At the start of the weekend, and quite by accident, I found myself aloft and looking directly into the glare of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System. I can tell you that not only does it roast birds in mid-air, it certainly seems to be a hazard to aviation. First, a story today from AP, via my local newspaper. Photos follow.
Emerging desert solar plants scorch birds in midair-Chico Enterprise-Record
IVANPAH DRY LAKE (AP) >> 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.
Federal wildlife investigators who visited the BrightSource Energy plant last year and watched as birds burned and fell, reporting an average of one “streamer” every two minutes, are urging California officials to halt the operator’s application to build a still-bigger version.
The investigators want the halt until the full extent of the deaths can be assessed. Estimates per year now range from a low of about a thousand by BrightSource to 28,000 by an expert for the Center for Biological Diversity environmental group.
The deaths are “alarming. It’s hard to say whether that’s the location or the technology,” said Garry George, renewable-energy director for the California chapter of the Audubon Society. “There needs to be some caution.”
The bird kills mark the latest instance in which the quest for clean energy sometimes has inadvertent environmental harm. Solar farms have been criticized for their impacts on desert tortoises, and wind farms have killed birds, including numerous raptors.
“We take this issue very seriously,” said Jeff Holland, a spokesman for NRG Solar of Carlsbad, the second of the three companies behind the plant. The third, Google, deferred comment to its partners.
The $2.2 billion plant, which launched in February, is at Ivanpah Dry Lake near the California-Nevada border. The operator says it is the world’s biggest plant to employ so-called power towers.
More than 300,000 mirrors, each the size of a garage door, reflect solar rays onto three boiler towers each looming up to 40 stories high. The water inside is heated to produce steam, which turns turbines that generate enough electricity for 140,000 homes.
Sun rays sent up by the field of mirrors are bright enough to dazzle pilots flying in and out of Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
Full story here: http://www.chicoer.com/breakingnews/ci_26357771/emerging-desert-solar-plants-scorch-birds-midair
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I drove to the Heartland ICCC9 conference in Las Vegas, NV, (my “Big Oil” charter jet never showed up) taking the US395 route through Nevada on the way to the conference, but on the return trip, I took the Interstate 15 to SR58 route to Bakersfield, and that had me drive by the Ivanpah Solar Power plant. I had never seen the desert air glow before in broad daylight, so I stopped to take some photos.
Here is the view from Interstate-15 looking west at the southernmost tower:
And here are all three solar towers from the same vantage point:
Click the images for full size ones to see details.
I have to say it was an eerie sight seeing the air glow that electric blue color like you see on carbon-arc searchlights at night, but instead being visible during the day. The amount of power being concentrated in the air is quite impressive.
Dr. Roy Spencer also took photos and wrote about the Ivanpah Solar power system when he drove out of Las Vegas leaving the ICCC9 conference. He got closer than I did and beat me to the story, so I never published my photos, figuring there was little I could improve upon.
On Friday, in the early afternoon, coming back from a work related trip in Florida, I found myself having a short layover in Las Vegas, to connect to my flight to Sacramento. I’ve flown the Vegas to Sacramento route dozens of times, and so there is little I haven’t seen on the ground from that vantage point, so I didn’t even bother looking out the window. I was reading a book.
I was surprised all of the sudden when the cabin was briefly lit up by a flash, and I thought to myself that we must have passed some air traffic pretty darn close and gotten a sun glint off the aircraft, looking out the window, I discovered I was being dazzled from the ground, and then I knew what it was.
I got up to get my cell phone/camera out of my laptop bag in the overhead, and was griping to myself, “c’mon, c’mon, BOOT dammit!” waiting for Android to load. By the time I was able to get the camera app running the glare had passed, and all I got was a couple of photos like this one:
I gotta tell you, for a moment, it felt like we were in full glare. And I think that if I had my camera ready at that instant when the angles all conspired to illuminate our aircraft, all I would have gotten was a screen of white, much like this one taken by Sandia Labs during a study:
![ivanpah-glare-7-17-14-thumb-600x395-77670[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/ivanpah-glare-7-17-14-thumb-600x395-776701.png?quality=75)
Interestingly, the Sandia National Laboratory is developing a 3D mapping tool to help predict glare from this thing, as seen below:
![3D-glare-tool-1[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/3d-glare-tool-11.jpg?quality=83)
They purposely flew into the glare and report:
![Ivanpah-glare-photo[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/ivanpah-glare-photo1.jpg?quality=83)
The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS) consists of three 459-ft-tall power towers and over 170,000 reflective heliostats with a rated capacity of 390 MW. The California Energy Commission (CEC) has received numerous pilot and air traffic controller glare-impact reports. The situation is serious because pilots report that they cannot “scan the sky in that direction to look for other aircraft.” According to an air traffic controller, “Daily, during the late-morning and early-afternoon hours, we get complaints from pilots of aircraft flying from the northeast to the southwest about the brightness of this solar farm.”
