Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach.
Sometimes when I’m reading about renewable technologies, I just break out laughing at the madness that the war on carbon has wrought. Consider the Ivanpah solar tower electric power plant. It covers five square miles in Southern California with mirrors which are all focusing the sun on a central tower. The concentrated sunlight boils water that is used to run a steam turbine to generate electricity.
Sounds like at a minimum it would be ecologically neutral … but unfortunately, the Law of Unintended Consequences never sleeps, and the Ivanpah tower has turned out to be a death trap for birds, killing hundreds and hundreds every year:
“After several studies, the conclusion for why birds are drawn to the searing beams of the solar field goes like this: Insects are attracted to the bright light of the reflecting mirrors, much as moths are lured to a porch light. Small birds — insect eaters such as finches, swallows and warblers — go after the bugs. In turn, predators such as hawks and falcons pursue the smaller birds.
But once the birds enter the focal field of the mirrors, called the “solar flux,” injury or death can occur in a few seconds. The reflected light from the mirrors is 800 to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Either the birds are incinerated in flight; their feathers are singed, causing them to fall to their deaths; or they are too injured to fly and are killed on the ground by predators, according to a report by the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory.”
– David Danelski, Solar: Ivanpah Solar Described as Deadly Trap for Wildlife,” Riverside-Press Enterprise, April 8, 2014.
But of course, that’s not what made me laugh. That’s a tragedy which unfortunately will be mostly ignored by those good-hearted environmentally conscious folks suffering from chronic carbophobia.
The next oddity about Ivanpah is that despite being powered by light, it is light-years away from being economically viable. Like the old sailors say, “The wind is free … but everything else costs money”.
But being totally uneconomical doesn’t matter, because despite costing $2.2 billion to build, Google is a major shareholder, so at least they could afford to foot the bills for their high-priced bird-burner …
… get real. Google would much rather use taxpayer dollars to burn birds alive than foot the costs themselves. Being good businessmen and women they sought and got a $1.6 billion dollar taxpayer funded loan, presumably because no bank on the planet would touch the project. And if the banks wouldn’t touch it, why should you and I?
But that’s not enough for these greedy green pluted bloatocrats. Now, they are applying for a $539 million dollar GIFT of your and my taxpayer money in order to repay the money that you and I already lent them … we should give them the money to repay ourselves? Give an unimaginably wealthy company money to repay us what we have loaned them? Have I wandered into a parallel universe? This is GOOGLE, folks, and they’re trying to poor-mouth us?
And of course, that’s not what made me laugh either. That is another tragedy which unfortunately will be ignored by those who wish to see electricity prices rise … you know, folks like President Obama, who famously said:
Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket …
Of course, such an electricity price rise would mean nothing to him, like every recent President he’ll leave office a multi-millionaire. And such an energy price rise means nothing to the Google execs who are burning birds alive … but for those of us here on the ground, causing the electricity rates to skyrocket is not the moral high ground, it is a crime against the poor.
So that is no laughing matter at all.
No, the part that I didn’t know about Ivanpah (and other solar steam plants), the part that got me smiling, was that there is a problem with a solar tower that is generating steam. This is that steam turbines don’t do well at all with half a head of steam. For full efficiency a turbine needs full pressure steam in order to operate. And it has to have full pressure, not when the valves are closed to let the pressure build up, but when the turbine is actually using the steam.
And since you can’t store steam, that in turn means that Google can’t start up their you-beaut solar tower until fairly late in the morning.
Well, the solution that the good engineers hired by Google came up with was simple.
Start the sucker up using natural gas. That way, first you can heat the cool boiler water before the sun comes up. Then, as more and more solar energy comes online during the morning, you can taper off on the natural gas.
But having a solar plant that runs on natural gas, although funny, wasn’t the best part … it gets better:
One big miscalculation was that the power plant requires far more steam to run smoothly and efficiently than originally thought, according to a document filed with the California Energy Commission. Instead of ramping up the plant each day before sunrise by burning one hour’s worth of natural gas to generate steam, Ivanpah needs more than four times that much help from fossil fuels to get plant humming every morning. MARKETWATCH
These good folks have underestimated the amount of fossil fuels that the plant would need by a factor of four, and they want us to follow their lead in reorganizing the world’s energy supply? And of course, in the familiar refrain, the taxpayer is expected to foot the bill for their ignorance and their inept calculations.
So now, I find out that the Ivanpah plant runs on natural gas four hours a day, and I gotta say, I did find that funny. But in the most ironic twist of all, the above link goes on to say:
Another unexpected problem: not enough sun. Weather predictions for the area underestimated the amount of cloud cover that has blanketed Ivanpah since it went into service in 2013.
And that brought the joke all the way around. I found that hilariously ironic. Because of alarmism based on computer model predictions of rising temperatures in 100 years, we’ve built a fossil-fuel fired solar plant which is already in trouble because of failed computer model predictions of the clouds over the next few years … don’t know about you, but that cracked me up.
Now, even the best solar energy conversion devices don’t operate 24 hours a day, or even 12 hours a day. Generally, eight hours a day or even less is the norm. And that has been cut down by clouds … so at present, dreaded fossil fuels are likely providing a third of the energy to fuel the plant.
Gotta say, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry about things like the natural-gas powered Ivanpah solar power plant fiasco. On the whole I have to favor laughter … but dear heavens, the damage that environmentalists are doing in the name of the environment is appalling. Burning birds alive in the name of making energy prices skyrocket? Have we sunk this low? Really?
