Tag Archives: solar

QVC Visit

On Thursday, June 18 i visited the QVC facility in Rocky Mount, NC. I was absolutely blown away by the facilities at QVC. The technology that goes into receiving, storing, and processing material is unfathomable for anyone who hasn’t see it first hand. QVC was a planned part of my Kenan experience because they are industrial members of Edgecombe-Martin Electric Membership Cooperative. They are a unique facility in terms of electricity production and consumption because they have a larg solar farm on-site that provides 5.8 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year that is put back on the grid and purchased by North Carolina Electric Membership Cooperative.  Read my post about solar energy here.

Packages are sorted into bins according to destination

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Since QVC’s equipment, methods, and materials are essentially ‘trade secret’, I couldn’t take any pictures of the inside. But I can summarize the steps, from bulk order in to individual order out:

1. A truck brings pallets of product to the facility. It is unloaded, sorted, and then stored in a specific location.

2. Once an order is placed for an item, the item is pulled from storage and sent to packaging. Keep this in mind the next time you order multiple types of items from any store– the items are likely stored in various storage areas, but somehow they all make into the same box. AMAZING!

3. The items are packaged. This may seem like a small detail, but you want that TV to receive in working order, right? How about the pearl bracelet you ordered? That should be handled carefully too, right? While they probably would not package a TV and pearl bracelet together, they combine as much as they can in order to keep consumer shipping costs down.

4. Once your order is packaged, it is sent on a conveyor belt where it is scanned and sorted according to region of destination, and then loaded onto a truck that will be used to transport your item to USPS or UPS or FedEx.

Its important to note that this process is heavily automated, it requires many people to monitor, package, transport via forklifts, and troubleshoot the system. It was very interesting to see how all of the machines worked together to deliver a fast and timely produce. Every hour costs the company lots of money– the higher the productivity, the higher the costs.

As I toured the facility I couldn’t help but compare the business world to the education world. In a sense, education is a business– however too often inefficiency is rampant and the result ends up being a product (student) that is not ready for what lies ahead. I know there are many great schools doing many great things, and they should be the model we look to for insight and guidance. What kind of product are we sending out to the world? What would our ‘bottom line’ actually be if we could attach numbers to productivity, creativity, and efficiency?

 

 

Solar Energy

Can you think of any reason why people wouldn’t want to use FREE solar energy to provide electricity to do the things we have grown accustomed to, including charge our phone, heat up our dinner, and wash our clothes? Well, when you think about how energy gets from the sun to your power outlet, it becomes far more complicated and much more costly than ‘free’.

QUESTION: How would a member go about getting solar panels installed on their house?

The member would need to contact Edgecombe-Martin EMC to have the engineers determine if existing lines can handle the voltage that would be put back on the lines. The member also must sign a Standard Interconnection Agreement that details the members responsibilities that include information about types of acceptable equipment, safety, and installation and interconnection costs that must be covered by the member.

QUESTION: How much will this lower a members electricity bill?

I’d really like to share some ‘hard facts and figures’, but the reality is that it isn’t that straightforward. You can do some quick googling and find that some projects pay off in 5 (or fewer) years because of hefty tax credits at the federal and some state levels. Solar panels are expensive to install, and the future of solar is not ‘set in stone’– as tax credits expire and the cost becomes even more prohibitive, you may see less solar ~or~ as technology abilities increase and panels become more cost effective, you may see more solar. If you install panels in the EMEMC district you’ll be credited on your bill according the ‘avoided cost’ that co-op calculates– which is how much you would’ve paid for power had they supplied the power to you instead of you supplying it via panels. The bottom line is that right now there is no way to store the energy, so Edgecombe-Martin is there to ‘pick up the slack’ and keep your lights on cloudy days and cold winter nights.

 

It is important to note there are currently various methods that have been tested and even used to ‘capture’ this energy and store it for times when the sun ISN’T shining, but it is equally as important to note that these technologies are not widely available and thus have high costs associated with installation, use, and maintenance of the systems.

Edgecombe-Martin EMC has a few solar projects that are connected to their system. There is a fairly high cost associated with connecting residential and industrial solar to existing lines, and extnesive paperwork that must be filed. The engineers must verify that the existing lines can handle the load that will be back fed onto the lines during daylight hours. This means that the substations have to be able to adjust the power they are supplying every second– even a cloud can cause a drop in voltage from the solar panels, and the co-op must provide continuous services to all of the members. As you can imagine, this is a modern marvel and requires engineers to be on-staff and monitoring the grid for any potential problems.