Some Ivanpah heliostats are moved to standby mode in which they reflect light to the side of the tower to reduce sunlight being pointed at the tower’s receivers. Aerial and ground-based surveys of the glare were conducted in April, 2014, to identify the cause and to quantify the irradiance and potential ocular impacts of the glare.
Sandia’s report concluded the glare from those standby heliostats could cause “significant ocular impact” at a distance of six miles. Ivanpah operators BrightSource and NRG are investigating new strategies and algorithms for heliostat standby positions to reduce the irradiance and number of heliostats that can reflect light to an aerial observer, and pilots have been warned of the issue.
Source: http://energy.sandia.gov/?p=19782
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Report to P..E.T.A. They’ll try to shut down the solar plant, give them an distraction from our sheep.
Even James Hansen criticised this solar plant , pointing out in “Chemistry World” (Royal society of Chemistry publication) that just one of the nuclear power plants to be built in China by Westinghouse produces as much power as 10 Ivanpah plants with a vastly lower land footprint , and no fried warblers.
I would have thought that if birds are being are being killed in such numbers and so spectacularly then some enterprising person would be videoing this for Youtube , or to sell to a news station.
Perhaps they have , but we are not seeing the result because they are effectively using blackmail to suppress the public release of the images in exchange for lots of money .
So many ways of becoming rich from” renewables”, and all because the public is, thank goodness, a limitless source of money . O Brave New World and how lucky I am to have lived long enough to see it.
My guess is if they turned the mirrors around to reflect the light back into space, it would cool earth more than the alleged amount of CO2 abated by making electricity from it.
I like how they say it is being built with private money. Backers are listed.
Then it says there is a $1,680,000,000 loan guarantee from the government.
Private backing isn’t what it used to be.
From the video at 0:13:
“From a distance it looks like a shimmering blue lake in the Mohave desert.”
The image looks exactly like a large, deep blue lake. That strengthens my (and others’) conjecture that birds are being attracted to it from a distance.
Denise says:
August 19, 2014 at 12:03 pm
“I was pretty disturbed about the bird deaths. I’m not convinced that insect deaths are just fine either when in large quantity. But the moment BrightSource are responsible for an airplane crash, it’s a whole new situation. Who thought it was ok to put aviation in danger from something like this?”
Its a good thing that this potential WMD is controlled by computers (not a person) and as such will be totally immune to possible sabotage by hackers. (SARC)
I would hate to see the entire array aimed at an airliner by utilizing computerized tracking data from the FAA… or simply swung to a frequently used flight path and altitude.
I have a suggestion: Instead of having mirrors that point up, how about creating a huge movable structure that holds a giant magnifying glass. This is similar to what we did as kids to burn leaves, paper and the occasional insect.
Why no discussion on the fact that each mirror has to be cleaned every two weeks and they rotate the schedule so there’s mirror cleaning each day – using 16,000 gallons of water a DAY? And that maintenance costs may far exceed electrical output? They expect to lose 30,000 mirrors every heavy rainfall as well as erosion and associated byproducts of flooding. 16,000 gallons a day!!! That basically evaporates before it hits the ground.
I have an idea. It involves the Tesla harmonic resonator.
We can clear out the navigation hazard in no time.
“””””…..mikeishere says:
August 19, 2014 at 9:11 pm
george e. smith says: August 19, 2014 at 12:57 pm Maybe if they used high quality circular parabolic mirrors……”””””
Please Mike; I said no such thing. You are citing, as a quotation from me, something that was said by someone else.