In any case, my best guess is that this is a self-limiting problem, or it would be without subsidies. The “levelized cost” of solar thermal is horrendous. It is the only technology which is more expensive than offshore wind, and it is the most expensive of the commonly analyzed grid-scale renewable choices. It won’t work without the kind of multi-million dollar taxpayer subsidies that the Google folks think that they deserve … me, I would never have given them the loan of taxpayer money in the first place, that’s the bank’s job, not the government’s job. More to the point, I think they deserve to pay the damn loan back themselves.
Let me close on a more optimistic note. The referenced article says:
Bird carnage combined with opposition by Native American tribes to industrial projects on undeveloped land has made California regulators wary of approving more. Last September, Abengoa and BrightSource abandoned their quest to build a solar-thermal project near Joshua Tree National Park when the state regulator told them the plant’s footprint would have to be cut in half.
In March the Board of Supervisors of Inyo County, a sparsely populated part of California that is home to Death Valley National Park, voted to ban solar-thermal power plants altogether. “Ivanpah had a significant effect on the decision making,” said Joshua Hart, the county’s planning director.
If the final end of Ivanpah is the end of any further Ivanpahs ever, I suppose that I’d say that Ivanpah was worth whatever it cost … although I’m sure the birds would have preferred a different path to that outcome. As long as Ivanpah is in operation birds will continue to be burned alive in the name of driving up electricity prices … and these monomoniacal carbophobes still think that they have the high moral ground regarding fossil fuels?
Because I rather suspect that neither the birds nor the poor would agree …
w.
De Costumbre: If you disagree with what I or anyone says, please have the courtesy to quote the exact words that you object to. That way, we can all understand exactly what you find objectionable.
How much of the power that it generates (%wise) is used to move all the 300,000 + mirrors to keep the sun focused on the tower(s)? I have looked into this before but have never found an answer.
Gross nameplate rating is 398MW. Net grid rating 370MW. So 28MW comsumed powering the thing. Biggest power loss is the fans air cooling the steam condensation post turbine.
LOL!! So for 4 out of >8 hours/day, this Google-solar plant needs to burn natural gas to work efficiently… Moreover, other natural gas or coal-fired plants need to burn fossil fuels without generating ANY electricity to immediately kick in should those rare events called “clouds” and/or “night” occur at the Google-solar plant…
Solar energy is a feasible source of EMERGENCY power generation for rich people, remote off-grid areas and people wishing to live off the grid (providing that it’s not too far north and/or is not in area that gets too much snow in the winter)..
As always, just let the frigging MARKET decide the winners and losers: NO subsidies, NO low-interest loans, NO special favors, NO kickbacks, NO flaming birds, NO bailouts and NO kickbacks…
If the private sector doesn’t want to fund an entrepreneurial idea or the idea goes bankrupt after initial capitalization, it usually means it’s not viable.
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”~Albert Einstein
Not at all. Solar water heating works very very well here in Australia. Solar power works for things like road signs and lights etc, we have many of these systems here in Australia. Solar power for base load power is, of course, a fallacy.
Yes I think you have hit the nail on the head. Solar can be useful for a number of applications. Even though like my solar calculator, I imagine they require batteries or can charge batteries to make them usable.
I had a solar calculator once, in the 80’s. Sure it worked in sunlight, but it was mostly used in a building with, coal powered lights!
Google. I think their motto is “Do no evil.” Well Steve Jobs found, after taking their president into the board of Apple, that he was there to steal the iPhone from Apple and kill them with their Android (nice name for a heartless creature) project. Jobs wanted to nuke Google, and I think today the two companies are at war. Google is a monster, and I hope to see the end of it. So much so that I will use a Microsoft product – Bing search engine – far more often than Google. I’ll never intentionally use a Google product if I can find a competitor. They are “evil”.
Demonizing Google is irrational. This is all caused by politicians that the majority of you voted for.
“steal the iPhone from Apple”
and they stole … the rectangular design?
The concept of touch screen?
The icons?
Get real. Apple couldn’t prove any real IP was “stolen” by Google. Nobody could.
OTOH, Bing copied search result from various search engines, not just from Google. And that was actually their defense and excuse: “we don’t just copy Google results, with copy every other search engine results, so leave us alone”. And before any irrational Google-hater(*) says anything: Google search results are only for human use, not for robots use. They are blocked at the robots.txt level, unlike content from other sites that Google copies and reuse. So “Google does it” is just plain wrong.
(*) and before anyone says anything: I hate Google for “contributing” to this solar crap, I really do; but leave the fake IP stuff to pathetic lawyers.
I disagree. Those birds are free range and fall from the sky cooked. Human settlements could be set up under the mirrors and like biblical manna cooked birds would fall from the sky. We could ship the poor from our inner cities to such power generation stations. The deserts naturally produce peyote. Welfare problems solved and Mexican drug cartel problems solved. What’s not to like?
Eugene WR Gallun
LMAO ….
http://www.powermag.com/ivanpah-solar-electric-generating-system-earns-powers-highest-honor/
Has any discussed this with McKibben? He mentioned how much he favors solar. I cannot fathom as to how he could be this ignorant to all of its failures. The biggest one being massive tax subsidies. Sure solar panels are hot, but only because they are backed by too much subsidy.
Again why we need more engineers running for office. It’s going to take people who solve real problems to right our country.
