World’s Largest Solar Plant Lights Up 140,000 California Homes with Clean Energy
 

http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...1&d=1412095468

Very cool setup in California.

World?s Largest Solar Plant Lights Up 140,000 California Homes with Clean Energy | Industry Tap

more info with a few videos: Solar Project in California Desert Ivanpah World

it's cool....great idea to use natural resources
 

I have never seen such a large number of solar panels installed on a desert together. The energy generated is very beneficial. I would like to see more such projects around the world, which will generate a large amount of power and will benefit billions of families around the world. As this project uses the solar energy which is a renewable source, many more renewable sources present around the world must be used to live a better life. These renewable sources are efficient as compared to the non-renewable sources, so there will be lesser pollution and energy wastage around the world.

But, there have been a few startup issues, with plant operators predicting another 4 years to hit predicted peak output.

"Factors such as clouds, jet contrails and weather have had a greater impact on the plant than the owners anticipated," the agency said in a statement.

Article Here

Pat

2.2 billion dollars for generating less than 400MW for only part of the day.
I have nothing more to say about it, the dollars versus watts say it all.

For many well-intentioned but not technically or financially inclined individuals, the dollars per watt value is pretty much irrelevant compared to the progress achieved. Many end users would gladly pay double for their power if they knew it was derived from renewable resources. I myself see this as a testament to what the big power companies can realistically achieve when they budget some of their billions in that direction.

Besides the obvious power generation, just imagine how many jobs have been created to maintain such an installation.

The problem is the government extorts the money out of taxpayers pockets to cover the cost. Solar is great, but taxpayers shouldn't get the bill.

There is an obvious solution to that situation: ecorenovate your own property. Simply install your choice of self-generation equipment. Lessen your reliance on the grid and start saving money.

The only downside to that option: you may end up paying more property tax, due to the increased value of your property.

You are correct.
If one were to grid tie their house how much would you expect it to cost?

I calculate almost $16,000 per home.
That would buy and install around 4kw of simple grid tied PV, that is enough to most if not all the power to a lot of homes.

Now if they were able to power each home for several thousand dollars then I would say bravo, good job and money well spent.
But no, with their huge bird incinerating project the are unable to do it any cheaper than the average person. I find it unacceptable to spend other peoples money that inefficiently.

That's what politicians do oil pan 4. Spend your money. Since it's located in the Mojave, mirror washers crews have a full time jobs plus benefits. :thumbup:

The mirror washers jobs will eventually be replaced by a robot.

Depends if they demand $15/hr !!

The guys who keep the window washer robots going will get at least $20/hr.
Minimum plus full health would be equivalent of $15/hr or close to it.

The cost of renewable power plants is mostly up front, and they get cheaper and cheaper over time - because they burn no fuel. And there is no decommissioning costs, either as there is with nuclear. And no pollution costs - and no climate change costs.

All in all, renewables are an excellent value.

Thermal solar isn't going to get cheaper over time.
Give me one example of something that isn't computer or consumer electronics based that has gotten cheaper over the years?
That plant is all material and labor cost which are not going to go down in price.
A 2 billion dollar power plant that is only able to produce power some of the day, until a cloud passes over is an unbelievable waste of money.

Decommissioning costs are not a problem so long as they are built into a nuclear plants financial design. Wind farms have decommissioning costs build into them so you don't end up like western California where there are some 5000 abandoned wind turbines.
All the wind farms I have been to have a decommissioning escrow.

Decommissioning costs for wind turbines may not even be an issue so long as the land owner agrees to renew the lease. GE wind turbines may be able to be economically repaired indefinitely and the less durable mitsus may be gutted and have new equipment installed on top of the monopole.

Running that plant will get cheaper over time. It gets built, and that is the biggest expense. Any fossil fuel plant, or a nuclear plant has to pay for fuel, and so they get more expensive over time. A renewable energy plant has no fuel expense.

And they pollute - that is a huge cost that is not included. And fossil fuel plants contribute a lot to climate change - and this is an enormous cost that will be borne by all future generations, and all life on the planet.

They don't have to pay for fuel but they have to rely on fossil fuels when ever a cloud blocks the sun and when the sun goes away at the end of every day.

If you are worried so much about CO2 then the obvious answer is nuclear power since it can produce power 24 hours a day, rain or shine, 7 days a week for roughly 350 days a year, a feat that will always allude solar and wind power.

Geothermal would be a direction to explore if you want 24-7 service in a safe manor rather then nuclear power with its obvious pitfalls.