And I asserted, that such mirrors, would make no difference whatsoever, to the result. The f/# of the mirrors, is so huge, that the optical tolerance for spherical aberration, is way in excess of the difference between a sphere and a parabola. You couldn’t possibly tell from the image quality, if one of these mirrors, was a perfect sphere, and its neighbor a perfect paraboloid. At these f / # speeds, the flat mirrors would be diffraction limited; and the angular size of the sun, about half a degree, is what totally determines the spot size.
A quick check in volume one of Conrady, will find you the math.
What the video from upcountrywater up there shows, is that what is visible up there in the sky, is simply an image of the sun, off perhaps a single mirror, in fact almost assuredly a single mirror, since each mirror is oriented to a unique normal vector direction, so it is not possible to get a reflection from more than one mirror at a time. Moreover, because of the lateral spacing of the mirrors, there must be dark zones, in between the mirror reflections.
So you are seeing a large f/# diffraction limited sun image from a 60 foot “hubcap”. Yes it will blind you, if you look at it too long, but it won’t fry you in an aeroplane, as the hubcap image is so large at that distance.
Evidently, geometrical optics, is not the forte, of climate skepticism.
@ur momisugly george e. smith says:
August 20, 2014 at 3:56 pm
George take a look at the google images of this place and you will see that the reflection is coming from hundreds of the mirrors if not more, I concede that my parabolic idea was wrong, but I am going to stick with the fact that these mirrors are not even close to being flat and are causing diffusion in every direction
I haven’t been able to find the info yet, but I feel like the mirrors are mylar stuck to some type of flexible plastic backer, take a look at the construction video, a ridged very flat backer would make a difference I’m sure of it.
Catapult on the south side, big net on the north. Load with turkeys.
Thanksgiving dinner in an instant!
“””””…..John ;0) says:
August 20, 2014 at 4:35 pm
@ur momisugly george e. smith says:
August 20, 2014 at 3:56 pm…..”””””
Well John, I just took a look at the front picture of that video, I mentioned posted above here, and there is but a single sun image.
Now you have to differentiate between operating, or non-operating. If you watch the video, you will see the guy bragging about his contraption, and behind him, the mirrors are all pointing either straight up (dangerous) or straight down. I can’t tell which. I have no idea, what the mirrors are made of, but any shiny material, is going to give hubcap images, that you may be seeing, in the google pictures.
With the system operating, no mirror is directing a sun image towards ground level. The boiler tower is 450 feet tall, so the focal length of even the closest mirrors, have to have a focal length of at least 450 feet, and a minimum radius for a spherical mirror of 900 feet.
The angular separation of the mirrors, would need to be less than 30 arc minutes, to be able to see a sun image in more than one mirror at a time. I doubt if they are that close. If they are 60 foot mirrors, the would have to be about 6875 feet from the target, to subtend 30 arc minutes at that point. so they would then be about f/115 speed mirrors, and the spherical aberration tolerance would be of the order of the square of that , or about 13,000 wavelengths which is about 6565 microns, which is 6.5 mm.
So a 60 foot mirror that is spherical, with a 900 ft radius, needs a sag of about 30 x 30 / 1800 = 0.5 feet, or six inches. so maybe you could improve with spheres, but what sphere with six inch sag over 60 feet, will tolerate 100 mph winds.
From the in-flight photo by Anthony, his flight was over Roach Lake about 12 nm northeast of the solar farm and heading northwest.
If this was early afternoon, the sun would be in the SSW and the mirrors to the southwest of the collectors would be trying to reflect light toward the towers but already struggling to find the proper angle as the geometry would become ever more difficult for the western mirrors as the day wore on. Meanwhile, any “misses” would be aimed northeast almost directly along airway V587 towards the Las Vegas area. Any aircraft transiting the LV area heading southwest on V587 would be staring directly into the mirror arrays. Good luck on spotting traffic ahead with even one of the mirrors (from each array) shining directly at you. This flight appears to have been vectored in a series of tacks so as to keep the solar farm abeam of the plane rather than in front of it.
george e. smith says:
August 20, 2014 at 6:06 pm
Thanks for typing all that out, I have to say though the last two paragraphs went over my head ;0)
Clarification, I said the mirrors are about 60 SQ FT (8ft x 8ft) not 60 FT mirrors (60ft x 60ft)” the parabolic Mirrors would also be 60 SQ FT
Yes I see that the glare is an image of the sun, but what don’t get is how several hundred mirrors could be pointed directly at a camera lens on an airplane several thousand feet in the air if there isn’t significant diffusion caused from crappy floppy mirrors ;0)
Smoother flatter mirrors should reflect more sunlight onto the tower reducing glare
Gee, I wonder how much more jet fuel is burned avoiding these stupid things?