Ivanpah 1 operating data:
http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/57074/?freq=A&pin=
Ivanpah 2 data:
http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/57073/?freq=A&pin=
Ivanpah 3 data:
http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/plant/57075/?freq=A&pin=
The data above shows natural gas use if you dig a bit – monthly, quarterly of annually
Application to increase gas usage:
http://docketpublic.energy.ca.gov/PublicDocuments/07-AFC-05C/TN203064_20140915T132932_ISEGS_Order_Approving_Petition_to_Amend.pdf
http://www.platts.com/
Search “Ivanpah” … firewalled …. plenty of stories there
First search result: May 1 – 2015 story … “Ivanpah attains 14.4% first-year capacity factor”
… so much for 31% capacity factor
Jan 2015 – “New data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows that the three ISEGS units pumped out 47,176 megawatt-hours in November, the plant’s third best month in 11 months of operation, trailing just June (64,335 MWh) and October (56,013 MWh). For the year, the plant was at 401,203 MWh of generation.
One thing that might have helped boost Ivanpah’s fall performance: increased use of natural gas”
http://breakingenergy.com/2015/01/28/ivanpah-solar-plant-picking-up-steam/
City: Las Vegas
Sunny Days 210
Partly Sunny Days 82
Sun Hours/day
SUMMER 7.13
WINTER 5.84
AVG 6.41
Various reports note natural gas is required 4.5 hours per day
Chart Ivanpah production:
http://breakingenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/01/Ivanpah-Jan-Nov-2014-Chart.jpg
Reblogged this on The Arts Mechanical and commented:
I suspect that issues are even worse than the post points out. I don’t know if Ivanpah is a straight steam system or has a potassium topping cycle like Solar 1 did, but if it does that potassium has to be kept at temperature at nigh and that takes a LOT of heating. There’s also the mirror drive mechanisms and the problem of keeping dust off the mirrors.
The largest issues is that all the issues that Ivanpah is dealing with were encountered at Solar 1 back in the 1980’s and that plant was deemed a failure because of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Solar_Project#Solar_One
Can’t help thinking of Chairman Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” where everyone was supposed to donate iron and assist in smelting it to be used presumably for industry or export.
The worrying thing is that the people carried out this “Great Leap Forward” with some enthusiasm causing a shortage of agricultural equipment and other essentials such as essential home ware etc. Not only was the resultant product useless but the harvest failed partly because people were too busy “leaping forward” when they should have been tending their crops, but they had given up their means , (agricultural and industrial tools) to actually farm.
Central administration of agriculture plus the above etc. caused 50 million plus deaths by starvation between 1961 and 65.
Are we doing the same thing to ourselves??
Cheers
Roger
http://www.rogerfromnewzealand.wordpress.com
Harrabin, this article is so contradictory, beginning with the headline. after all, the CAGW-infested MSM never stops giving China exaggerated credit for “renewables”:
16 June: BBC: Roger Harrabin: China ‘deserves more credit’ for renewable energy effort
China should be given more credit for its investment in clean electricity, the head of the International Energy Agency says.
Maria van der Hoeven says most people think that China is frantically building coal-fired power stations.
The reality, she says, is that China is spending as much as the US and Europe put together on clean power.
She says its coal-fired power stations are state of the art – and should be copied in other developing countries…
The country is also building 50 new nuclear power stations and creating economies of scale in nuclear too, the IEA says, at a time when the industry is moribund in Europe…
***Last year the nation reported that its emissions had fallen by 1% as coal use slumped…
Ms van der Hoeven said China was still investing heavily in coal-fired power plants, but that the power stations were highly efficient and enabled old inefficient plants to be retired…
But despite its admiration for China’s achievement, the IEA is still critical of what it says is the nation’s lack of transparency on data.
And it says that because of China’s vast size and its growing wealth, the country’s emissions are expected by 2030 to be two and a half times higher than the next bigger emitter, the US.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-33143176
***Harrabin, go check the revised China figures in the BP report.
10 June: Carbon Counter: BP: China’s coal consumption did not fall last year
I wrote earlier in the week that we should be skeptical about China’s coal statistics. As Glen Peters has said, they are like a bottle of wine and improve with age.
So when we saw the claim that coal consumption, and CO2 emissions, fell last year the wise thing to do would be to wait for more data.
And here is the latest. BP has just released its Statistical Review of World Energy. Instead of falling by 3.5% as some have claimed, BP estimates that it actually increased by 0.1%.
Similarly, BP estimates that China’s energy related CO2 emissions did not fall, but increased by 0.9%.
BP also estimates that global energy related CO2 emissions increased by 0.5%, which contradicts the claim by the International Energy Agency that they fell…
https://carboncounter.wordpress.com/2015/06/10/bp-chinas-coal-consumption-did-not-fall-last-year/
Harrabin – there is your admission at the end that China’s “emissions are expected by 2030 to be two and a half times higher than the next bigger emitter, the US”.
as India is expecting its emissions to double or even triple by 2030, why is the MSM still pretending there is any plan for the world to reduce CO2 emissions?
In a past life, I developed, designed, built and operated “renewable” electric power generating plants. I’ve had nothing to do with Ivanpah and personally know no one who has. The following are my educated guesses of what is going on at Ivanpah, based solely on personal experience in the industry and news releases about the plant and its performance struggles, delayed tax credits, delayed bank loan repayments, etc.
