A birds-eye view of the bird scorching Ivanpah solar electric power plant

Not road kill but: Green Kill or Solar Kill?…………….

rogerknights says: August 18, 2014 at 8:45 pm “I wonder if the birds are attracted by the glare. If so, that would explain why the high kill rate wasn’t foreseen.”
Cynical Scientst says: August 18, 2014 at 8:48 pm “The play of light on the mirrors may look like sunlight on water to the birds, attracting them to their doom from a considerable distance.”
You two are on to it and I think it is more than the reflection of sunlight, looking at several of the photos, the birds are seeing a reflection of the sky in general. There is only one thing in nature that reflects the sky on such a large scale – water. To a thirsty and dusty birdie in the desert it has to be an enormous attraction. I wouldn’t be surprised that the sight attracts birds from over a radius of 50 miles away.
Imagine the disappointment of the ones that fly such a long way and discover there is no water for them? If they were thirsty enough to set out flying a long way to investigate then they are going to be that much more thirsty when they get there. Perhaps many that arrive looking for what they thought was water are determined to figure out where the water is and orbit the installation a few times trying to figure out what went “wrong” – increasing their chances of meeting their doom.
There are not that many birds in the desert to begin with and some of the more permanent species there are more specialized to survive there, (gee.. like polar bears are to survive in the arctic…)
I can think of only two possible solutions, build a lake all the way around each farm at a huge expense and operating cost to actually give the birds the water they were attracted to, (basically altering the local desert environment in a big way with now even more animals attracted to the smell of the real water) – or – TEAR IT ALL DOWN!
I wouldn’t be surprised that many of the birds are only partially scorched and therefore not killed by the hot beam of light at all but are instead having enough of their flight feathers singed off enough that they can no longer fly. Many probably hit the ground alive and the ones not lucky enough to break their necks on impact die a slow death in the sand. If I’m right someone should be able to get video of these suffering animals. WHERE IS THE ASPCA???

Speaker-to-Animals agrees, sunlight can be a b*tch.
(for Larry Niven fans)

Oops, too little coffee. I meant to type 240 birds per day, but carried my typo through the arithmetic. So it’s not 46 billion birds, its 24 billion. Sorry.

Considering how the authorities go ballistic when they even think someone
might be considering pointing a laser pointer (low milliwatts?) at an aircraft, I would think that there would be at least life in prison for using a garage door sized mirror to point a sunbeam (maybe 4 kilowatts on a bright day) at a commercial airliner. Consider how effective “Gee, officer, I didn’t know that (insert one: commercial airliner, aircraft, or police helicopter) was there.” would be if your laser pointer was mounted on a mechanism to randomly point it around the sky.

All the above is applies only to non US electrical production. The US solar market will hit the wall in 2016 when the 30% tax credit expires. No way solar can compete without those tax credits.

