According to the New York Times, a major solar power project in California has been canceled. It seems that even creating solar power in the middle of nowhere in a desert can’t get past California environmentalists these days. If not here, where then on earth will be acceptable? Don’t hold your breath.
Excerpt:
BrightSource Energy Inc. had planned a 5,130-acre solar power farm in a remote part of the Mojave Desert, on land previously intended for conservation. The company, based in Oakland, Calif., said Thursday that it was instead seeking an alternative site for the project.
The Wildlands Conservancy, a California environmental group, had tried to block the solar development, as had Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who proposed that the area become a national monument.
The land was donated by Wildlands to the Interior Department during the Clinton administration, with assurances from President Bill Clinton himself, the group says, that it would be protected in perpetuity. But the Energy Policy Act of 2005, a Bush administration initiative, opened the land to the development of solar projects.
Here’s the details on the project from the company website:
BrightSource is currently developing its first solar power complex in California’s Mojave Desert. The Ivanpah Solar Power Complex will be located in Ivanpah, approximately 50 miles northwest of Needles, California, and about five miles from the California-Nevada border. The complex will be a 6-square mile facility (4065 acres) within the 25,000-square mile Mojave Desert and will generate enough electricity to power 140,000 homes and reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by more than 450,000 tons per year.
Fast facts
* Location: Ivanpah, California
* Output: Up to 440 megawatts
* The Ivanpah Solar Power Complex will power 150,000 homes and reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by more than 450,000 tons per year.
* The Ivanpah Solar Power Complex will nearly double the amount of solar thermal electricity produced today in the US.
* Ivanpah will create 1,000 jobs at the peak of construction.
Project details
The 440 megawatt Ivanpah Solar Power Complex will be built in three phases – two 110 megawatt facilities and one 220 megawatt facility. The first phase (110 megawatts) is scheduled to begin construction in early 2010 and completed by 2012. The second phase will begin construction roughly six months after the start of the first phase in early 2010.
A 100 megawatt solar thermal plant utilizes approximately 50,000 heliostats.
YinYang. Everything from bacteria to people eats something else to survive and propagate. That’s the fundamental truth that many econuts cannot come to grips with. Life and the universe is messy and violent, and they just cannot deal with it.
So, the output of this plant would have been up to 440 MegaWatts? During what times of the day? I doubt it would be anywhere near this output at 9Am in the morning.
Another summary of why there is no man made warming!
http://cobourgskeptic.com/archives/476
Peak Watt?
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tarpon 5:23:28
Here’s an idea I don’t see discussed enough. Dump unrecyclable nuclear wastes in the deep oceanic trenches, where nothing can happen to them for hundreds of half lives except be silted over. Easy, simple, solution.
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John A (04:29:07) : “This is not a “very conservative” blog. … This blog is about the reality of climate science and the reality of science. …
Pleased you posted all you did, John. Wholly agree and it did need saying just to keep the record — perhaps the reality — straight.
So let me get this straight…
This plant would have resulted in our saving energy for other nations to burn, and it would have taken only a fraction of the area of the Mojave desert?
So what’s the problem?
Maybe somebody should modify the bill so Feinstein’s husband’s firm profits in some way.
On a more serious note, can anybody see what’s going on here? Environmentalists want us to do with less and have a lower standard of living and a major reason why they want us to use less oil is so other developing nations have access to it to help develop their economies.
Perhaps we should teabag environmentalists like we have been teabagging democrats.
you could invent a tree that generated electricity, grew it’s own outlets, stored excess electricity with 100% efficientcy, absorbed twice the CO2 of a normal tree, never shed it’s leaves, made beautiful flowers in the spring, had a partridge in it and they would probably protest it because it competes with native trees for resources.
There you go again. Push back on President Bush’s progressive energy reform.
Truth be told –
Methinks the REAL reason this project was shelved was an old-fashioned, Republican one. It didn’t appear to be financially profitable. Last summer natural gas was $13 per mcf – this summer it was $3 per mcf. With oodles of the stuff pouring over the Canadian border with no place to go.
Hey, I don’t blame these guys for trying to cash in on federal “Green Energy” money. That’s what T. Boone Pickens was doing with his mega-wind farm ideas – which he also shelved, by the way. Folks have been cashing in on the free wheelbarrows of public money since the days of the Transcontinental Railroad – probably even the Roman Empire and the Appian Way Economic Development Project back in 312 BC.
John Egan (21:14:04) :
Dear Mr. Smith –
I live in rural Wyoming.
Given that you took offense at my characterization of ‘rabid greens’; does that indicate you are self identifying as a ‘rabid green’?
