Posted on 02/13/2025 8:37:42 AM PST by ChicagoConservative27
The controversial Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in California’s Mojave desert is going to close 14 years early despite $1.6 billion in loan guarantees from the Department of Energy under President Barack Obama.
The Ivanpah facility works by using mirrors that concentrate sunlight on a central boiling tower, which then heats water to move turbines. It has been criticized for incinerating birds and other animals within the reflecting zone.
Ivanpah has become a familiar sight on the road between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, and in the airspace above, with its blinding light visible for miles.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
He sure could pick'm
So the incompetent guy who never ran anything successfully in his life, but who was elected solely for being black has created another stupid mess costing taxpayers billions?
No surprise. The man was a fool, and were it not for the media-liar complex pushing this nitwit on the nation, we would have never had to deal with his idiot boondoggles.
$1.6 billion in loan guarantees
I suspect on the back burner.
The plant has a back up natural gas firing system for when the sun is not shining. In practice, the plant produces about 80% of it's power output from a very inefficient and costly natural gas fired steam cycle plant.
At about 3 time the cost and natural gas consumption compared to a simple, efficient, flexible and inexpensive natural gas fueld turbine powered power plant.
Commercial thin film PV panels are cheaper than mirrors on a watt for watt basis by far. This is due to physics, any time you use a thermal process you have to pay good ole Newton and his buddy Carnot, you lose 40 to 70% of your heat energy input to losses. The process of going from heat to steam to turbine to shaft torque to electromotive force to electrons is lossy all along the way. This applies to combustion turbines just as much, as we ll as nuclear heated steam turbines. Heat is heat is heat it’s all just molecular mmotion in a fluid or gas.
PV thin film are photoelectric devices with no moving parts, and no heat used to drive a process it is purely electrical. You go from photonic energy directly to electrons. This alone makes the process less complicated and in some cases mmore efficient on a per square meter basis. The economics of electrons delivered vs capital and operating and land area expenses is what matters in end. While thermal power via mirrors can hit a higher per sq meter efficiency 30% or so vs 25% or so for electrons delivered per sq meter the cost of all the complexity of using, heat and moving parts and high temps is vastly offset by the slight loss of raw eff by going directly from light to electrons.
The only advantage of CSP and thermal power is heat is easy to store with a host of means , salt being one of the best. With heat storage you can keep using said heat after the sun goes down that is the only advantage for CSP. turns out it is cheaper to just have gas turbines ready to turn on as the sun sets and take over the load.
People will hyperventilate and say but but just use the gas turbines then. Well that’s great but the electrons coming off the solar panels during the day are cheaper now in capex per watt vs turbines and they use zero fuel which is zero cost vs vs burning fuel that always has a cost.
In Texas not sure about CA the cost for PV power is under one cent per kWh at the plant gate all in as in LCOE which includes capex and O&M. No gas turbine CA touch that so it is automatically cheaper during the day to use PV vs gas. The IEA has report after report with data showing thin film PV is by far the cheapest power humans have ever created in areas with medium to high insolation its peers reviewed , replicated published fact now the IEA will happily let anyone who wants too download the datasets, and reviewed science.
This fact is why CSP is a dead end and why most days 30-40% of the Texas grid during the day time is PV solar. Last week we had three days in a row where 60% of the 70,000 megawatt ERCOT grid was PV and wind over the center part of the day. The wholesale price at the time was $25-30 megawatt hour that’s 2.5-3 cents wholesale far cheaper than the early evening price of $60 when the turbines spin up. You can see a correlation when there is lots of wind in the early evening and overnight the price drops to the 20-30 range if it’s all gas it’s 50 or more. Why? Because gas adds cost for fuel to the wholesale prices.
You can get bulk panels for 16 cents per watt of capacity capital eexpense for a 25 year lifespan warranty. This is fractions of a cent per kWh over a 25 year lifespan in anywhere that gets decent sunshine per year. We get 220 days of sun in north tTexas, in West Texas it’s closer to 320 than 220.
Photons can get stacked on top of each other ad infinitum.
Unlike water molecules, electrons, all matter, etc., which are limited.
So you can have a laser with practically unlimited energy density. Same with this mega-Boy-Scout-hot-dog-cooker-thingee.
Should never have been built.
Don’t these MIRRORS made the atmosphere MUCH HOTTER???
They should just build a big dome over the reflective zone to keep birds from flying in.
The current plant owner is Solar Partners LLC seems to be broken into separate entities for each section, I, II, III. So here's a question. Why would a start up backed by Google need federal loans? Because they left as the price of photovoltaics dropped, and decided to leave off. And BrightSource? Another wiki tells "In September 2016, BrightSource signed a deal to sell its Ivanpah solar farm technology to a Chinese project owned by a state-run energy company."
As Obama boasted, "the future." What the future brought was bankruptcy, investment after investment like Solyndra, and governments are on the hook while private venture capital got paid.
And of late:
"Ivanpah Solar was built in an era when developers were investing in all sorts of clean energy projects in a 'creative destruction' sort of mindset to figure out what worked and what didn't. The goal was to find efficient and affordable technologies to reduce the need for greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels, and it was obvious from the start that not all technologies would prove equally cost-effective."Once an engineering marvel, two-thirds of this concentrated solar power plant will shut down after a California utility pulled two of its PPAs Factor This, 23 January 2015.
The other day the news carried an article that a power transmission line in western states will require 15 miles of right of way without any structures.
Leave the gate open for the copper and metal thieves.
I respectfully disagree with: turns out it is cheaper to just have gas turbines ready to turn on as the sun sets and take over the load. (For context, that was meant to be compared to converting solar to CSP and having nat gas turbines ready after CSP loses heat.)
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I believe we have no feasible way for natural gas plants to scale up and down as needed during the day. At best, if I'm correct, we can shut down the nat gas plants for days or months, then turn them on for weeks at a time (i.e. during a heat wave here in the south) in a feasible manner (we call it "reserve power" to supplement "steady power").
Until we can make nat gas plants scale up and down during the day, then intermittent sources like solar and wind for the grid are a waste of money.
No more so than any other thermal generating station. It's just grossly inefficient ... and it's located in what may be the ideal location for a solar power station.
Don’t these MIRRORS made the atmosphere MUCH HOTTER???
...............
Turns a bird into vapor quick as a hiccup.
It doesn’t add energy to the atmosphere. It only concentrates energy. The air and ground under the mirrors will necessarily be cooler than they would have been absent the mirrors ...
You can harness physics, but you can’t beat it. Thermodynamics is a cruel mistress ...
Pretty much so.
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