From Wiki:

Estimates of the electricity generating potential of geothermal energy vary from 35 to 2000 GW depending on the scale of investments.
This does not include non-electric heat recovered by co-generation, geothermal heat pumps and other direct use. A 2006 report by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), that included the potential of enhanced geothermal systems, estimated that investing 1 billion US dollars in research and development over 15 years would allow the creation of 100 GW of electrical generating capacity by 2050 in the United States alone.

The whole page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_electricity

No, they are huge an a single cloud doesn't block the whole thing, and where they are located has a lot of sun, most of the time. We can use molten salt thermal storage to extend the time they can generate power. Combined with wind power and solar PV, and biomass, and wave power, and tidal, and geothermal - we can easily generate more than enough electricity.

Nuclear power is a terrible idea. We still do not have a way to safely store the waste.

No safe storage. After 60+ years.

They shut down for weeks every 18 months or so, to refuel -- and we have to mine and refine and transport and enrich the uranium - and then we have to pay money for decades after they shut down to decommission them. We have a limited uranium supply, and making concrete is a very big greenhouse gas emitter.

They have problems when the temperatures around the plant get too high, and the cooling doesn't work well enough. They have power issues in the plant itself, and flooding or earthquakes or other disasters cause them to have to be shut down. Pilgrim here in Massachusetts has had numerous problems.

No thanks.

This would address most of those concerns. It also addresses problems with other ways of producing electrical power (wind, solar, etc).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLk46BZfEMs


>

If they are going to use Nuclear Power this New method sounds like the way to go.

I did notice the program had a fair amount of sensationalism and slight of hand , for instances it was claimed that wind power only generates wind 15% of the time .. hogwash I think most of us understand that they put windmills in windy places and likewise solar in sunny places.

All the geo thermal available for commercial power generation has been tapped, the US is the leading geo thermal power producer by wide margin to the #2 guy.

Agreed, if the waste is properly recycled 99.9% of the radioactivity is gone after only 40 years. Its about is radio active as English granite at the point.

I encourage everyone to watch this video in its entirety, if only to gain background knowledge into the way the related industries operate. In North America especially, the nuclear power supply-side industry is not so much geared to the building of power plants, but to supply nuclear fuel rods to existing plants through exclusive contracts. The burden of waste disposal is left to the actual operator of the plant, an entirely different organization.

The whole LFTR reactor subject was mothballed by the government in the '70s and sewn up tight due to the decision to pursue the types of power plants that are operating today. As a result, public policy and opinion has evolved to only consider this type of nuclear power generation and its unique set of truths and consequences. In reality, there are dozens of nuclear processes that can be employed to produce power that do not produce weapons-grade waste products.

Keep in mind that the sole reason the type of reactors in use today were invented in the first place was to produce weapons-grade materials to fill planned stockpiles of nuclear weapons. Fast forward 50 years, and now we have a relative abundance of this material that we can no longer justify a need for. It would only seem natural to pursue another process that fits our current needs. But no, the powers that be don't see things that way.

Now combine this set of circumstances with the direction the USA has gone in the mining of rare-earth elements. Due to the fact that these elements coexist in the Earth with deposits of radioactive thorium, domestic production has been regulated offshore. China picked up the slack, and is now the number 1 supplier of rare-earth elements in the world by a substantial margin. Not surprisingly, they borrowed our research and technology and are aggressively pursuing the LFTR reactor method of nuclear power generation. They also borrowed our technology for refining the various rare-earth elements and our methods of producing marketable products of very high value.

As it stands today, nearly every hard drive or speaker that uses rare-earth magnets was either produced in China or made with magnetic material sourced by China. Flat panel displays and compact fluorescent bulbs all use rare earth elements in the blend of phosphors that enable them to render the color palette that has propelled them to the level of quality they enjoy today. Passenger cars of all types use these materials as well. Gasoline vehicles use them in cat converters and oxygen sensors, while hybrid and electric vehicles use them in the batteries and traction (motor) drives. This supply situation has been exploited to fanatic proportions by the Chinese government, so there is literally nowhere else in the world we can obtain this material to fuel our technology.

We put ourselves in this situation, and we can get ourselves out of it. All that has to happen is radical change not experienced on this continent in decades. The worst thing we can do is nothing, which is what is happening now. I urge you all to do what you can to try to sway the status quo in whatever direction you support.

Unfortunately this is not new tech. It was being developed in the 1950s then was abandoned in favor of nuclear reactors that could make plutonium for nuclear weapons.

