Posted on 02/22/2008 8:45:51 AM PST by decimon
PHOENIX, ARIZONA (AP) -- A Spanish company is planning to take 3 square miles of desert southwest of Phoenix and turn them into one of the largest solar power plants in the world.
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Arizona will be enough to supply up to 70,000 homes at full capacity.
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Arizona regulators are requiring utilities to get 15 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2025, with annual increases of roughly 1 percent.
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Unlike most solar energy, Solana will use the sun's heat, not its light, to produce power. Gila Bend can get as hot as 120 degrees in the summer.
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Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano said she envisioned the state as a solar powerhouse.
"There is no reason that Arizona should not be the Persian Gulf of solar energy," she said.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
I wonder how many homes you could power with 3 square miles of gas or nuclear power plant? I bet a lot more than 70,000.
Three square miles of pristine desert!? What about the Gila Monsters!?
Let the raping of the desert begin! Arizonians are going to love their mirrored landscape.
God forbid that a bird should fly close and get ground up by the blades on the windmill....
Guess they'll get bent at Gila Bend.
The good news is there’s a whole lot of nothing out here. Gila Bend pretty much only exists as a good way to avoid Phoenix when going from Tucson to LA or vice versa. Land and dollar inefficiency have always been my big problems with wind and solar power though, that much money and land can generally make a lot more electricity the traditional ways than wind or solar can even come close to.
You are exactly right. soon these environmental folks will realize that the optimum way to get power from the sun is not going to be fields of corn, but massive solar panels that absorb all the light hitting the ground. the landscape will turn black, and there will be nowhere for the lizards or anything else.
Well, that would keep them away from this place.
This is a good idea. However, it should be done by American companies!
Buy stock in windex.
Scientific American: A SOLAR GRAND PLAN
* A massive switch from coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear power plants to solar power plants could supply 69 percent of the U.S.’s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy by 2050.
* A vast area of photovoltaic cells would have to be erected in the Southwest. Excess daytime energy would be stored as compressed air in underground caverns to be tapped during nighttime hours.
* Large solar concentrator power plants would be built as well.
* A new direct-current power transmission backbone would deliver solar electricity across the country.
* But $420 billion in subsidies from 2011 to 2050 would be required to fund the infrastructure and make it cost-competitive.
More— http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan
This part I like but without any "Grand Plans." When you can go to Home Depot to pick up your solar collector/battery pack power unit to juice some DC devices in your home is when solar will have found its niche. In the short term, that is. Long term is anyone's guess.
If these schemes were inherently less expensive than the existing power system, they would be self funding. As great as solar power is, it has its own dirt, for the dirty secret is how to supply power when the sun doesn’t shine.
The economics of the necessity to supply power every night and on stormy days means that this alternate power source must have the full capacity as the solar panels. So solar power means: we must build and pay for two power sources!
I fully understand that solar power is free, but money to build both it and its necessary backup power supply must be properly and honestly recognized as a continual cost for the simple reason: the meter runs all the time on the money invested.
If the investment was in the form of equity, the meter is running in the form of opportunity costs, or what the money could be earning instead of being sunk into this project. If the investment was in the form of debt instruments, they have recurring interest expenses. If the investment was in the form of tax distortions or “subsidies”, then either the marginal budget deficit was borrowed from China, or it marginally bid up interest rates for all government debt, or it displaced some other “urgent need”.
But, we will never see an economic impact estimate of the $420 billion in subsidies. Too many people just want to believe that money was picked from the Money Tree at no cost to society. This is just denial in a tuxedo, which is still denial.
sw
Solar thermal is one of the few approaches that might actually become economical in the short run.
Oh, please, who goes out there, anyway? At least it will be non-polluting energy, and the greenies won't hold up approval as they would for a nuke plant.
Nah, I imagine that there will be creatures who will enjoy living in the shade of the mirrors. Just the opposite of the caribou, which like being near the Alaska pipeline, because of the warmth.
The economics are interesting. They say it will cost $1B for the power infrastructure for 70K homes, or about $14K/home. The operational costs are low, so the annual cost of power will be, roughly speaking, the annual interest on $14K, or at today's interest rates less than $1K. Not too bad.
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