Last I heard, Ivanpah was only producing about 50-60% of design output on average. That unhappy result was achieved only AFTER the plant owners talked the California PUC into allowing them to use WAY more natural gas than their original operating permits provided.
The usual financial structure for a financially viable (with subsidies) renewable energy plant is as follows:
1) Investors put up $2
2) Commercial bank puts up $8
3) The day the plant reaches “continuous commercial operation”, the investors receive either cash or tax credits for $3 and the “construction loan” converts to a “non-recourse, term loan”, meaning the investors are off the hook for the bank loan and all the bank can do in the event of default is repossess the plant.
4) Over the next five years, investors (not the financing bank) receive tax depreciation benefits worth an additional $4 (assuming a 40% tax bracket for those “high rollers”).
5) So, the investors receive $7 out for every $2 invested during the first 5 years of plant operation. After that, they don’t care WHAT happens to that plant because all the plant will ever typically actually produce (assuming it is viable) is enough revenue to cover operating expenses and pay off the bank loan.
6) States such as California “sweeten the pot” with additional tax credits, property tax exclusions, etc.
No commercial banker in his right mind would finance Ivanpah on the customary non-recourse basis and no sane investor would put up even his 20% if HE were going to be responsible for his share of that loan because it simply did not pencil out that the plant would produce enough revenue to service such a loan. What to do?
MAKE TAXPAYERS RESPONSIBLE FOR THAT LOAN via a federal loan guarantee!
To their credit, the feds did insist that the 30% investment tax credit (or cash) due from the federal till at the commercial operating date go toward paying down that federally guaranteed bank loan instead of going into the investors’ pockets as is done in the usual “renewable” scenario. Supposedly, the plant would then “pencil out” as being able to service the remaining loan over the long term with its sweetheart power sales agreement (forced on the receiving electric utilities by state renewable mandates) at over triple the current U.S. average “at the fence rate” for our national mix of coal, gas and nuclear plants.
It appears to me there are two monster “flies in the ointment” at Ivanpah:
1) In my experience, “continuous commercial operation” as defined by the IRS and which is the milestone necessary to secure that 30% tax credit (or cash in lieu of from the U.S. Treasury) has never been so loose as to accept a plant limping along at 50-60% of design capacity. I suspect Ivanpah has met with difficulties in that arena.
2) I am unsure of whether, under current rules, the clock for depreciation starts with “initial operation” or “continuous commercial operation”. If the latter is the case, even the investors’ expected depreciation tax benefits could be in question unless the IRS has accepted current plant performance as “continuous commercial operation”.
3) Since the government required that the 30% investment tax credit cash go to pay down the bank loan, is likely the plant just barely “penciled out” to pay off the remaining loan over the years running at or near its design capacity. At 50-60% capacity, I’d guess the loan will go into default rather quickly, if it isn’t there already, and taxpayers will wind up holding the bag.
If anyone knows of anything different than my above stated “guesses”, I’d be pleased to learn.
What would be better than a system with all the flat mirrors aimed at a single tower is a solar thermal plant with distributed collection. Use many large, parabolic mirrors that each have their own collector and small turbine and generator, or gang several to one turbine. Each dish tracks the sun individually and with a far smaller amount of working fluid to heat up each morning they can get to working faster. The fluid could be stored in a super insulated container at night so it doesn’t cool off so much.
Such a system would be scalable, easily expandable to meet both the ability to pay for it and the power need. It wouldn’t all have to be gathered in a single place. Units could be installed anywhere there’s enough sunlight. It would also be failure resistant. How many mirrors can have their tracking fail at Ivanpah before the entire thing has to be shut down?
I’d expect a distributed system to be much less likely to fry birds due to the collectors being much closer to the mirrors. If birds did tend to fly between the dishes and the collectors, install fake owls perched atop each dish. Make them with solar powered, random flapping wings and turning heads. Completely independent of the rest of the system, with their own small PV cells. The sun tracking should be powered the same way so it uses none of the thermally generated electricity. (How much of the power generated does Ivanpah siphon off to operate its own systems?)
A few years ago I went to Las Vegas and went past a solar thermal experiment installation with two collectors as I’ve described. One with a single large mirror and the other with 7 smaller mirrors in a hexagon arrangement. There was a sign saying how much power they’d generated since the start of the testing. Now for the kicker, on a BRIGHT and HOT and CLOUDLESS Las Vegas day, both of those collectors were *pointed at the ground*. If you’re attempting to demonstrate how much electricity can be generated with small solar thermal collectors, wouldn’t you want them aimed at the Sun 100% of the time it’s possible for them to produce electricity?
Something else that has been done with small solar thermal dish experiments is mounting a PV cell to the collector and using the working fluid to keep the concentrated sunlight from instantly destroying the cell. Seems like a good way for a two-fer. Generate steam with the heat and convert light to electricity. There would need to be an emergency stop fail safe in case the working fluid stops flowing. Have it trip a release that allows a spring to flip the dish up enough so it’s no longer Solar Death Raying the collector. Should also have that spring action operate a plunger pump to push a shot of (fluid with large heat absorbing capacity) through the collector to quickly cool it down.
Anyone want to build a casino hotel in North Vegas and have the parking lot all under cover with a field of small solar thermal/PV dishes (built from all the obsolete C-Band TVRO dishes one can obtain) on top of the parking lot shade structure? Since North Vegas is short of money, I’d expect the city would love the jobs.
