Uh, oh. From NatureWorldNews
![crescent-01[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/crescent-011.jpg?quality=83)
“It’s no secret that solar power is hot right now, with innovators and big name companies alike putting a great deal of time, money, and effort into improving these amazing sources of renewable energy. Still, the last thing you’d likely expect is for a new experimental array to literally light nearly 130 birds in mid-flight on fire.
And yet, that’s exactly what happened near Tonopah, Nevada last month during tests of the 110-megawatt Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project.”
“According to Rudy Evenson, Deputy Chief of Communications for Nevada Bureau of Land Management (NBLM) in Reno, as reported by Re Wire, a third of the newly constructed plant was put into action on the morning of Jan. 14, redirecting concentrated solar energy to a point 1,200 feet above the ground.”
“Unfortunately, about two hours into the test, engineers and biologists on site started noticing “streamers” – trails of smoke and steam caused by birds flying directly into the field of solar radiation. What moisture was on them instantly vaporized, and some instantly burst into flames – at least, until they began to frantically flap away. An estimated 130 birds were injured or killed during the test.”
“Officials behind the project have refuted that claim, saying that most of the streamers are floating trash or wayward insects, but federal wildlife officials have begun calling these ‘eco-friendly’ power towers “mega traps” for wildlife.”
Surprisingly:
“US Fish and Wildlife Service officials are now waiting for a death toll for a full year of operation at the Ivanpah plant. The subsequent report may impact plans for future solar power towers in the United States.”
h/t to WUWT reader “catcracking”
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Wow, if chickens could fly …
Nothing new here, they had the same problem at Solar 1 a couple decades ago.
The glowing dust from the concentrated sunlight attracts moths, and the birds follow the moths. I stood at solar one and watch little streaks of smoke several times a minute from moths, and every 5-15 minutes a larger one from a bird. That is the story of every large concentratot array.
Global Warming Generator also doubles as an endangered species exterminator.
Ahhh. Progress.
why no photos showing this mass killing of birds? That would help to make this statement more believable!
It is finally here guys- Congress is taking action against wasteful spending. Oil subsidies have been stealing public tax dollars to line their pockets with profits, while destroying the Earth for too long.
Show your support by emailing here:
http://blumenauer.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1788
Read the Bill info here:
http://blumenauer.house.gov/images/stories/2011/documents/EBOTS_Fact_Sheet.pdf
Black Crack, you have confused subsidies with tax policy. Subsidies are for green energy and Democratic contributors, not oil and gas.
From Forbes
“So how did all of this misinformation get started? It all began in 2009. Within days of being sworn in as the nation’s 44th President, Barack Obama ordered his staff to scour the tax code for any provision that was relevant to the oil and gas industry, and promptly began proposing them for repeal. The oil and gas industry has always been an easy target for political demagoguery, and that dynamic has played out repeatedly and consistently in this Administration.”
“Unfortunately, most media outlets and reporters have chosen to basically repeat the Administration’s mantra that these tax treatments – several of which have been in the tax code for almost a century – are somehow unique, specific to the oil and gas industry, and are “subsidies” for “big oil”. A great example of just how inaccurate this depiction is applies to Percentage Depletion, which has been a feature of the tax code since 1913, meaning it will be a full century old this year.” FYI the oil depletion allowance mentioned in your link was discontinued in 1975 for large oil companies although it is brought up anyway to fool the uninformed.
I assume you know that the Democratic Senators on that Bill are the worst offenders when it comes to spending us into debt. They gave us the wasteful Trillion dollar stimulus, which was like Christmas for bundlers and unions, including stupid things like turtle tunnels which did nothing to help the economy. Also these same Senators gave us the very expensive Obamacare, and they have been a big part of increasing the national debt to 18 Trillion dollars. Clearly they are not honest when they discuss subsidies for fossil fuels. They support their leader who has the biggest carbon footprint in the world while hating carbon fuels while enjoy extensive use in their private and public life. The claims on subsidies for fossil fuels is false. Do you know that Oil and gas companies are the biggest contributor to the treasury after income tax and their proposals to eliminate deductions include deductions normally allowed for every other industry.
