of thing, but it strikes me that national geographic data is precisely the kind of thing we have governments and pay tax for. I am already paying for this data and do not want to consume product placements or spam for a chance to look at it!

Have a look at the spider.my Geographical Place / Location API and tell me what you think. It has plenty of ‘issues’ – how could it not, given its provenance? I could improve it / extend it further, but it appears to me that that’s someone else’s job. If you’d like to use it, feel free.

Posted in Bolehtics, Spider.my, Useful | No Comments »

TM Streamyx and telephone down Port Dickson area 24th February 2011

February 24th, 2011

Sometime around 3pm the Internet connection died. The phone is also dead (no dialtone). There’s no sign of my friendly local technicians at the local switchbox, so perhaps it’s not just this area. Then again, perhaps nobody knows. I tried to fill in a “Contact Us” form at www.tm.com.my but the submit button didn’t work. I’m installing VirtualBox at this moment so I can install an old copy of Windows XP and try to use their website that way. Perhaps I’d be better off with cURL and a hand-crafted POST. Then again, it’s well past fucking time I just sold this house and went to live somewhere with working Internet.

I can hear Jess downstairs giving it “Adoi ma” after the “mm kthxbai” on her handphone: seems like she’s not having much better luck. Everybody who once visited our house as a TM technician seems to have a new job elsewhere now. There’s no way we’re phoning the 1300 88 9515 line – it has been such an utter and miserable waste of time on every occasion we’ve phoned it in the past, and we’ve had to hold on through criminally spammy advertising for so long each time that we have built up considerable antipathy towards TM’s ‘customer support line’. We would need personal visits, to our door, at least one hour before a fault occurred, with chocolates and flowers on at least three occasions before we would consider wasting our lives away on 1300 88 9515 again.

Hmmm… my DiGi adapter is also not being very reliable. Is the network problem infectious?

Jess has got through to a technician from her massive list who reports that the problem is that the telephone network is “down”, but is working on it and expects it to be back tonight.

Hmmm… no joy connecting to DiGi mobile internet for ten minutes now. Welcome to Malaysia!

DiGi’s back, I’d better get this published.

Update: Phone and Streamyx back around 17:30.

Update 5th March 2011: Received an email from TM in response to the support form I filled in at tm.com.my to tell me that the problem has been fixed. They refer to “our telephone conversation on 24th February 2011 (Time: 1:10 PM)”, which was before the problem occurred. I can only imagine it’s a copy-and-pasted email reply.

Interestingly, I see that it costs different amounts of money to call TM’s support line from different mobile networks, with Celcom being the cheapest at a fixed RM1, Maxis next with a fixed RM2 and DiGi potentially the most expensive quoted at RM0.60 per minute. A typical wait (in my experience) of calling TM support line during an outage would be five to ten minutes. I wonder who determines the charge – is it TM, or the mobile network?

They also mention that it’s free to call TM support from a fixed line to report that the fixed line network is down. I guess that’s incontrovertibly true.

Posted in Bolehtics, Broadband, Broken, Life | No Comments »

Google, Bing, other search engines OpenSearch link missing?

February 5th, 2011

When did that happen? In a demo that reminded me of days working in large software houses, I showed my brother-in-law how he could add Google to his IE9 search engine list by just going to Google’s homepage and right-clicking the search engine drop-down list for the “Add Google Search…” option. It wasn’t there. I think my demo reminded him of all my previous demos of how easy things are on the Web.

“It should work!” I said, and triumphantly showed him how easy it is with Bing and Yahoo! Search. It failed with them too! I’m sure that all those sites once had a <link rel="search"> element compatible with the OpenSearch standard in their heads that was the cue for browser search engine handling to pick up new search engines. Now none of the big ones appear to have that link. You can still see the OpenSearch link elements in pages from blekko, DuckDuckGo, and also from spider.my.

I thought OpenSearch was a VeryGoodThing. Why have the search majors stopped using it?

Posted in Broken, Google, Search | No Comments »