I’ve also known a smaller number of ‘rational greens’ (in fact, I’d call myself one. Though I’ve been working on coining the term “Olive” for the ‘rational greens’)
I have no desire to despoil the world. What we do to redwoods makes ‘sin’ too weak a word. I would like to see roughly 1/2 the world set aside for the non-human occupants (and think would could easily do that with no impact on our lifestyles.)
But I’ve also been “nose to nose and belly to belly” with a lot of “rabid greens” (something about living in SillyCon Valley that leads to proximity). My statements were NOT an ad hominem. As I stated, each of those characterizations came from a real world interaction. It is simply accurate reporting of a fringe group.
For example, right now a person living a few houses away has a fungus on his arm. The patch has grown to about 3 inches in diameter. He refuses to put anti-fungals on it and is certain that it is just because his internal energies are not balanced right. He, BTW, has an engineering degree from a name school…
I had the conversation about light switches vs powerplants with a very cute and very clueless girl at a meeting of one of the organizations ( I think it was Sierra Club, but it was 30 years ago and I was looking at her more than whoever was speaking 😉 I tried desperately to be interested in her, but as Ron White put it “You cain’t fix stupid”; and I could not get past that.
I could go down the whole list.
That you know folks who drill gas wells and shoot bear (and have not poisoned them nor burned their houses down) leads me to believe you are not a “rabid environmentalist” but just took issue with my comments for other reasons.
So before accusing someone of an ad hominem, take a look at the actions of groups like “Earth First”. A couple of years ago they burned down a bunch of homes that were being built near the ocean here. The land was privately owned. The permits were granted. The site was in a semi-urban area with surrounding homes. They “felt” it was overdevelopment in that the homes were 2 story not one and the land could have been returned to nature instead. (And they are still at it…)
So you want to call that an ad hominem? Then talk to these folks first:
http://earthfirstroadshow.wordpress.com/our-presentation/map-of-resistance/
Map of Resistance
Below are the numbers that correlate with the red (threats) and green (actions) flags on our ‘map of resistance’ that we present.
Under their “green” accomplishments:
16 – New York, NY: 1/6/09 A flaming street blockade finished out a benefit show for Eco-Prisoners and the EF!J
17 – Whatcom County, WA and Sammamish, WA: arson of partially built homes to protest sprawl, 2005
18 – Charlotte, NC, Lancaster Co. SC: 6/6/08 17 partially constructed luxury homes burned down
Under their “red flags”
5 – Oklahoma City: Natural Gas drilling and shiping
6 – Western North Carolina: Cliffside Coal power plant expansion
7 – Broward Co. FL: New Liquified Natural Gas Terminal proposed by Calypso LNG
8 – Black Mesa, AZ: Roan Plateau to be mined for coal by Peabody
9 – New Coal plant proposed on MN/SD Border
10 – Buffalo slaughter in and near Yellowstone National Park
11 – OH, NY, and PA: Marcellus Shale Natural Gas drilling
12 – Elliotsville, ME: Plum Creek Development of the NorthWoods
13 – South Florida: West County Energy Center, Liquified Natural Gas Terminal and 500 miles of new pipeline
There is no energy development that they favor, as near as I can tell. Not even Natural Gas from Wyoming…
But this ought to be fun:
21 – Los Angeles, CA: UCLA continues to engage in vivisection
22 – Santa Cruz, CA: University plans to expand into the redwood forest
23 – Crystal River, FL: Progress Energy proposing to build a Nuclear Power Plant
They want to take on the greens at U.C. Santa Cruz over redwoods…
If you ever get a chance to visit the UCSC campus, it is beautiful. The buildings are darned near wrapped in Redwood trees. It is like something out of a fantasy world where people and nature blend together. (And as I noted elsewhere, UCSC is rather rabidly left wing in it’s own way). I almost attended it in the ’70s when it was fairly new, and had taken my son to look it over (and discovered it was full of radical left wing agenda…)
So sit back, pop a cold one, and watch what happens when the Loony Left meets the Radical Rabid Greens. (You just can’t make this stuff up…)
Oh, note that the “redwoods” that they talk about are not some pristine park. UCSC is built on land that was the Cowell Ranch and was donated for the making of the campus. So private land, a working ranch, was donated for a campus, used for the campus, developed with extraordinary environmental sensitivity blending the buildings into the forested part, and they want to put up a few more buildings in the same manner. Nope, can’t have that…
28 – Vancouver, BC: development in relation to the 2010 Winter Olympics
29 – Atlantica Free Trade Area to be created and filled with new infrastructure projects
30 – Ohio/West Virginia: I-70- Truck Only Lanes from Kansas City to OH/WV border
31 – I-15 Expansion around Salt Lake City and Las Vegas
And you want to have the Olympics? How could you! (Notice this is REdevelopment …)
Want to separate trucks from other traffic for safety? Want to bypass the freeway around the city so there is less fuel wasted and less smog? Nope, not good enough.