How much tax did green energy pay to the treasury?.
Black Crack
You are confused. Subsidies are not depletion. Depletion is an accounting used by all industries involved in the utilization of natural resources whether oil and gas, minerals, timber, aggregates such as sand and gravel. The depletion accounting is similar to depreciation of capital assets calculated for determining tax liabilities.
Note that ALL extractive industries utilize depletion accounting, not just oil and gas.
So why target oil and gas? Because there are the types who love to hate the industry; the foam-at-the-mouth enviros
We just need some windmills and we can have pre-cooked poultry filets.
There was an old pun book called “Games for Insomniacs”. In it, it talks about a member of the press announcing “I’m brown from the Sun”.
Better than burning heretics.
Birds turn around if keeps getting hotter to avoid the heat.
Try turning around when you are nonchalantly flying along at, say, 20mph, minding your own business and, then, in an instant, you are vaporised. Zzzzzttt!
The surface of the Sun is almost 11,000 degrees F, and this is the actual temperature the birds will encounter when flying through the concentrated flux from the mirrors. Turning around, not an option, the heating is virtually instantaneous. Without nuclear reactions/powerful lasers it is difficult to achieve this temperature anywhere on our planet, any other way. Your nine-year-old with a magnifying glass, scarier than you might think…
Well the actual sun image is about twice the area of each flat plate mirror, and likely three times the projected area as seen from the sun, and the mirrors use maybe 10% of the total solid angle of the whole array.
So I don’t see this array ever getting anywhere near the sun surface Temperature of 6,000 K or 11,000 deg, F in your world. If it got anywhere near there, the birds would be instantly vaporized instead of steamed.
I haven’t done the calculation, but I think it probably doesn’t exceed 1,000 K.
Go ahead and keep pissing the money away… /S
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2014/11/obamas-1-6-billion-dollar-ivanpah-solar-plant-cant-pay-its-bills-needs-bailout/
I hope that the audubon society is proud of itself between this and the wind turbine debacle.
On that note, all of those jobs that were outsourced to other countries over the last decade has been disastrous and now they have the gall to raise taxes because revenue has fallen and they keep giving their cronies more. We have Solyndra/Evergreen Solar et.al and an absolutely incompetent crony government that cannot see the forest for the trees. This has been an abject failure. Our jobs have been lost, yet those illegal immigrants need jobs and are given preferential treatment above and beyond even our own veterans, (so does ISIS/ISIL). They are all entitled to get refunds while we struggle and get (insert expletive here). This global warming bullshit (including all those NGO’s like 350 org who study AGW in war zones, protected by Academi (formerly Blackwater), needs to be stopped. This dog and pony show is destroying what was a great nation (and others too). Enough is enough.
So sad, just how many times do you have to make clear, these plants do not work, do not produce nameplate capacity nor cheap electricity. Just how many times do you have to do simple calculations, summing capital cost. land cost, water coat, maintenance cost, transmission cost, backup cost and divide by power produced
Quote
The Mojave Desert plant, built with the aid of a $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee, kicked off commercial operation at the tail end of December 2013, and for the eight-month period from January through August, its three units generated 254,263 megawatt-hours of electricity, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration data. That’s roughly one-quarter of the annual 1 million-plus megawatt-hours that had been anticipated.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/ivanpah-solar-plant-falling-short-of-expected-electricity-production
Unquote
Local Atmospheric Heating generates electric power.
KFC has filed a lawsuit claiming patent infringement.
This has to be an Onion knock-off. Solar cells absorb light, not reflect. LOL
They’re not solar PV panels, they’re mirrors. This is a thermal solar power plant that melts salt and that’s used to produce steam for steam turbines.
The BBC reported project is a rehash of a project going back to at least 1976, the Severn barrage. The new model splits it into “lagoons” ( name, envision, get the picture) but triples the cost and lowers the efficiency. Yet despite this, it is not 24/7 power nor is it an efficient water turbine design system, just a rehash of windmills underwater. no groundbreaking science or thought there.