I saw that too. Where I am we get up to 40% to 50% utilization.
Unfortunately most windy places don't meet the requirements to justify building a wind farm:
1 A windy site. Self explanatory.
2 Roads. Not just any roads. You have to be able to get tractor trailers to the site, modular cranes and wind turbine components such as 100 foot long blades.
3 Grid tie in point. Building transmission lines can double the cost of a wind project, plus the NIMY crowd can shut down a wind project by blocking the transmission lines. So the wind farm needs to be located near transmission lines that are not normally ran at capacity or can have their capacity expanded to accommodate the wind farms output with out having to expand right of way (problems due to NIMBY jerks).
4 Transmission losses. You have to put the wind farm near the market. Where I am they could easily build more wind turbines than the market can consume and more power than what the transmissions lines that interconnect markets can move. With this scenario it can actually be cheaper to build wind turbines that are closer to say Oklahoma city and have them produce less, as opposed to building a 1 billion dollar power line that will still see 20% or 30% losses.

No mechanical or electronic system gets cheaper to run over time.
Things wear out, break downs happen more often. When the systems age major break downs happen more often, they get more expensive to maintain, needing more man power, the parts become harder to find.
Nothing better happens as these systems get hours on them.

Wind turbines and solar burn no fuel. So they cost less and less over time. Sure they require maintenance - but so does nuclear and fossil fuel plants.

Renewable energy gets less expensive the longer we use it.

Thorium need not kill other technologies , it would fill in the spaces rather well , for instance I could see it being useful to power a complete city that currently has to bring its power in.

Some areas without sufficient energy resources to draw from would be a prime candidate for thorium nuclear power.

Africa could sure use some thorium Power too , poor guys are left in the dark literally no lights.

Actually if you look at the map. Ivanpah is actually very close to las vegas. Now las vegas has the hoover dam, so we will assume the vegas doesn't need that solar power. So one must assume like the hover dam, a good portion of the power is going to SoCal, which is roughly 200 miles to market. You can expect a solid 10% transmission loss over that distance.
If the 2.2 billion dollars was spent giving away money for people to buy their own solar power system then at least there would be no transmission losses.

I just pulled this from wiki:
In November 2014, Associated Press reported that the plant was producing only "about half of its expected annual output." The California Energy Commission issued a statement blaming this on "clouds, jet contrails and weather."

So its a 2.2 billion dollar project that only powers 70,000 homes. So its double the huge waste of money I originally thought it was.


I don't think thorium should power everything.
The only thing I am not a fan of is transmission losses.
That is why I cant stand the idea of power plants, alternative or not being located so far away form the market they are going to see 10% or higher transmission losses.

Have you seen the level of Lake Mead, lately? It is pretty low, so they may not be generating much power with it.

last time I saw lake mead was 2009 and it was pretty low.

Who would have thought this would be happing?

Birds Bursting Into Flames over State of the Art Solar Plant

“Workers at a state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave Desert have a name for birds that fly through the plant's concentrated sun rays — "streamers," for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair.”

Birds Bursting Into Flames over State of the Art Solar Plant

Doh. It seems all sources of power have their drawbacks.

The beginning of this year saw the IFC , a member of the World Bank Group, announcing a collaboration with the Madhya Pradesh government to establish a 750 MW ultra-mega solar power project. Once it is set up, it will be the world’s largest solar plant. The plant is said to start generating solar energy by March 2017. According to the state’s energy minister Rajendra Shukla, the project is a joint venture of Solar Energy Corporation of India and MP Urja Vikas Nigam, wherein both parties have 50% stake.

Welspun Renewable takes credit for developing some of the world’s largest and highly efficient grid-connected wind and solar projects in India.

Is it PV or bird incinerator?

Of all the power sources, my preference is for solar (PV), it of course has no moving parts, and minimal impact on the environment. PV works synergistically with hydro dams, when the sun shines, hold back the water.
PV also is viable in small scale operations, and is infinitely scalable. A small town can install a PV array and unload the grid during peak A/C use. Nipton Ca has done that and it is working well.
Cost per installed watt is known and is approaching $1 /watt for the panels,
Panels and assoc wiring and hardware can be installed beneath exisitng power lines, and on big flat roofs.
Wind turbines have a special place in my heart as I used to build small units, but so many errors have been made in siteing them, near homes, places with little wind, shoddily built small units etc that they carry a little baggage these days.
PV just makes so much sense to me.

More trouble.
World's Largest Solar Plant Catches Fire
I guess they just assumed there would never be a glitch or mistake.

You would think they would catch something like that with inspections.