This is very unlikely to be true. That’s like saying “no way somebody is going to build a personal computer that holds more than a megabyte of RAM”, or “no way somebody will reduce the cost of a personal computer from $5000 to $500”. All the removal of the subsidy will do is force the solar market to be flat with the various alternative energy sources already out there. This, in turn, will probably make solar a marginal loser in some places it is a marginal winner, but there are places where the winning margin is already large enough to survive the subsidy loss, and solar cells have been experiencing a Moore’s Law-like end-user price curve, halving their price per watt roughly every seven to ten years.
Without wanting to go once again through the entire panoply of costs and benefits of PV solar, some points worth making are:
* Don’t underestimate the semi-free market. There is no fundamental reason solar cannot be cost competitive with fuel-based energy over a reasonable amortization frame, especially in parts of the country or world where fuel-based energy costs are high and annual insolation is large. There are already parts of the US where these conditions hold, and the cost-recovery time for consumer-installed solar with or without the subsidy is between 10 and 15 years out of a nominal 20 to 25 year lifetime. Corporate power installations are already clearly profitable — they can obtain cells, electronics and so on in bulk and have cost-efficiencies in installation that exceed those of private citizens and can amortize costs much faster, over time frames that are very competitive with new construction fuel-based power plants. The reason subsidies will disappear isn’t because solar is good or bad, it is because in some sense the subsidies have done their job, which is to develop a new industry that makes a valuable product to where that product is competitive and the industry can stand alone, or not.
* Don’t underestimate the march of technology, engineering, and physics. The one thing holding PV solar back more than anything else is the cost of storage. Substantial private and government subsidized R&D money is going into battery technology, not only to support the solar energy generation process but to support/improve things like hybrid car or electric car design and engineering.
I own both a Toyota Prius and a Ford Excursion — one that averages just under 50 mpg, the other that averages around 14 mpg (8 cylinder, my previous 10 cylinder Excursion only got 11.5 mpg). It would be child’s play to add Prius-like features to the Excursion — in particular, the shutting off of the engine at a stop light so that the car’s startup from rest and restarting of the gas engine is accomplished using (mostly) reclaimed kinetic energy from magnetic-assisted braking. I have >>watched<< the Excursion's internal fuel efficiency counter plummet at every stop sign in town after a reset — if this feature alone were added, the fuel efficiency of my Excursion would go up to around 20 mpg, perhaps 18 mpg for a 10 cylinder version. Those 10 cylinders really suck down fuel idling. Batteries and still-patented technologies that can solve this and many other related problems could take my Excursion from having a highway no-tow range of around 700 miles to over 1000 miles, and drop its substantial cost of operation by 1/3 and STILL let me tow my boat. It isn't just about global warming, in other words…
Other places where technology is bound to both improve and come down in cost include the inverters needed to hook solar houses up to the grid, power transmission technologies, solar cell efficiencies (at constant cost). But storage is the big one, and there are projects investigating a variety of ways of storing large scale daytime energy production for release at night and for transporting energy over sufficiently long distances to smooth out weather-based variability of commercial generation. But even without these technologies, solar is still a conditional win in many southern US locations, including in NC where I live and much of the southwest.
* There is little reason to get religious about electricity generation either way. Coal is not “desirable” as an energy source. It never was. Quite aside from CO_2, it is expensive and dangerous to mine, “dirty” in many ways when burned (although sure, one can clean it up at substantial, hence profit-disincentivized, cost), and one day our descendants might well curse us for using up so much of the readily available coal when it, like all fossil “fuels”, are stores of raw materials for all kinds of manufacture, of everything from steel to concrete to plastics to drugs. We have used coal (among other things) to bootstrap a wonderful energy-rich civilization, and have dealt with whole generations of ecological/environmental problems associated with the use of coal as an energy source from the soot produced by household-level coal-burning furnaces of a century or more ago to acid rain produced by high-sulfur coal today. We have dealt with the health issues and substantial risks associated with mining coal in vast quantities. We have dealt with the political and economic problems associated with a key commodity being produced by a small, powerful, collective of companies (and humans) to their enormous enrichment from a resource that arguably should be part of the commons.
Solar is not “desirable” as an energy resource. Solar cells (like all solid state electronics) are doped with toxic elements, they are comparatively expensive to mass-produce with enough efficiency and quality control to be a reliable investment, they don’t work when the sun doesn’t shine (enough), and we lack mature and cost-effective storage technology.
Uranium fission-based nuclear is again dangerous to mine, dirty (in an entirely different way) to “burn”, and carries various nonlinear risks in its current pressurized-water implementation of both meltdown and nuclear proliferation.
Hydroelectric requires enormous capital investment, covers lots of otherwise fruitful land with water (which may or may not be desirable), and comes with a risk price tag of substantial vulnerability to sufficiently violent earthquakes, which are rare but which can easily happen on a century plus timescale.
Fusion might be ideal — oh, wait, no it’s not because it does not work.
Natural gas is peachy except that it is a finite supply, “fracking” to liberate a supply sufficient to run the power grid produces a variety of problems that you can pretend are not there if you like, but it won’t stop them from being there, and personally, as a cook I’d much rather we save it to run gas stoves because cooking on electric sucks.
We live in a society whose wealth is defined almost precisely by its per-capita energy cost and consumption. The world’s poverty is equally precisely defined by the lack of access to cheap, plentiful energy. The world’s energy supply itself is a collection of finite resources, each with costs, risks, and benefits associated with their “mining”, transportation, conversion, and utilization. Optimizing this and shepherding the entire world down a path to a stable, energy rich world civilization is not a trivial task, and the process is not aided by sound-bite reasoning, knee-jerk reaction, anger, or the deliberate amplification and distortion of perceived risk or future cost (which is widespread on both sides of e.g. the global warming issue, exaggeration of risk of global warming on the one hand, minimization of the risk associated with increased CO_2 and continued large scale mass consumption of coal reserves on the other).
In the meantime, pilot projects such as the one that is the subject of the top article are very valuable, easily worth even the substantial investment of building them. How else will we learn what the not-so-visible costs are of implementing designs like this? To the nominal cash price tag, we can now add the estimated net present value of at least 10’s of thousands of toasted birds (and orders of magnitude more insects, and possibly other ecological sequellae) per year. Or, in the case of wind energy, the cost of shredded birds, butterflies, whatever. Perhaps this will cause us to adopt some other design for heat-based solar generation — there are other designs out there, after all — that are less risky to birds although perhaps less efficient as well. Europe is learning the hard way that massive wind may not be the best possible way to power up their electrical grid, and may not even be a great way to supplement it and eke out fuel based electricity if it comes at the expense of removing fuel based resources altogether and ratcheting up prices instead of ratcheting them down. Pilot projects and sober economic analysis is the only way to make real progress with measurements of costs and benefits and unexpected economies of scale and their opposite — diseconomies of scale such as massive numbers of dead birds that scale up with the resource and could easily threaten endangered regional species.
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Somebody needs to create a video of birds being roasted by this monstrosity and post it to all the online video services. Just like environmental activists record abuse at turkey and pig farms. This needs to be made common knowledge.