Why not turn a liability into a feature? Open up a fried poultry store next door. Mmmm, extra crispy!
“US Fish and Wildlife Service officials are now waiting for a death toll for a full year of operation at the Ivanpah plant.
What ever happened to the precautionary principle?
Heartfelt appeal.
Can we please have a simple paper, showing the economics of Ivanpah and a competitive gas plant of the same actual nameplate capacity. This needs to be published here and somewhere else high profile and google indexed and promoted.
I have done back of envelope calculations and come up with four times the cost of gas, not counting, transmission cots, profit, non 24/7, I.E. hidden back up costs. The return on capital employed is so low that even if they get their 500 million cash subsidy, they will hurt rapidly to extinction, long before the birds hopefully.
WUWT is replete with scientists, mathematicians and accountants well able to do a text book presentation.
This Article is about Tonopah, not Ivanpah;
It’s not a cash subsidy it was a subsidized LOAN — just like Nuclear Plants get.
They sell the power to NV energy @ur momisugly 13.5 cents per KWh.
Karl
This link (http://www.eia.gov/electricity/state/) lists Nevada retail kWh price at 8.5 cents ($0.085). You state Tonopah solar kWh will be sold to (presumably) Nevada utilities at $0.135/kWh (utilities have additional cost – billing, power line charges, profit, etc) before delivering to the retail consumer. I see three options:
1) Retail solar kWh at roughly $0.15 (includes utility mark-up), which is 77% higher than the current $0.085/kWh average. The actual rate would be blended with cheaper power, but the incremental solar would still be $0.15)
2) Sell to suckers in some higher-cost state – but only Connecticut & Hawaii have kWh rates above $0.15/kWh.
3) Subsidize the retail cost with (more) taxpayer funds.
My bet is on option #3.
You mean subsidize it like the rate hikes by the Utilities Commissions whenever a utility wants to build a new Nuclear Plant — subsidies like that? See Maryland for the new Calvert Cliffs Reactor and Florida for the new 2 reactor plant (can’t remember the name)
Or subsidies like the federally guaranteed insured loans for ~$10 Billion for 1 Nuclear Reactor?
Or the subsidies for the actual production of nuclear fuel rods — fuel made by a company that is in essence an FFRDC Federally Funded Research and Development Company.
Subsidies like those?
Or do you mean something else?
BTW Chip it is a 25 year Power Purchase Agreement @ur momisugly 13.5 cents per KWh. Maybe a bit high on the front end — but based on recent electricity inflation rates — it is parity in about 5-7 years.
Or, since grids are interconnected and CA power is unregulated — they could sell it at the average retail price of CA power.
Not to mention that that table includes major industrial customers that skew the numbers. My parents live in MD and pay over 15 cents per KWh — yet it says 11.9.
My base Kwh rate is more than 1 cent higher than the average listed for my state.
Just think of all the motors, at least 2 per mirror, and all the materials, land, cabling, control systems to track the sun and manage that many mirrors, can only operate when there is sun, as well as the cabling to connect the power to the grid. Putting aside the fat these are wildlife killers on a large scale, it an huge waste of resources!
Conventional caol/gas fired power stations will occupy an area not much bigger than the center of this site and produce more reliable power, 24 x 7. Insanity!
1. It is not a wildlife killer on a large scale — that’s just plain bollocks.
2. Ever been to that part of Nevada? — its sunny pretty much every day.
3. The SEVENTY MILLION POUND molten salt heat sink (working heat transfer fluid) has an 11 hour post sundown production capacity — so it actually does produce power when the sun is not shinning.
You guys should really get a little more educated before you throw stones at what you don’t know.
Karl, do you happen to know at what fraction of the peak daytime heat generation capacity (MW) they run it at night for that 11 hour cushion. They are probably going to operate at some peak MW capacity that eventually they can keep going at 24 hours a day, so it would be less than the peak daytime solar megawatts.
