Posted on 09/28/2011 9:40:09 AM PDT by maggief
>>>The Energy Department announced Wednesday that is has finalized a $737 million loan guarantee for a Nevada solar project.
How does this work? How is it funded?
If/when this project goes belly up, the funds from the US gov must flow to the lenders on this project. How does that get approved by the House? If it’s later, then shouldn’t these projects be included in the current spending plans? How can the Executive branch go and spend 3/4 of a trillion dollars without Congressional approval.
This is just mind-boggling.
Agreed. Two things still need to happen for solar to take off. Costs still have to come significantly, and some of the technologies for integrating solar into conventional building materials need to pan out.
Costs have come down steadily, just not enough, and I gather that there is a growing legitimate market for off-grid applications. No one would be happier than I if the lab guys produced a silver bullet, but we’re not there yet.
Doing the math, we have $15-million to the Chinese for the panels, a few million for the transmission lines, and 720-million in “professional fees”.
I don’t have a problem with solar and possibly some day with improvements in battery tech and lower costs it will be viable. What I have a problem with is our government giving away our money in the form of loans to their friends and then forcing a woefully deficient technology down our throats and charging us for it in increased costs from power companies.
If solar is going to make it find venture capitalist to fund it for profit.
There’s around 800MW of total Nameplate Capacity for all Solar Power in the US, around as much as for one medium sized coal fired plant. If all those Solar Plants produced at their maximum, which by the way means that a way has to be found to make the Sun shine for all night as well as all day, then they could deliver around 600Million KWH of power. They actually delivered 143 million KWH of power to the grids they are connected to. This gives them a power delivery efficiency of 23.8%, effectively meaning they too can only deliver their power for around 6 hours of each day. The rolling 6 month percentage only comes in at 13.1%, or around 3 hours a day.
Again, no Power Authority in its right mind would rely on Solar Power to make up part of the power they need, and anyway, it’s such a monumentally tiny amount that it’s not even looked at, let alone taken into consideration.
I compared all these Solar plants to one medium sized coal fired plant. This coal fired plant would have delivered 576 Million KWH, or just over four times as much power, That same coal fired plant would have delivered the same power as all those Solar Plants by 11AM on the 7th of June, or in just under seven and a half days.
Add the solar to the wind, and the total still only comes to 1.62%. Almost nothing.
These renewable plants are in the vicinity of five to seven times more expensive to get to the power delivery stage than for any other plant. They are more maintenance intensive and they only last for a third to half the time as for a large coal or nuclear plant.
All that aside, that power delivery rate of only 20% at the absolute best should be enough to convince you that these things are next to useless. The only way they can even get off the ground is with the injection of huge amounts of money in the form of Government subsidies. The only thing that they can absolutely ensure is that the cost of electricity to the end consumer will be much more expensive.
This is one great big turkey that is never going to fly, no matter how much money you throw at it.
Taking into account that 20% power delivery rate, that means you will just have to rely on getting the required power for the remainder of the time from those other sources, so in all reality, the construction of these wind plants and solar plants at an alarmingly ever increasing rate will not really result in the saving of all that much in the way of Carbon Dioxide emissions anyway, as those coal fired plants will have to stay running to provide power for the bulk of the time these so called renewable plants are just not even working at all.
The only way to make it more of a boondoggle would be to put the solar arrays on a high speed train run by the postal service.
Wobbly Bob, you are a man after my own heart. Below are figures that pretty much spell it out...
Clean and green, the energy system we aspire to, is subsidized like no other energy source in history. By whom? Us, and our progeny. All energy has historically received some type of public support to even out the volatility of high and low price cycles. The Energy Information Agency of the U.S. government’s Department of Energy reports that, for 2008, natural gas was subsidized 25 cents per megawatt hour of electricity produced, coal received 44 cents per megawatt hour, nuclear $1.59. Oil was not reported in these numbers since oil is hardly a factor in electricity production. However, oil benefits from a variety of tax subsidies for dry well expenses and royalty holidays dating from the $10-a-barrel oil days of the late 1990s, which the administration promises to rescind. At the same time in the same year, wind energy received public subsidy of $23.37 per megawatt hour; solar energy received $24.34. These numbers do not include the additional subsidies we taxpayers have been compelled to pay for wind, solar and biofuels through the stimulus plan, the 2010 budget and the 2011 framework budget. These subsidies help support 2 percent of today’s energy system. Their proponents promise to double and double again the amounts of subsidized supply from clean and green with no commitment to ending subsidies. That’s not a new energy system.
A power plant is an engine that follows the laws of thermodynamics. Think of it like a hydroelectric dam. You dam up a river and backup water to get a "head" (higher elevation) of the water level. You allow the elevated water to pass through a turbine, extracting energy to drive a generator, converting the energy of the river flow to electrical energy. The water is then released to the environment (clearly, if not released the turbine would not spin!).
In a thermal plant you use a source of heat (concentrated sunlight, coal, uranium, it matters not what you pick) to boil water. As you add heat to the water it's temperature rises like the water behind the dam, increasing it's potential energy. Once it has turned to steam you can add still more thermal energy by superheating it, raising it's temperature. You then allow the superheated steam to pass through a turbine which drives a generator producing electricity from the heat flowing through the process (like the water in a hydroelectric station). The steam is then condensed back to liquid water (rejecting heat) and then recycled back through the boiler in a closed loop, to prevent corrosion of the internal parts of the boiler. The water in the closed loop must be as close to pure as possible, that is why it is not simply exhausted to the environment. To condense the steam back to water so that it may be returned to the boiler, it is necessary to reject heat by passing it through a condenser. The condenser must be cooled to remove the heat and your choices are air cooling or water cooling.
The analogy with a hydroelectric dam is now complete, with heat flowing from a high energy state to a lower state with the energy removed from the process converted to electricity. Like a hydro station it is necessary for a thermal station to reject the working fluid (water or heat) back to the environment else the process stops.
The problem now becomes how to dissipate the rejected heat in a desert environment. Water is scarce and air cooling does not lend itself to large installations as the radiating surfaces could become larger then the rest of the plant.
Regards,
GtG
LOL!
Gonna need a much bigger shamwow at the rate that clown is going.
This is the mental image I got...
Martha did time for a whole lot less.
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