Want to mine phosphate to fertilize crops so you can eat?
43 – Manatee County, FL: Proposed phosphate mine
44 – Alachua County, FL: Proposed bio-mass incinerator, and proposed Plum Creek Development
45 – near Cincinnati, OH: proposal to re-open old nuclear power plant
46 – Upper Peninsula, MI: metallic sulfide and uranium mining: http://www.savethewildup.org/blog/maps/
Can’t have that. Heck, can’t burn your garbage either (nor can you bury it… but that’s another story). Oh, and don’t even think of mining Uranium.
So if you wish to self identify with the the “rabid greens”, go right ahead. Me? I’d rather be an Olive.
PS – I do take some small degree of comfort that I am called a “denier” over at Daily Kos and an “econut” here. I must be doing something right.
Could the real issue be the fact that it would be visible from the golf course.
http://www.lasvegasgolf.com/courses/nevada/primmvalley.htm
Yep, must be someone important that owns that course. What made it obvious to me was the green patch in an otherwise brown.
E.M.Smith: I hope you are wrong. I fear you are right.
One additional issue: How would they get the power from the plant to the consumer? Can’t build any transmission lines, the eco’s block that at every turn. Water for cleaning is only part of the problem, sand is a bigger one. Wind, not uncommon in the Mojave, tends to pick up sand, which does a rather nice job of etching glass, as in mirrors. I suspect that will reduce efficiency.
Spent nearly 20 years near the Zion nuke plant north of Chicago. Used Lake Michigan for part of the cooling. Best fishing on the lake, about a mile out.
And, you could do it at night. Easy to spot the glowing fish.
Robert E. Phelan (23:17:17) : OK, you answered the question before it got posted. I’ll support the towers along I-15, but I’ll make a small wager (preferably in Lucia’s Quatloos, all I can really afford and I can print them at home) that THAT location will also prove environmentally unacceptable and that no technology will be green enough.
I-15? Ooohhh NOoohhh Mister Bill! No development near I-15!:
31 – I-15 Expansion around Salt Lake City and Las Vegas
Earth First will not allow that! (Especially in the desert near Las Vegas…)
pyromancer76 (01:05:56) :
Everything EM Smith said is true. However, we do not need a solar monstrosity on the Mojave. Wait until solar is available in urban areas;
Thanks!
One of the best installations I’ve seen is at my kids High School. They put up a PV farm. Over the parking lot. Cars sit in the shade, staying cool and saving upholstery. Rain gets collected in drains instead of puddles. Nice.
Only “brain dead” feature is that the inverters have big cooling fans on them that seem to run all the time, even if there is no sun… I’m hoping it’s just some kind of short term thermal overrun at first dusk.
I’m all for solar panels over any and every parking lot. Talk about your wasteland… Now if you couple that with daytime charging of electric cars during peak sun, you start to get somewhere. (It still takes 20 years+ to convert to solar electric cars, but the direction is then sound.)
Surely the key issue here, at least at present, is the question of subsidies.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I doubt that a project like this would be considered if there were no subdidies available.
I say that all subsidies should be removed and then we can talk about so-called sustainable energy projects.
“Life and the universe is messy and violent, and they just cannot deal with it.”
That’s because most of them grew up posh in clean homes and all the clean food and drink money can afford. They got the money free from mummy and daddy so they don’t have much of a work ethic either. To them the idea that people live in dirt and work hard is some sort of unnatural crime created by “the 40 Jews who rule the world and exploit workers’. Fact is life is naturally dirty, dangerous and hard work, the more we work out ourselves out of that abysmal condition the more carbon intensive it is. This logic evades the posh elitist who think people should be like them – sit around smoking pot and get everything for free.
Ron,
Nice! Not LOL – I seldom LOL and even if I did, I wouldn’t proclaim it
The business to get into is selling power to California. They will soon be completely dependent on outside power.
Just make sure the power plants are in another state/country.
Given how rabid and negative the ecos behave i am reminded of the scene in independence Day when the president asks the alien ‘what do you want us to do’ and I can picture the ecos yelling ‘DIE’ – they do not want a solution to energy problems.
Tenuc (01:43:45) :
Until we get the problem of fussion power generaton cracked, it looks like fission power plants are the only real alternative to fossil fuels.
However, more money needs to be pumped into the problem of getting rid of the radoactive waste these plants produce in a ‘future safe’ way before I would support this strategy.
