Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 04/15/2010 8:43:22 PM PDT by I got the rope
Spain produces solar energy at night
Posted: 15 Apr 2010 04:05 AM PDT
Bloomberg and various German media (EN) and Spanish media (EN) have revealed that Spain is able to produce solar energy at night, too. The global warming has breached the tipping point so that the Sun is shining not only during the daytime but during the nighttime, too.
Unless the solar energy was actually lunar energy, we're doomed. ;-)
Between November 2009 and January 2010, about 4,500 megawatt-hours of electricity was pumped by "solar sources" into the Spanish grid after the midnight but before 7 a.m. The subsidized price paid for this amount of solar energy is about 2.5 million euros and the authorities assume that this is the total amount of fraud.
That's of course ludicrous because if the diesel engines could have been running at night, they were probably running during the days, too. Both during the nighttime and during the daytime, it is always economically better to get energy by burning fossil fuels than from the solar sources.
It's not clear to me whether the nighttime solar producers were shining diesel-produced light on their solar panels, or whether they directly connected the wires to other sources. Whatever the trick was, it can be done during the daytime, too.
So the actual amount of "fake" energy is surely at least 5 times bigger than the estimate above. However, most diesel producers of the "solar" energy are probably smart enough not to produce their product before 7 a.m. So I actually guess that most of the "fake" solar energy was produced (and probably is still produced) during the daytime, so the actual damages may be orders of magnitude above those few millions mentioned above.
The diesel-produced fake "solar" energy may be a significant portion of the electricity labeled as "solar".
At any rate, a couple of people in Spain have earned tens or hundreds of millions of euros more than they deserved, receiving the market price of electricity inflated by a factor of 5 or so. What remains overlooked is the fact that the same thing holds for all the producers of solar energy. They're also robbing the whole system, our whole nations, giving us the same energy as others but receiving much more money for that. Most of them will never be arrested.
A solar trade group wants an investigation because their diesel solar colleagues are damaging their "image". Well, as far as I am concerned, their image can't be damaged more than it already is. They're thieves and freeloaders living out of nepotism, friends in the governments, and irrational hysteria. And they have always been.
The environmental subsidies - distinguishing different kinds of "energies" which are physically indistinguishable - and the price of CO2 permits are really designed to allow similar kinds of fraud. With these policies distorting the economy and prices, most of the new transactions will be fraudulent. You can't avoid it.
The example above was very simple. You don't have to be a clever trader, fraudster, or a physics PhD to invent that you can shine a light bulb on your solar panel. But even if this possibility is banned and prevented - not sure how - you may invent more complex ways how to circulate and store the electricity or CO2 so that you make a lot of money at the end.
In 1968, the main author of the proposed reform of the Czechoslovak socialist economy with a human face, Dr Ota Šik of Pilsen, found a mine and a coal power plant in the city of Ostrava such that the plant burned all the coal from the mine, and the mine consumed all the electricity produced by the power plant. A useful pair, indeed. ;-)
Again, this was a simple example but an environment without clear market prices allows you to create more sophisticated "loops" that are just losing money that not even Ota Šik could instantly see.
Wow. What a great breakthrough.
I hope the Islamofascists that run that country through fear approve of them using it.
I recall reading about a Spanish solar plant that was storing extra heat from their grid in a salt mass, and using the stored heat to continue steam generation for the turbines will after the sun set.
battery banks
Molten salt can store vast amounts of heat for many hours....long enough to boil water for a turbine at night.
A solar facility near Las Vegas uses a simlilar concept via a heat storing oily-gell material.
This must be an example of why Spain’s economy is doing so great! Are they re-deploying their state of the art techniques to the other members of the EuroZone yet? Perhaps to Portugal, to Italy and to the other PIIGS?
A devious mind would suggest using the Cloward-Piven strategy here. Organize local people to generate as much fake “solar” power as possible, in order to make the subsidy scheme completely untenable and force the Government to abandon it.
Awesome. Socialism at its very best.
The moon was shining sulkily,
Because she thought the sun
Had got no business to be there
After the day was done--
"It's very rude of him," she said,
"To come and spoil the fun!"
From "The Walrus and The Carpenter"
in "Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There"
By Lewis Carroll
OK whjat happened may have been a scam, but for solar power to work in needs to be from something that gathers energy during the day and released over 24 hours
Solar Updraft Tower 
Other advantages:
1. Simple. It just sits there and generates power (The idea of millions of mirrors of solar panels being steered by millions of control systems and millions of motors to track the sun has always seemmed coocoo bananas to me)
2. For this to work they have to be big. No, I mean really BIG 
This will be a) cool, and b) annoy the ecomentalists
Andasol 1 & 2, in the Andalusian Sierra Nevada.
http://www.abb.com/cawp/seitp202/cfbd3e0344fc81dbc125754e004d7f2e.aspx
Each power plant has its own 50 hectare solar field containing 624 parabolic troughs arranged in 156 loops. The fields produce up to twice the thermal energy that can be absorbed by the plants’ steam turbines. The excess energy is stored in liquid salt tanks for up to seven hours, thereby ensuring a continuous and stable supply of electric power to the grid – even in the middle of the night.
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