OK, John , now we have to recalculate. If the mirrors are only 8 feet in diameter, instead of 60, then the radius is 4 ft instead of 30, so 4×4/1800, for a 900 foot radius of curvature , gives 2.7 mm sag.
So the spherical aberration tolerance is more than double the spherical mirror sag, so can’t distinguish image between flat and sphere.
For a sphere of radius R, a cap of radius r has a sag given by r^2 = s.(2R-s), so for a small sag you have r^2 = 2Rs.
From 4-H club geometry, we learn that ANY two chords of a circle , that intersect each other, at a point P, that divides the chords into segments, AP, and PB plus CP and PD, we have :
APxPB = CPxPD, hence the equation given above when those two lines are perpendicular and one is a diameter of the circle.
It so happens that the exact same chord segment product rule applies, even if the two chords intersect at a point P that is outside the circle, and points ABCD are all on the circle.
In the latter case, a special case occurs, when one pair of points, are coincident points, so AB-P is a tangent to the circle, and the other line CDP is a diameter, then we have :
h x (2R +h) = T^2, where h is the height of P above the circle, and T is the tangent length from P.
So, for the earth, where 2R >> h, the horizon distance T^2 = 2Rh.
Well there was a time when people learned all that in school. So now they learn, how to take selfies with a crummy cell phone camera.
Thanks George again for doing all that math, but as a 52 year old with a decent High school education, I can neither do that type of math nor can I get the camera on my smartphone to work ;0) so I guess i’m screwed
If I understand what you wrote above, a parabolic mirror at that size and focal length is basically flat
what is you opinion on the difference between the bumpy wobblie mirrors they are using in comparison with something that is extremely flat, in relationship to the total gain of the amount of photons reaching the collector, would there be a measurable gain? 2% 10%
How much does this electricity cost compared with an equivalent gas powered plant?
24/7 comparing like with like.
If I may, the discussion between george e. smith and John ;0) only tangentially address a key point: These mass produced mirrors are not ideal flat (or spherical, or parabolic) mirrors. They are a pair of “flat” mirrors, held up by a central pivot and steering motors. John make a mention of them being “mylar” on a flexible frame.
The issue as I see it is that the shapes of the mirrors are so imperfect and/or floppy that a sizable fraction of the sun’s energy is missing the boiler target and becoming a hazard to aircraft. Two possibilities:
1. the sag on the wings of the frames is creating a dihedral sag with convexity up (toward the boiler) or
2.the sag of the mylar (if that is what it is) is making for too great a concave upwards curvature that it spreads the sun’s rays over greater than a degree.
Also, what are the dynamic wind forces on those theoretical mirror plane surfaces?
What percent of the incident sun’s energy on the mirror array actually hits the boiler? What is left is leakage, solar shrapnel, directly affecting aircraft flying or looking at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Concerning the imperfect shapes of the mirrors.
0:15 “what looks like a shimmering blue lake in the Mojave Desert.” (unintentional support by the reporter that birds would be attracted to a “blue lake”).
0:17-0:19 a close up of a pair of mirrors on a heliostat. The wavy reflection pattern is caused by the mounting underneath is obvious. They are not planes. At best, they are corrugated shapes, cylindrically concave upward for 90% of the surface with 10% necessarily convex upward at the mounting points.
0:26-0:35 walking on a path between helio stats.
0:36-0:37 Excellent close up of the underside of a heliostat. Each mirror in the pair is supported by 3 triangular trusses (about 3 feet apart) with 7 mirror mounting points. Each truss is attached to a main mounting pipe (?six inches in diameter) and ?16 feet long) that serves as the horizontal axis.
The material of the mirrors is uncertain. We could be looking at the back side of a glass mirror. If the mirror surface is mylar (I’m skeptical), it is on a sheet metal or composite backing board. But the back side of the mirror is not the same color as the aluminum truss.
0:52 Close up of the tower. 450 feet tall.
The black part is about 1/7 the height of the tower, or about 60-70 feet tall and 40-50 feet wide.
