The bird community has rankled feathers about this.
Their members say the birds were actually flying away then they were zapped.
The solar officers say, that isn’t true.
The solar officer say the birds had turned and were rushing the solar collector when it zapped them in self defense.
Birds everywhere are chirping mad.
Protests have been called, but with a curfew of from dusk to dawn, the only time they can protest is during daylight hours. The birds have chosen to protest anyway, and the solar collector better be on notice.
The governor has stated that the solar collector has over-reacted, so the state energy commission reps are being called in to provide unbiased security.
If this doesn’t work, the national hawks and eagles will be called in. Normal birds generally don’t like that idea.
It remains to be seen if the militarization will indeed escalate over coming days.
Birds say they’re going to protest tomorrow. We’ll see if any streamers dematerialize.
$2.2 Billion divided by 140,000 homes = $15,714 per home.
$15,714 at 5% cost of funds and/or opportunity cost = $786 per year for interest or opportunity...$65.50 per month.
To pay back $15,714 in 30 years is $84.36 per month if no one makes a profit or has any expenses such as employees or maintenance.
Realistically, break-even would be lucky to be $100/month per home.
Now, if you can bill homes $200/month for their power usage, then you are golden!
“Death estimates range from 1,000 to 28,000 per year”
Wow! that is way more than I thought. Time to shut this thing down and go back to nuclear power.
For that amount of money, you probably could have built a 3000 MW coal fired powerplant that took up about 500 acres and provided electricity for an average size city. You could have saved the birds too.
I drove by this facility a couple of years ago. It is a mega monument to arrogance and stupidity.
How do you operate it at night?
It might be simplistic, and I certainly don’t mean it to sound callous to the bird community, but does this mean that they would realize greater efficiency by adjusting something to put this point of doom more toward the middle of the boiler instead of its present location in random space?
AKA 5 and a half square miles...of course it was dry dusty desert before.
This kind of facility belongs in space or on the moon, or in the middle of the pacific.
You want to smell the irony... Put “Ivanpah Dry Lake” into google maps, go to satellite view and back out a bit. Just a mile or so east of this huge plant in the desert you see ... a golf course. This is 20 or 30 miles from nowhere. So in one picture you get to see something the environmentalists and green energy types are no-doubt congratulating themselves on...and a colossal waste of precious water. Hey, don’t worry about the drought, or the falling reservoir levels along the Colorado river...
Had this not been designated politically correct “green energy,”
the greenies would have shut this facility down by now.