VikingExplorer June 15, 2015 at 10:27 pm
Thanks, Viking, but actually that is a fact. Every year the EIA produces a report on the levelized cost of power generation. Here are selected figures from their report. Note that this does NOT include the cost of the installation of the transmission lines to the often remote location of the renewable sources, nor does it include the cost of necessary (and necessarily inefficient) intermittent backup for the intermittent sources such as wind and solar:
Natural Gas-fired Advanced Combined Cycle: 7.3¢/Kwh
Natural Gas-fired Conventional Combined Cycle: 7.5¢/Kwh
Hydroelectric: 8.4¢/Kwh
Conventional Coal: 9.5¢/Kwh
Biomass: 10.1¢/Kwh
Solar PV: 12.5¢/Kwh
Wind – Offshore: 19.7¢/Kwh
Solar Thermal: 24.0¢/Kwh
So no, Viking, solar thermal is not a viable energy business. Solar thermal is the highest cost of all of the sources analyzed by the EIA. Why do you think that they are demanding subsidies?
Several people have found analyses above which put the sales price of the Ivanpah electricity at 16.5¢ per Kwh … and of course that’s just what PGE pays for it. By the time they add their wheeling costs and maintenance costs and sinking fund costs and pensions for their employees costs, they’ll be selling it to the customer for something on the order of 20¢ per Kwh. That is not a “viable energy business” anywhere but in the People’s Democratic Republic of California, where such lunacy is not only permitted, it is mandated by law.
w.
Oh, yes, Viking, regarding your comment that “Should restaurants not exist, because McDonalds does, and it’s cheaper?”, consider this:
If all restaurants sold exactly the same food (as do all electric generators), and McDonalds could provide it cheaply 24/7, and the other restaurants could only provide it when the sun was shining, and then at a high price … well, yes, in an unsubsidized market with a level playing field such restaurants would go out of business very rapidly.
w.
Wrong. Like any other business, location and supply and demand matter. Solar pv, like nuclear, can afford to out bid fuel based sources. Your setting up a false dichotomy between solar pv and fossil fuels. The link I provided show that it’s very competitive without a subsidy.
There is demand for more power. There is no moral, scientific or economic reason not to invest in solar pv.
Clearly there are environmental issues, but we’ll just forget about that eh?
McD’s IS NOT cheaper. Not by a long shot. To use it in your analogy is totally misleading. Any take out food is vastly more expensive. Believe me, I had a family member who was a store manager at a McD’s “restaurant” in the UK. McD’s make an obscene amount of money on their “food”, and that is even factoring in raw materials, energy and labour before the final cost price to the consumer.
Recharging your Tesla with Ivanpah power at 20 cents would cost you usd 17 plus extras. that is 10.3 cents per mile. Petrol is cheaper.
You’re not being objective if you don’t recognize that it’s like a restaurant with no labor costs versus a restaurant with expensive and highly unpredictable labor costs. Which business would you rather be in?
Patrick, you can spout environmentalism all you want, but I’m no environmentalist. Any bird stupid enough to fly into sun needs to die.
You’re crazy to claim that McDonald’s isn’t cheaper than regular restaurants. You sound like a left wing socialist with your description of McD. I was a swing mgr at one when I was a teenager. A beautiful model of efficiency leading to profit. Only a socialist could call profit obscene.
However, you missed the whole point. Some restaurants are open all night, and some are only open for lunch. Is it logical to refuse to open up a luncheonette because all night restaurants exist?
Well, Viking, you are very wrong. Take out food is vastly more expensive than any other form of food made by someone else. This is a recognised fact.
I never knew birds were smart enough to recognise man-made structures so as not to fly in to stuff humans made. Windows, cars, trains, aircraft and solar plants.
I have no issue with profit. The example I draw on is obscene in the extreme, if you can call McD’s “food” and cheap. I don’t! BTW, when my brother was a store manager a “Big Mac” cost McD’s 35pence, all in, labour, materials, power etc etc. They sold it for GBP1.75 at the counter. A large coke, all in, was 2 pence, sold for 50 pence at the counter. You will not find those profit margins at a typical restaurant.
I think you have clarified the fallacy in VIkings claim. Different products have different consumer markets and price points. You could go to McDonalds and buy a hamburger for $5 or go to a higher end restaurant and pay $15 or more for the environment, the service and quality of meat prepared by a skilled chef. They are not the same thing.
A Kwh is the same thing. You don’t get anything extra paying 24.0¢/Kwh instead of 7.3¢/Kwh. Contrary to Vikings claims solar cannot outbid fossil fuels unless there is government intervention. Forcing investment in Solar by giving investors guaranteed profits and little to no risk is the worst form of capitalism, better known as crony capitalism.
If fossil fuels and our ability to extract them from the earth did begin to dry up or could not keep up with demand, then other forms of energy become attractive and do not require government forcing, or in the case of coal crippling, on the market. Whether solar is competitive at that time is unknown. A lot could happen in energy technology by then and the countries that are economically successful are the ones that find the path to the cheapest forms of energy not the more expensive.
>> This is a recognised fact.
It is NOT a recognized fact that McDonald’s is more expensive than other restaurants. In the US, McDonald’s is one of the cheapest restaurants. The point is that other restaurants are still viable, even if less expensive restaurants are available somewhere.
>> Different products have different consumer markets and price points. … Kwh is the same thing
You have clarified nothing, since there is no fallacy. My point is that business viability is more complicated than a simple comparison of generation costs.