Given that the sun is 30 arc minutes wide, how far can a perfectly flat mirror be before that 30 arc-minutes is larger than the boiler? Assume 50 foot target. 25 feet = D * tan(15 arc min). = D*0.004363351; D = 5730 ft.
But, if the heliostats themselves are 16 feet wide, then the target must be correspondingly narrower, 34 feet, not 50. 17 feet = D * tan(15 arc min). D = 3900 feet if the 16 foot wide heliostat is perfectly flat. So it is not the distance that is causing the solar shrapnel, but mirror imperfections.
1:13-1:18 Reporter: “So there’s steam going up into the sky, but no CO2”.
Manager: “You’ve got it. That’s exactly right.”
Humph – If this place uses natural gas to preheat the boiler for at least 1 hour per day and there is application to increase that to 5 hours per day, it is NOT “Exactly right”. Lyre Lyre Pants on Fyre!
1:48-1:58 $22 million dollars to … relocate 200 tortoises into pens on the property. [$90K per tortoise? Is that the best use of money? And why pen them up? So they don’t get run over by the fleet of mirror washer machines, of course.]
1:59: quick shot of mirror array, probably taken from the tower, with only a few heliostats aimed at the sun. Vast majority are neutral (for safety of the videographer of course). I first noticed this image as imperfect aiming, but it is a contrived arrangement for the video.
0:36-0:37 Excellent close up of the underside of a heliostat. Each mirror in the pair is supported by 3 triangular trusses (about 3 feet apart) with 7 mirror mounting points.
Look at the structure and think about differential thermal expansion of the parts, particularly the difference between the ?aluminum pipe and truss and whatever the mirror plate is. There doesn’t need to be much difference in the expansion coefficients for a crinkling corrugation of the mirror to manifest.
“””””…..John ;0) says:
August 20, 2014 at 9:27 pm
………………………………
If I understand what you wrote above, a parabolic mirror at that size and focal length is basically flat
what is you opinion on the difference between the bumpy wobblie mirrors they are using in comparison with something that is extremely flat, in relationship to the total gain of the amount of photons reaching the collector, would there be a measurable gain? 2% 10%…..”””””
John, let’s just guess that a typical mirror is 1,000 feet away from the target, it would require a 2,000 ft radius of curvature to actually act like a spherical mirror. Parabolizing it would be futile, even if such a say 10 ft diameter circular mirror, actually held its shape.
The sun disk, subtends about 30 minutes of arc; shall we say 1/120th of a radian.
So a perfect parabolic mirror, would make a sun image at the target, that is 1000 / 120 or 8 1/3 rd feet in diameter. well a perfect spherical mirror, would give exactly the same image. A perfect flat mirror, must make an image as large as the mirror, and that will be expanded by the angular size of the source.
So the image, 1,000 feet away is going to be somewhere in the 18 foot diameter range, plus diffraction effects, and any angular errors of the mirror surface are magnified by two. Good mirrors need to be four times as accurate as good lens surfaces, because the deflection depends on n-1, and a mirror acts like a lens with n = -1, so n-1 =-2, versus 0.5 for a lens made of index 1.5 glass.
So a minute of arc slope error on some part of a flat mirror surface, will displace the sun image from that region, by two minutes of arc.
Good quality protected Aluminum mirrors, only have about 85% reflectance. that is when new. After fifty years out in the sun, being washed every day, they are going to be as scratched as all get out, and quite scattering.
Stephen Rasey says:
August 21, 2014 at 11:31 am
“So it is not the distance that is causing the solar shrapnel, but mirror imperfections.”
True, but there are other factors conspiring against hitting the target. First, most of the mirrors do not have a straight shot. The towers appear to be square in cross section and aligned with the square mirror fields, so many of the corner mirrors have to deal with horizontal angularity and the closest mirrors have significant vertical angularity.
Of course there are various atmospheric scattering effects as noted in various photos.
And there is the matter of the aiming process. There are hundreds of thousands of mirrors and controlling motors x 2, I would assume. So there is likely some tolerance for imperfect aim in order to reduce energy demands and wear-and-tear on the mechanical gear. As the sun swings across the sky each mirror likely moves in a series of jumps and each reflection will jump to one edge of the target and then move smoothly to the far side of the target area. At some point in time a certain number of drive systems will have failed and will be awaiting repair.