The phase change thermal store is really a clever idea, and if they do have the corrosion chemistry well in hand, the maintenance need not be a big headache.
A couple of my high school chums worked in molten salt technology here in the States, and that was 50 years ago. Far as I know it wasn’t for thermal storage, but probably molten salt fuel cells.
It really is a cool way to solve the intermittency problem. Their salt tank is like the Grand Coulee Dam storage lake. They really can run it in a supply and demand load mode just like hydros do.
Well I still think it’s a boondoggle, and the collateral damage may not be solvable, but they will probably get a lot of good engineering data from playing with it.
And yes it is streets ahead of Ivanpah, and that other earlier one.
G
Are people stupid?
Conventional power stations – hydro electricity, gas, coal and nuclear power stations – are cost effective, efficient and reliable, and produce a constant amount of electricity that makes for a well managed electricity grid system.
The renewable energy industry, using solar and wind technology, is anything but cost effective, efficient and reliable. No matter how much this industry is talked up, the key flaw with such renewables is that humans cannot control the sunshine and clouds, nor can humans control the wind. The renewable energy data from Germany shows why solar and wind energy is not viable.
Neither solar nor wind technologies are renewable. Only the driver (e.g. heating, light, convection) are renewable. And the technologies are certainly not “green” throughout their life cycle from recovery to reclamation. The marketing of “green” products and services has done a disservice to properly assessing their value and placement.
Then why are countries (outside the US and Europe) that don’t have solar and wind subsidies NOT building Nuclear, but are INSTEAD building new WIND and SOLAR like gangbusters?
WInd is a weibull distribution with respect to both whether there is any — and what the velocity is. It is quite easy to calculate the annual capacity as a % of nameplate for a wind farm.
Records of sunny days over decades are very consistent WRT the US southwest and other places in the world that are good Solar Resource Areas.
Offshore winds are fairly constant year round and daily — at many places — that is what site surveys are for. Stanford University has ublished a paper showing that Wind CAN be used as dependable baseload power by interconnecting several windfarms. google it
WIND is more cost effective per MWh than COAL Advanced GAS or NUCLEAR
The Levelized Cost of Electricity (what it really costs to build a plant and produce electricity) for Onshore WIND is cheaper than GAS COAL and Nuclear
WIND = 80.3
GAS = Advanced Combined Cycle with CCS 91.3
GAS = Conventional Combustion Turbine = 128.4
GAS = Advanced Combustion Turbine = 103.8
COAL Conventional / IGCC/ IGCC with CCS = 95.4 / 115.9 / 147.4
NUCLEAR = 96.1
$ per MWh
http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm
(before you say that wind doesn’t blow all the time — they controlled for that with a 35% capacity factor which is what newer wind farms in good resource areas are producing)
Karl
Such lenders now under the firm socialist and enviro-CAGW-control of the World Bank and EMF REFUSE to lend money for anything other than partially-productive (17% of the time!) solar and wind. You take what you can get, if you have nothing at all without it.
These same groups refuse to lend money for dams and hydro-power. Though the Chinese are beginning to assist for those in their neo-colonial African empire of resources and mines and oil fields – all at the expense of the newly-re-enslaved Africans of course.
Politicians (and the enviro’s who control the world’s liberal and democrat and socialist politicians and their energy management and electrical and environmental bureaucracies) control what is built and where. Enviro’s control what areas are released for new power lines (it took 15 years for one short line to built on the west slope of the Appalachians for example). Electric power companies have used the last 8 years of lower consumer demand and industrial demand to “eat up” the reserve capacity that they used to have, and to serve that against the regulatory cushion of “no-useful-production approvals.”
Because Wind is more cost effective as shown by the link I just posted
The above projections are based on the following:
“Under the assumption that current laws and regulations remain unchanged throughout the projections, the AEO2014 Reference case provides the basis for examination and discussion of energy production, consumption, technology, and market trends and the direction they may take in the future. It also serves as a starting point for analysis of potential changes in energy policies.”
