Pierre Gosselin points out this absurdity on his website:
Weed-Covered, Neglected Solar Park: 20 Acres, $11 Million, Only One And Half Years Old!
German solar skeptic website SOLARKRITIK.DE here provides the background on the rundown, weed-covered solar facility in former communist (and now “green”) East Germany, which I presented in my last post here.
It’s much worse than we thought. The story behind the above photo and the project itself appears here at the online Leipziger Volkszeitung newspaper. The facility is sprawled over an area of 20 acres. The Leipziger Volkszeitung newspaper wrote just before the facility went into operation:
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Looks like they run a mower between the rows, but have’nt figured out how to keep the weeds down under the panels.
I suppose “RoundUp” would be sacrilege to them.
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The desertec project was mentioned. If you go to the desertec webpage you will see they are asking for donations for this and other projects. An indication to me that they cant do this themselves and in the future they will need subsidies or more “donations” from other sources to keep things running even for the short term.
AndyG55 says:
July 5, 2011 at 10:30 pm
I am puzzled about the effect of putting a large solar farm in the middle of a desert might have on the region. The farm will absorb a LOT of energy, and may have quite a significant effect on the local climate. Will the shade encourage plants to grow? How will it affect evaporation etc,
Do they even know what affect it will have ??
Think I would be more worried about the sand storms and the moving sand dunes, nothing stops them.
Here’s a thought. Weeds are a renewable source of energy. They grow rapidly, converting CO2 and water, using the sun’s energy, into fuel. Has any one calculated the rate of energy production of 20 acres of weeds and compared it with 20 acres of solar panels? Which would produce the most electricity for the least cost?
Solar panels in a German winter, I would love to see the output. I live in Melbourne and have a 4.997kW system, at 4:00pm on a cloudy winters afternoon my systems output was 37 watts, last week on a clear sunny day at 16°C, max output was 1.498 kW and total for the day 5.521kW. You are not going to run too much heavy machinery on that.
Any smart farmer would attest to the need to have a cover crop in between the rows of as yet non productive mature fruit trees. The alternative to this ‘cover’ crop, is to create financial incentive to offset the maturity calendar costs by subsidizing the actually costs via some as of yet undiscovered loop hole in the final line of the tax code. Energy costs would necessarily skyrocket to farm in this manner.
Does this presented little ice age theory have a Northern Hemisphere fitment with say the Mt Rainer glacial data records?
Thistles – oh joy!
You can’t get rid of them just by pulling them out by hand:
‘Creeping thistle persists and spreads chiefly by means of the horizontal underground creeping roots that can exceed 5 m long. Fragments of root from plants in the field margins can be carried into the field and spread during cultivation. The collection and burial of root pieces by rodents has resulted in the unexpected appearance of the weed in previously clean areas. There is also evidence that undisturbed pieces of swollen root can remain dormant in the soil for several years until disturbed by cultivation.’
Link: http://www.gardenorganic.org.uk/organicweeds/weed_information/weed.php?id=5
Solar ‘farms’ like this one – I’m sure there are others – are hugely detrimental to the environment. But we already know that watermelons don’t mind environmental destruction as long as it ‘saves’ the planet.
“former communist (and now “green”)”
So, no change?
The New Hampshire version of that photo is a picture of giant solar arrays in February with 20 inches of ice/snow on top of them…
I think we should get Greenpeace, UEA and NASA/GISS to do the maintenance for these facilities (preferably with climate scientists doing the heavy labor).
Don K says:
July 5, 2011 at 11:08 pm
But, I have some trouble figuring out how solar can be viable in places like Canada and northern Europe.
Climate Scientists have already solved this. With the increase in CO2 there is much more EM radiation reaching earth as “back radiation” than there is as “solar radiation”. There are many pages of peer reviewed Climate Science calculations showing this to be true. This “back radiation” is what drives solar panel in northern latitudes and at night everywhere on the globe, making fossil fuels largely unnecessary for future power generation.
I see another long journey for Anthony after his epic photograph as many surface stations as possible, next summer will be taking pics of solar and wind parks.
Well at least it’s outside.
@ur momisugly Fred H Haynie…
Compiled from Jack Herer.com Fuel:
Farming 6% of the continental U.S. acreage with biomass crops would provide all of America’s energy needs.
Hemp is Earth’s number-one biomass resource; it is capable of producing 10 tons per acre in four months.
