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Comment by swamp40 | Hacker News Reader

Why is there any need to make it much smaller than the solar panels that will be providing the power?

I can see where ultra-thin (and flexible) would be a benefit, but why not allow the electronics to spread out over the entire area of the solar panels? The space is being used up already.

That gets rid of the super high power density problem.

The sun delivers about 1KW per square meter, so even if the solar panels were 100% efficient, you'd have an entire square meter of room for a 1KW inverter.

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They used solar panels as an example. If anyone succedes in making much smaller inverters the technology will be used everywhere.

I applaud Google for doing this! I think Google knows there's a bunch of undisovered Einstein's in the world, and they just using the Internet to find them?

I like contests like this. I thought Bill Gates condom contest was a great idea.

Google are the sort of company who would rather have 5,000 crappy, unreliable, but efficient and tiny inverters attached internally to crappy, unreliable commodity servers than spend 5000x on a single, huge, expensive, only slightly more reliable inverter covering all 5,000 servers.

It's just another way of pushing unreliability to the network edge where it minimizes systemic effects and can be replicated away cheaply, much like they did with GFS or even their UPS system (at least previous server generations at Google included a large per-server battery).

Nothing about your comment is mutual exclusive with the one you're replying to...

One inverter per solar panel sounds just like one inverter per server.

Parent comment assumes one inverter per solar panel, my comment suggests it's more like one per 19" rack unit. Today's inverter vs. the kind of size they're looking for is a difference of perhaps 4-10TB per U, or approaching enough space for an extra half petabyte of spinning rust per rack

Ah, thanks for clarifying. My bad. :)

Switching power supplies were not needed for consumers until labor & material cost of linear supplies became exorbitant enough to drive all manufacturing overseas.

After that, freight was still on the increase and soon it became more economical to expensively engineer a lighter weight, smaller replacement. Regardless of orders of magnitude more complexity, switchers replaced simple transformers.

Inverters are like that too.

At 50W/inch^3 one ocean container of inverters will handle as much power as two ocean containers at 25W/inch^3.

Surely we need to do whatever we viably can to make solar as inexpensive and practical as possible, so I think the hope is that a smaller inverter means higher efficiency and lower production costs.

I might be completely wrong. Still, I'm sure we all agree that it's not ever a bad idea to incentivize any sort of energy innovation.

My exact question. This whole thing has an emperors new clothes feel about it. Why is an inverter the size of a cooler an issue under any circumstances?

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