Posted on 10/24/2009 8:24:54 AM PDT by lowbridge
The Florida solar panel plant cost $150 million to build.
A field of orange trees makes more sense.
The state of Florida is completing the final touches on a solar panel plant that cost $150 million to build and will only power 3,000 homes.
Barack Obama will visit this solar-paneled cash dump next week.
The AP reported:
The Desoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center will power a small fraction of Florida Power & Light’s 4-million plus customer base; nevertheless, at 25 megawatts, it will generate nearly twice as much energy as the second-largest photovoltaic facility in the U.S.
The White House said President Barack Obama is scheduled to visit the facility Tuesday, when it officially goes online and begins producing power for the electric grid…
…The Desoto facility and two other solar projects Florida Power & Light is spearheading will generate 110 megawatts of power, cutting greenhouse gas emissions by more than 3.5 million tons. Combined, that’s the equivalent of taking 25,000 cars off the road each year, according to figures cited by the company.
The investment isn’t cheap: The Desoto project cost $150 million to build and the power it supplies to some 3,000 homes and businesses will represent just a sliver of the 4 million-plus accounts served by the state’s largest electric utility.
But there are some economic benefits: It created 400 jobs for draftsmen, carpenters and others whose work dried up as the southwest Florida housing boom came to a closure and the recession set in. Once running, it will require few full-time employees.
The plant cost $150 million to build and will power 3,000 homes or businesses.
In other words it costs about $50,000 per household.
Banks make loans for this every day.
Not to mention hail storm targets.....
The $50k per household cost is just the tip of the iceberg.
The largest solar installation in the world, in Spain has several full time crews washing mirrors (lots of sun = lots of dust) and replacing electronic control equipment on the tracking mirrors.
The voltaic cells vesions are not much different.
Super maintenance intensive, and that's not free.
No solar installation anywhere, has had even one fifth of that lifespan without major overhauls.
Not a single one!
Why waste time even reading about it?
That's just enough power to drive four CFLs during the daytime (if you're lucky) when you don't need the light.
Wonderful!
That's why he has it hooked up to deep-cycle storage batteries. Enough juice to keep his laptop charged and provide a few hours of light and DVD watching after dark.
I was trying to scale his solution up to the point where it could take a normal house (as opposed to a campsite) off the grid (except for the odd cloudy spell, for which you would need a good windmill and/or one of these). It's difficult to get the $$$ to work.
Oh, no doubt about it - if it were subject to normal "market-driven" or "engineering-driven" demands (such as paying close attention to projected return on investment, competing with other investment alternatives to weed out the 'clunkers', etc.) it may never have gotten past the "laugh test".
However in a perverse inversion of reality (of the sort that we are seeing nearly every day), such an "investment" may make economic sense as a preemptive/defensive move, to keep Soviet-inspired, heavy-handed government central planners at bay so that the utility can continue to run the rest of their business in a more straightforward way without as much other government interference as they might expect to see coming down the road (they won't be able to avoid all of it, but maybe this trivial $150 million feint may serve as a useful diversion and distraction, a figurative green-tech smokescreen while they run off in a different direction).
In that way of thinking, it is little different than accomodating the usual sort of extortion and bribes and payoffs that are necessary when dealing with any kind of government entity, union, or other organized criminal enterprise.
smile...but the pilots are still free souls...smile...
We have civilian Lear jets, we have commercial jets, in the olden days even the P51s broke the cound barrier. Not only the gov’t planes can break the sound barrier.
THANK YOU! As an Arcadian I can vouch for the fact that we seem to get rain every day for at least half the year. We’re still getting either clouds or rain every day. Right now it’s a completely overcast day down here, so it’ll be interesting to see how Obama spins it for his PR photo shoot.
My electric bill is high enough as it is from living in a 100 year old Arcadian house. This is the last thing I wanted...
Why don’t they build a couple of Nuclear power plants??? A lot more effective than solar energy..
Oops, wrong thread.
{ping} :-)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.