So, I paraphrase: Based on the regulatory preference towards wind, and the giant hammer used against gas, coal, and nuclear, we have decided that wind power will be cheaper.
Our head policy maker has stated that will make coal to expensive to utilize…. We all know what a regulatory expense it would be to try for nuclear. I haven’t looked into gas, but there is no reason to believe that the listed costs are so high because government regulations and lack of subsidy are applied.
The numbers are not cooked, but they are massaged to reflect desired outcome.
Karl, it appears that you have made an emotional decision and you will believe anything that supports your emotional outlook.
I don’t consider this a major problem. First, I’m pretty certain these problems can be reduced by doing what airports do to avoid birds.
http://birding.about.com/od/birdconservation/a/birdstrikes.htm
And the rest can be left up to evolution: birds with instinctive fear of the tower will have greater chances of surviving. Painting the tower a distinctive and unnatural color – e.g. orange – might help the process.
There are many birds killed by various pieces of human technology. Nobody counts birds killed in collisions with cars, birds falling down factory smokestacks, birds killed by harvesting machines, etc. etc. This is just an example of case where it’s particularly easy to observe.
If you want wind mills use them for pumping water, as intermittency is not a problem, if solar is your passion use it to heat water. In isolation solar panels can charge batteries, but do not ask me to subsidise your solar panels on your roof, our through my taxes pay for exorbitant wind turbine power. Bird killers, now this wonderful new, blind the Astronauts in space solar crap, more subsidises more bird killers. Do the powers that be realise that people want heat and power at night, when the sun does not shine and oft the wind doth not blow. Idiots all.
The levelized cost of electricity (actually cost to produce based on capital costs to build plant, fuel, production capacity etc ) :
Wind is more cost effective than Nuclear, Coal, or Advanced GAS
http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm
The above referenced website projections are based on the following:
“Under the assumption that current laws and regulations remain unchanged throughout the projections, the AEO2014 Reference case provides the basis for examination and discussion of energy production, consumption, technology, and market trends and the direction they may take in the future. It also serves as a starting point for analysis of potential changes in energy policies.”
So, I paraphrase: Based on the regulatory preference towards wind, and the giant hammer used against gas, coal, and nuclear, we have decided that wind power will be cheaper.
““By the time the test ended for the day at 3:00 p.m., biologists had counted 130 such “streamers.” A subsequent test on January 15 reduced the number of mirrors aimed at the focal point above the tower, said Evenson, and that apparently ended the injuries to birds.””
Or, the reason they want to average it out over a year is…*drumroll* after you kill off 90% of the bird population in the area the numbers are pretty much going to drop to nothing. They’ll then rationalize it as “There’s an initial spike in bird deaths, but this levels off rapidly as animals adjust.”
wait a minute are these solar arrays on the migratory path of monarch butterflys? Oh the inhumanity! Quick! Plant some noxious weeds somewhere else so the butterflys will go there instead! Fish and Game will send you the seeds so you can do your part in saving the butterfly!
These things are now mushrooming up over isolated but well insolated and subsidized parts of South Africa. I’m sure our streamer count will be archived under a suitably secret act.
I was intrigued by how these solar panel arrays resemble Crop Circles, very attractive in a Lysergic sort of way, rather ingenious, and unequally useless.
Then I realized, of course, to create a crop circle only requires a smidgen of the
resources consumed by a solar array.
All you need for a decent crop circle is a nicely un-cropped field of cereals on the way,
some rope, some board, some flashlights, a van, a motley crue of drunken students,
and one sober quantity surveyor. You don’t really need any birds, or streamers.
The solar arrays seem like more permanent monuments to some bewildering obscure
passion, like post-modern Nazca geoglyphs, or towering Moai glowing with terribly hot Epsom’s
Salts.
Some one will have the sad task of composing a new Flight of the Bumblebee for
Modern Times
“Children just aren’t going to know what what a bird is.”
Are they open on Thanksgiving ?