In the ’80s or so I was fairly rabidly anti-nuke. Didn’t see any 25,000 year civilizations that would give me confidence that we could monitor waste sites that long…
Later I found out that the 25,000 years is based on a fiction. Sound familiar? It is based on “to reach background radiation”. But the original ore was NOT at background. For the waste to become no more radio active than the original ore takes a few hundred years. (The exact number depends on the particular ore and particular waste, but it is on the order of 250 years.)
That was the moment when I began re-thinking my opposition to fission…
So build a traveling wave reactor next to the mine, run it for 50 to 80 years, then pour concrete over it for 200. Not exactly changing the final result for that patch of dirt much.
Aron (02:08:13) : What will those ecominded celebs in California do when the lights go out and they won’t have energy to power their industry?
Well, we already had this happen. (Remember Gov. Greyout Davis?)
So it is simply a matter of reading your history. They will buy the power from someone else (Arizona, Washington State, maybe Mexico if the whole US goes off the deep end.) Then they will file suits over the cost. Finally, they will blame “big business greed” for whatever results.
No, Enron did NOT cause the power shortages in California. They did exploit, at a profit, the insane requirements of our PUC that 1) The distribution utility could not own generation and 2) they could not have long term contracts for power. The best description of this came from Dennis Miller who aptly called it “Buying power at mini-bar prices”. (The thesis was that buying all power at spot prices would lead to lower prices. So much for theory. Someone had to learn that inelastic price demand curves only lead to very low prices when supply is in excess and the buyer is not captive.)
So they will not for a moment understand the connection between their “green agenda” and the lights going out. It will all be the fault of evil business.
Also, some of us will resort to far less efficient and far more ecologically damaging solutions to continue having a decent life:
I had bought 2 generators during our prior round of blackouts.
I’m now down to only 1 generator (I sold my second to a friend who had none – so it is not out of service.) but still have all my inverter kit. WHEN the lights go out (from earthquake, storm, or government idiocy) I fire up the generator. All the wiring is in place to ‘cut over’ in about 2 minutes. Not a major impact (and critical stuff is on mini-UPS boxes. Which, btw, have standby battery losses and parasitic losses and transformer losses and contain lead and …)
So instead of 50%+ efficient nearly zero smog lowest cost production, I run on gasoline with no smog controls and about $0.25 /kW-hr with all the safety that comes from pouring gasoline into hot generators implies…
And if gasoline is not available, I have an inverter that can be connected to my Diesel car that can run on vegetable oil. Yes, I can burn food at several dollars a gallon in a completely non-smog controlled Diesel from the 1980s. But the coffee maker will run, the Satellite TV will entertain me, and I can charge the phone. (And power the non-smog controlled fireplace insert fan to burn the trees I’ll be chopping down to stay warm in winter…)
If food is not available, well, lights are going to be the least of our worries.
John Egan wrote:
In addition, the desert may SEEM like a wasteland to city folk who don’t really give a crap about any environment that doesn’t have a Starbucks around the corner or a nice bluegrass lawn in suburbia, but desert environments are some of the most fragile of ecosystems. In addition to the threats to the rare natural springs that occur in deserts because of water withdrawals – roads, powerlines, and service areas must be constructed. Damage to thin topsoils and flora may take centuries to recover.
Hmmm. I guess those bighorn sheep can live in a hostile environment scaling rock faces that stand at 70 + degree angle, but they can’t cross a road. And those poor sidewinders can’t either…. well, they could, but ever time they try, a car is always there to run them over, since there would be so much traffic traveling down the service road to the station. Are there any natural spring at that spot? Please show which flora and fauna endemic to this specific area will actually be damaged? Prove your very generalized statement is relevent to this specific part of region.
This is one of the things about the modern environmental movement that really gets under my skin, this whole quasi-hippie fragile Earth philosophy. Yes there are places on the Earth that do have an ecological fragile foothold – tidepools comes to mind – but the desert isn’t one of them. Desert topography is an end extreme on the scale of observed surface states, and is not “delicate” at all. A desert environment is very hard to change it and keep it changed.
Gary P (05:51:18) :
The sun has disappeared. At least its no longer in the side bar and the SOHO site seems to be gone. Watts Up With That?
Ahem… Electrical Upgrade
Mr. Hancock,
Silicon is not toxic.
Which small towns in China have been rendered polluted waste lands from the manufacturing of solar panels? I travel a lot in China partly because of PV business. Where are these polluted towns?
There are PV manufacturing companies whose solar panels are getting closer to the critical 1$/Watt price range.
Cadmium is toxic in CdTe based solar panels. However, old CdTe panels can now be recycled. Many of the materials used in semiconductor manufacturing industry are far more toxic than the materials now used in PV industry.