Take gasoline for example. In the US, we have 87 octane. All 87 is considered the same product, no matter which gas station you buy it from. However, gas prices vary all over the place, based on location, supply and demand. It’s same for a generator. If gasoline would run low in a certain area of the country, prices at those stations that have gas will naturally go up according to supply and demand.
It’s the same with electricity. Here is a brief intro. Here is a more detailed and fascinating explanation of the electricity market. If you watch that up to about the 17th minute, you’ll see that the spot price at one point was $43/MWh in Minnesota while it was $300/MWh in NJ.
>> Contrary to Vikings claims solar cannot outbid fossil fuels unless there is government intervention
Alx, this is a really ignorant statement. Do you realize that solar PV has no operating costs !! If you don’t believe me, you can look at the Variable O&M column.
This statement of yours is completely and utterly FALSE. Once built, solar PV can outbid any other power source. Natural gas is the easiest to outbid, since they have fuel costs that they cannot control. In January of 2014, some NG plants could not supply power for less than $1,000 / MWh.
Solar PV is the most similar to Nuclear power in terms of business model. Both have large up front investments, and very low operating costs. Nuclear variable operating costs are about 20 Mills/kWh (where Mill = 1/10 of one cent), so about 2 cents/kWh. No government intervention is required.
“VikingExplorer
June 16, 2015 at 7:25 am”
How many times do you need to be told you are wrong?
I never said solar thermal.
Would have liked to have seen nuclear in your list.
Great article Willis, as usual. I too had a bit of a chuckle (Gas powered solar plant HA HA HA. Err, no it’s not that funny actually). A lot of people do not understand the fact that each mirror will have two motors on it to track the sun (When it shines LOL). So, number of mirrors X 2 = the number of motors, plus all the electical systems, cables, power to drive them. It’s lunacy!
Friends:
Actually, there is a good reason for a government to subsidise a demonstration plant but only in a specific way and for a specific purpose. The solar power plant in this case demonstrates both why such subsidies are warranted and why they should not be abused (as they are in the case of this solar power plant).
Novelty risk inhibits demonstration of technologies for large and long-term investments such as power stations. I explain novelty risk and its importance as follows.
A power station needs to operate for at least 30 years. In its first 15 years of operation it is paying off its capital cost and after that it makes good profits. Investors in a new power station need to borrow the money for the capital.
The first full-scale power station that uses a novel technology provides a risk that unforeseen problems may close the power station before it has lasted 15 years so the investors fail to get their money back. (In the above article some such problems for the solar power plant are called effects of “the Law of Unintended Consequences”.) This is the novelty risk.
A loan for the capital investment is given a high interest rate to compensate for the novelty risk. Hence, a demonstration plant for a novel power generation plant may not have a possibility of being economically competitive whatever the potential benefits of the novel technology. And this can prevent such a demonstration plant being built although the technology may have large potential benefit to a national economy.
In this case, a government may reasonably underwrite the novelty risk of a single demonstration plant. If the plant is successful then the government pays nothing. But if the plant proves the technology is not viable – as is the case in the above solar plant example – then the government pays to meet the losses obtained from the demonstration and closes the plant.
Please note that underwriting the novelty risk of a single demonstration plant is NOT the government picking a winner. On the contrary, it is government investment to allow potential winners to exist while exposing potential technologies that cannot be winners. This is the exact opposite of renewables subsidies in e.g. the UK where vast amounts of money are expended as subsidies to prop-up technologies such as windpower that – by any rational evaluation – are failures.
Richard
“there is a good reason for a government to subsidise a demonstration plant”
Interesting, but there are many subtle and not-so-subtle public policy issues with government-backed “demonstrations”.
– If the unit works but with more costly maintenance than expected, who foots the bill? Who gets to say “too much is now really way too much, experiment is over now”?
– What if further analysis shows that observed failure modes were actually predictable by classical engineering methods? What is the responsibility of the “entrepreneurs” (not so much, actually) who submitted the flawed design?
The commercial value of IP depends on the knowledge that technology actually works:
– Who gets the “intellectual property”?
With this scheme, the state funds private R&D. This type of organisation creates deep ties between parts of the private sectors and the state, and this can be unhealthy if the state gets to choose who gets the IP benefit of public funded research, with friendly corporation who will back the government and encourage more spending, etc.
Very new designs can have serious issues that requires technical changes; they can fail to reach some design goals but succeed elsewhere; they can fail to meet the original idea of working in all conditions but work in some restricted conditions, with a limited workload, etc. For example, parts of Superphenix design failed (notably the barrel loading thing), had many incidents (some pretty serious) but worked well at the end:
– Who gets to decide when a partial failure is a reason to stop the experiment?
– Who defines “failure”?
simple-touriste
Thankyou for your thoughtful post which is a stark contrast to the kneejerk reaction from another person.
As you say, demonstrations are often abused by governments. The example I cited was windfarms in the UK. Such abuses often take the form of claims that a technology needs to be subsidised to encourage its development; indeed, that is an excuse often used for subsidising windfarms. This is NOT a proper demonstration.
As I said,
And the answer to all your questions is clear.
If and when the plant owner asks the government for money then the technology has been demonstrated to be a failure.
And, of course, if the government is not asked for money then the novelty has been shown to have no demonstrable risk.