Biomass can be converted to methane, methanol, or gasoline at a cost comparable to petroleum, and hemp is much better for the environment.
Pyrolysis (charcoalizing), or biochemical composting are two methods of turning hemp into fuel.
Hemp can produce 10 times more methanol than corn.
Hemp fuel burns clean. Petroleum causes acid rain due to sulfur pollution.
The use of hemp fuel does not contribute to global warming.
@TK who said: “Do the Germans know there are weed whackers, I think they are invented by a German.”
The Weed Eater was invented by George Ballas, Sr., a Houstonian who was born in Louisiana, He died last month.
Can one of our German readers get us some real information to go with the photo? Kinda like the Surface Stations project–run over there and collect factual local information about the ‘solar farm’ and get back to us with a guest post? (We acknowledge that the original photographer was ‘driving by’ after business hours and did his best.)
Who besides the mentally stable would have thought it would not work?
Note that to allow access by vehicles they take up twice as much land as the panels themselves require, thereby undoing people’s estimates of how much land solar needs when they just count the panels.
The West squandering its wealth and future, that is the essence of it isnt it? Doing the wrong thing at the wrong time for the wrong reasons with hundreds of billions pissed up the wall. And at the end of the day, when all becomes clear and the truth can no longer be hidden and the money has gone, what we will be left with is a scrap yards dream. Thousands of useless windmills and acres of useless solar panelling.
What were our leaders thinking? What went through their minds I wonder, Homer Simpson is a genius beside these imbeciles and in fact I insult imbeciles when I compare them to our leaders. They have contrived not only to take the wrong road, they ignored the evidence and they scorned, insulted and scoffed at the people who warned of the disastrous consequences.
God have mercy on us because our enemies will have none.
Most of the large solar plants in the US are being put in deserts in the Southwest, so this isn’t really a problem here.
Utilities here only get their renewable production standard credits for energy produced so there is a strong incentive to maintain output.
And the large scale solar plants here are quite tall, especially the ones on trackers.
Weeds are not likely to be an issue for utility scale solar plants in the US. I expect etching and clouding of glass and broken dust-inundated trackers are more likely problems. 20 years is a long time to sit in a desert.
The past winter brought huge amounts of snow that covered solar panels for months.
After that we had an extreme release of (sticky)pollen which also covered the panels.
And we didn’t discuss the bird droppings.
This is a major problem in the cities.
We need base load electricity generation for a functioning society.
Wind and solar is just a money pit.
Just forget about it.
LOL. Sorry to be directly offensive, but you are posting utter nonsense there.
Solar cells are only 30% efficient at their theoretical limit. We’re not there yet. So whatever backradiation increases exist, the solar cells are only picking up 30% of that. Thirty percent of a <1% increase in backradiation (not incident radiation) is probably immeasurable with a handheld fluke multimeter off of any solar cell.
By all means, keep posting your humor.
Don K says:
July 5, 2011 at 11:08 pm
And, unlike wind, it should interface rationally with power grids.
Nope…those things we sometimes refer to as ‘white puffy clouds’ raise havoc with solar and the grid. One minute you are getting a power spike as a result of the reflectivity of the cloud and the next minute you have a power dropout as a result of the shade from the cloud.
Here’s a graph showing solar generation at 10 second intervals for the big solar farm in Arizona.
http://bravenewclimate.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/apt_pv_fluctuations1.jpg
There isn’t anyway for a fossil fuel plant to ramp up and down that fast to compensate.
An enormous amount of work went into detailed intervisibility studies of that part of world, I can’t imagine how that facility would have ever been efficient.
R. de Haan, I wish we could get greenies as a class of non-workers added to the next Civilization game as a negative feedback on prosperity for advanced societies.
In the future solar panels could be designed to not grow weeds on them. I don’t see any problem with solar power if it is not forced by the government. It is nice to have your options open.
harrywr2 says:
July 6, 2011 at 7:57 am
“Here’s a graph showing solar generation at 10 second intervals for the big solar farm in Arizona.
http://bravenewclimate.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/apt_pv_fluctuations1.jpg”
I suggest that we require all climate science labs and compute servers be hooked **directly** to solar and wind power sources…it would be quite amusing, especially in the colder months…
Marijuana?
Of course weeds remove CO2 so they can’t be messed with.