Do you think solar powered PCs are possible by the year 2040?

Instead of paying electric bills for a render farm, why not harvest energy from the sun using solar panels with long lifespans?

The power system uses 2 high voltage battery packs about the size of typical computer tower case with 10 hours battery life. On first use, the system charges both batteries and then alternates them like battery 2 will charge while battery 1 is in use and when battery 1 is empty battery 2 will be used and then battery 1 will charge.

There are already people out there who are powering their homes (and by assumption their PC’s) with solar, thousands of homes in the southwestern US are powered by large solar plants (which would also include the PC’s inside them).

If you mean powering a PC from a solar panel directly, there’s new solar technology in the works which dramatically raises the energy efficiency, so it might be possible a lot sooner than you think (this combined with both the CPU and the GPU on the route of requiring less and less power per flop).

As for batteries, there are also new technologies in the works that promise ultra-fast recharge speeds, they’re not available yet, but it seems like the rate of advancement has had a jump start with the advent of electric cars.

There will always be technology to help us.

I have created my own desktop pc attached with the solar panel from the roof, this is not a rocket since.

I live off-grid and run my laptop off solar power. Two or three square meters of panels and one large lead-acid battery is sufficient for lighting and laptop, if it is sunny I have enough power to run the fridge as well. Modern laptop power supplies are rated at around 90W, but the laptop will use a lot less during light use. Unfortunately, (or fortunately when I’m in a hurry) rendering blender scenes will max out my CPU - and maxing out the CPU will use a lot of power. Cycles would max out the GPU instead, but I don’t use Cycles because my GPU is too slow. To render using Cycles you would want a desktop machine (perhaps with a low power CPU), but the graphics card is going to burn a lot of power - compare the 750W plus power supplies in your average (3D capable) desktop to the 90W of my laptop. You can still use solar, you just need to have more panels and bigger batteries.

Do you invert to 120 ?

this is a common mistake, there are 12v power supplies, leading to a increase in efficiency

I think we’ll have solar-powered or at least solar-assisted tablets yet this year.

Maybe you can use multiple car batteries to power the PC. Charge the expended ones by solar.

Do you invert to 120 ?

You are right… I use a 12 volt car power supply (“Universal Car DC adapter” LS-CR90AA), rather than an inverter + mains power supply. As I don’t have that many solar panels, by taking the inverter out I save power, also, most inverters have fans which can be annoying when close-by.

Maybe you can use multiple car batteries to power the PC.

Batteries are a problem. Most off-grid systems use deep-cycle lead-acid batteries. These are big and heavy batteries and a bit more expensive than car batteries, but car batteries don’t last well in the daily cycle of a solar powered household. Hopefully, by the time my deep-cycle batteries are due for replacement, prices on Lithium batteries will be low enough to make them economical for my system. I could connect my 12V power supply directly to a solar panel and just use the laptop battery, or perhaps have a pair of laptop batteries and charge them in turn.

Many small Android tablets will charge off a USB cable, the specification for USB allows for either 0.5A or 0.9A at 5 volts - that’s a maximum of 4.5Watts - while the wall charger for our 7" tablet is 2.0A or around 10Watts. According to Wikipedia: “Under [standard] test conditions a solar cell of 20% efficiency with a 100 cm2 (0.01 m2) surface area would produce 2.0 W”. So theoretically you could get around 5watts from solar cells mounted on the tablet itself. Current commercial cells are about 15% to 20% efficient, but 44% efficiency has been achieved with experimental cells.

Of course - you’d need an Android version of Blender.

It’s what we do…

Our Forty2 is running servers in Africa as we speak. Our Milo line can run tablets to laptops

What about this…

http://gravitybattery.info/

Side Note->

I always thought you could pump water uphill, to store energy, and have it flow back to release it…

I am not sure what the best motor/generator would be for this application though.

or connect a bike to a dynamo, cancel the gym
got an extra hour a day for blender and still keep fit :wink:

Yeah, i think we all human being should start considering of using this solar energy to all of our home electricity task. It will kill the needs to use oil, thus will save this earth from destruction in the future.

With these clean energy producing technologies, I see a greener future.