Richard
Willis Eschenbach
Your sophistry is not acceptable. You quoted me out of context and you did NOT quote the part of my comment you claim to disagree.
I repeat that I specifically stated
The obvious truth is that you read the first two paragraphs of my comment and made a knee-jerk reply without reading the rest.
Your subsequent verbosity does not change that.
And – as I said – my point is important for two reasons.
Firstly, there has been no large-scale novel engineering for over half a century. Recent significant advances have been in distributed computing and in laser applications. In both these cases the novelty risk is shared between many small incremental units. Furthermore, the lifetimes and pay-back periods of these units is very short compared to that of large infrastructure units (e.g. power stations or the 19th century railroads you cited).
Secondly, underwriting novelty risk of new technology demonstrates when technologies cannot work. It inhibits the justification used for subsidising losers such as windfarms, solar plants, etc.
Not content with failing to quote and address what I did write, you now say to me
Say what!?
I said no such thing and you do not quote what you are misunderstanding.
Perhaps you are refering to my having written this
If so, then I am at a loss to understand how you manage to equate that with your claim that I “said that the Ivanpah plant was a demonstration of why such subsidies are warranted” especially when my statement is taken in context: I said the subsidy of the Ivanpah plant is being “abused”.
My comment explained both “why such subsidies are warranted” and “why they should not be abused”. You are implying I said the abuse is warranted. I did not.
And you conclude your verbiage with this nonsense
Well if I had suggested that then you would have a point, but I did not.
What I did say – and bolded for emphasis – is clear; viz.
In conclusion, I repeat,
At the end of your above article you wrote
It would have helped if you had adopted that admonition.
Richard
richardscourtney June 17, 2015 at 12:39 am
Well, that’s a relief. It means I don’t have to go down your rabbithole.
Richard, I’m sorry you don’t like what I quoted, but it was what I disagreed with. And while it’s clear that you SAID that
… I fear that doesn’t make it so, regardless of whether or not I quoted that particular part of your disavowal.
However, I’m absolutely unwilling to get into one of your patented nit-picks with you, so I’m very glad my response has been deemed “not acceptable”. It lets me leave you to discuss this with others whose responses are acceptable.
Catch you on the rebound,
w.
richardscourtney June 16, 2015 at 1:10 am
Richard, somehow, we managed to move from wood to coal as our main energy source without any government subsidized demonstration plants. Nobody seemed to notice the demonstration of the coal-fired technologies required the government to eliminate the “novelty risk”.
And somehow, we managed to move from coal to oil as our main energy source without any government subsidized demonstration plants. I don’t recall the government subsidizing demonstration oil-burning plants.
And somehow, we’re managing to move from oil and coal to natural gas as our main energy source without any government subsidized demonstration plants. I guess they never noticed that they needed money out of my pocket in order to get natural gas going.
So I call BS on your claim that we need the government to pick and promote useless, ludicrous technologies, of which this project is a prime example. Here’s a simple rule, Richard:
If a new technology can’t survive without a government project to eliminate “novelty risk”, then it is NOT READY FOR THE MARKET.
Just like … oh … I don’t know … say the Ivanpah solar power plant.
w.
“If a new technology can’t survive without a government project to eliminate “novelty risk”, then it is NOT READY FOR THE MARKET.”
…
Shhhh…..don’t tell that to Elon Musk and Space-X or Branson with Virgin Galactic
Willis Eschenbach
You say
I call BS on your claim that I said we need the government to pick and promote useless, ludicrous technologies. On the contrary, I specifically refuted it.
At the end of your above article you wrote
It would have helped if you had adopted that admonition.
I said, and you did not quote but attempt to refute,
Nothing you have said refutes that. You have merely ignored it by asserting
Willis, if it needs a demonstration plant then – by definition – it is not ready for the market.
At issue is to demonstrate its technical and economic feasibility so it is enabled to enter the market or is shown to be non viable.
All governments underwrite novelty risks of novel technologies either overtly or covertly (e.g. by funding military developments).
Richard
richardscourtney June 16, 2015 at 10:30 am Edit
Sorry if I misunderstood you, Richard. What you said (and what I quoted) is that it is fine for the government to fund a “demonstration plant” in order to avoid “novelty risk”. Not only that but you also said that the Ivanpah plant was a demonstration of why such subsidies are warranted. Here is what I quoted:
I fail to see how this is NOT the government picking and promoting useless, ludicrous technologies.
I followed my admonition to the letter, Richard. I quoted exactly your defense of the government subsidies of this plant. I noted that you said you think the government should be in the business of shielding some chosen technology (but not all technologies) from what you call “novelty risk”.
How on earth is this NOT the government picking winners and promoting ludicrous technologies?
Richard, if I as some poor jerk want to go into the energy business with my new energy source, the government is not going to protect me against “novelty risk” any more than they protect Apple against “novelty risk” when they release the Apple Watch. NOR SHOULD THEY! It’s not the government’s business to pick out one group, oh, I don’t know, say Obama’s wealthy pals who run Google, and insure them against “novelty risk”.
So I’m sorry, Richard, but I did quote your ludicrous claim that the government should be in the business of making sure that insanely wealthy investors should be guaranteed a risk-free big money return on their investment, that they should be a special class of investors insured against “novelty risk” using taxpayer dollars …
I just think it’s wrong.
w.
It is none of the government’s business if it succeeds or fails. “Novelty risk” is a head fake.
Willis Eschenbach
My rejection of your recent post addressed to me is in the wrong place. Sorry.
