Posted on 02/13/2014 10:48:49 PM PST by grundle
At California's Ivanpah Plant, Mirrors Produce Heat and Electricity—And Kill Wildlife
A giant solar-power project officially opening this week in the California desert is the first of its kind, and may be among the last, in part because of growing evidence that the technology it uses is killing birds.
U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz is scheduled to speak Thursday at an opening ceremony for the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating Station, which received a $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee.
The $2.2 billion solar farm, which spans over five square miles of federal land southwest of Las Vegas, includes three towers as tall as 40-story buildings. Nearly 350,000 mirrors, each the size of a garage door, reflect sunlight onto boilers atop the towers, creating steam that drives power generators.
The owners of the project— NRG Energy Inc., Google Inc. and BrightSource Energy Inc., the company that developed the "tower power" solar technology—call the plant a major feat of engineering that can light up about 140,000 homes a year.
the BrightSource system appears to be scorching birds that fly through the intense heat surrounding the towers, which can reach 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
The company, which is based in Oakland, Calif., reported finding dozens of dead birds at the Ivanpah plant over the past several months
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Of course this isn’t a problem for the spotted owl...
Wait until the next hail storm.
In 1949 a solar furnace for melting steel was built in France.
We should add...this French furnace in 1949...handled 50kW of power. It was a state-funded university project. You would have thought that he’d have won the Nobel Prize for stuff like this....but apparently didn’t get much publicity out of the episode. There’s also some suggestion that he really stepped on various toes of the French and European science community by building this and proving several industrial uses. Even the Wiki guys barely give him eight lines of text. He was probably sixty years ahead of his time.
and at a cost of ONLY $16,000 per house!
$11,111 per home?
If this puppy can keep this up for enough years, it could break even.
If Darwin is correct, no changes will have to be made to the solar thermal generators, the birds will adapt and develop skins and feathers which are impervious to high temperatures.
Phoenix?
Phoenixes? Phoenices?
$2.2 BILLION to produce a PEAK output of 377 MW, but with only a 29% capacity factor - which translates into 110 MW (avg) power plant. That is a cost of over $20/W! Conventional power plants cost $1-2/W.
Another payoff from Obama to Google.
The initial capitalization of the plant isn’t the only cost there, though.
There’s also the fuel, which for this sun plant is zero.
It might or might not add up to a stunning bargain, but to dismiss it based on a one dimensional analysis is not thinking.
Idiots!.....The birds are drinking the windex and choking on paper towels.
The problem is that it can't power any homes at night, so it is mostly useful for 1/2 the year (at most) that A/C needs coincide with power generation. The rest of the time the power is not created at peak time (evening) therefore it is simply not needed since a conventional boiler can't be turned off every day and turned back on at night.
Nope. There's O&M which for this plant is huge. Fuel for conventional plants costs money, but other O&M costs are much lower.
Bookmark.
The problem is you also need the water and lots of it.
When solar panels collect dust and grime, they lose much of their effectiveness, so they must be cleaned frequently. Where, exactly, are we going to get the water needed for cleaning in the middle of the desert? And who’s going to be out there wiping down 500,000 acres of panels?
Furthermore, the more distant a source of electricity is from where it’s used, the more of it you lose during transmission, as much as 50% over 115 miles.
Birds. If the wind generators don’t get them, the solar array will.
The cost is to the lowly taxpayer. The benefit is to the Regime's politically connected friends.
Yesterday’s thread on the topic (different news source, not duplicate)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3122668/posts
Includes some more pictures
No, but electrical power usage goes down at night. Solar in this area (Vegas) produces the most power when the AC load is the highest.
The government subsidies are the real problem, not the technology.
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