It is here.
Richard
Gamecock
Whatever any anonymous internet pop-up may think, it is the business of a government to promote the success of its country’s national economy.
Richard
“It is the business of a government to promote the success of its country’s national economy.”
Not in a federalist, democratic constitutional republic. And by what stretch is giving money to cronies to play with solar going to promote the success of our economy?
Oh why not (:
Fight of the Century: Keynes vs. Hayek Round Two
Music starts @1:26
…One big miscalculation was that the power plant requires far more steam to run smoothly and efficiently than originally thought, according to a document filed with the California Energy Commission….
This doesn’t make sense to me. Engineers don’t ‘miscalculate’.
They would have KNOWN how much steam was needed, and they would have KNOWN how much steam was going to be evolved from the heating. And how rapidly. That’s why you pay engineers to design these things.
Is this piece suggesting that it was understood that the plant wouldn’t work as specified, but that people went ahead and built it anyway?
Seems unlikely, but Tacoma narrows bridge killed a sweet puppy.
No. The bridge had nothing to do with it. It was the owner of the puppy that left it in his car when he ran away after driving on to, what was clearly, something unsafe and likely to eventually fail.
Agreed that the owner was also responsible. Yea, why the heck did he stop driving, but once stopped, then why did he leave the dog? 🙁
However, my point is that as an engineer, I must reluctantly admit that it is theoretically possible for engineers to “miscalculate”, as they did for the TNB. 🙂
Well maybe the bridge spoke to him? I have seen cattle ships in Waterford harbour, Ireland, rocking side to side at the docks. Would I get on a ship like that? Hell no! Sheesh! Your argument is engineers/engineering fail/fails. Yes they/it do/does.
Engineers actually work in reality. Climate “scientists”…don’t work at all. Sure they get paid, but work?
Engineering does try to account for human stupidity and often a goal of design is to make it “idiot proof”. That’s why you cannot put a car into drive without your foot on the brake. A person trying to cross a bridge that was fluttering like a hair ribbon in a strong wind could not be engineered for. A bridge that would not flutter could be engineered.
The issue with the Tacoma narrows bridge was engineers did not understand how wind interacted with a suspension bridges. That gap in knowledge has been filled much greater understanding and application of aeroelasticity.
What knowledge was missing in mis-calculating how to heat a specific amount of water in a contained vessel in order to be wrong by a factor of 4?
This is not about “Climate scientists” in any way, shape or form. I’m reacting to what Dodgy Geezer said.
>> mis-calculating how to heat a specific amount of water in a contained vessel in order to be wrong by a factor of 4
Alx, either you’re confused or putting words in someone’s mouth. Willis mentioned that they were using 4 times more NG than they expected. I personally see nothing wrong with this. In my solar farm thought experiment, I also realized that it would be good to have a different source of power to stabilize the transitions between sun and no-sun.
You could be right about your claim, but do you have a reference? Regardless, without really analyzing this system, we can’t really say if someone made a big mistake or a small one. My gut says that this thing is pretty complex. It’s not a design I personally like, and like the market watch link says, this is probably the last of this type.
Who raised the topic of Tacoma?
Its called fluffing.
It’s like asking a used car dealer how a car you are interested in runs. The answer is of course that it runs great, it’s probably best running car on the lot with great gas mileage. Fails to mention it runs rough in rainy weather and the great mileage occurs going down steep hills at highway speeds with a tail wind.
So yes of course they know, they fudged the numbers or used best possible case in best possible conditions to suggest all cases in all conditions in order to make the sale. Subsidized solar is basically free money for investors.
“Alx
June 16, 2015 at 5:36 am
That’s why you cannot put a car into drive without your foot on the brake.”
Oh yes you can! Talking of automagic gearboxes…yes you can. One can by-pass these “safety” systems easily. Having extensive knowledge of the ZF 4HP22 automagic gearbox fitted to Range Rovers in the 1990’s, I put one of these, behind a Rover V8, in a LandRover 90. And found out that there was wiring and warning lights on the dash for such a transmisssion. About a year later, an auto LandRover was on sale in California.
Richard I’d really like to believe what you are saying.
But ask yourself this “Does the Government have a good record of picking winners?”
Bitter&Twisted
It seems you failed to read what I wrote because you ask
No. It does not, but so what? I wrote
Please read what I wrote and comment on that.
Richard
Please stop calling these technologies “renewables”. This is all part of the fictional “science” that somehow energy comes for free. The reality is that just like other energy sources “unrelieables” are consumed. Wind is halted so it is no longer available – solar is consumed so it replaces plants – likewise hydro replaces it’s natural use.
But it all gets worse when we consider the total energy budget of how much energy goes into making the equipment. In many cases if not most, the sum total energy consumed putting a bird-mincer in place is greater than the total energy produced in its lifetime. (As indicated by the need for subsidies – higher subsidies indicate higher energy used in installation, production, etc.)
In effect many co called “renewable” devices are little better than batteries for fossil fuel. The vast bulk of energy is used producing the thing – and then they gather energy, but less than was used in production. So, in effect, a bird-mincer is little better than an enormous battery storing fossil fuel energy in China and shipping it to where some gullible government pays for the fossil fuel energy under the guise of being “renewable”.
So, let’s stop calling them “renewable”, because they are nothing of the sort. Instead I suggest a far better term that very succinctly describes them is “unreliables”.
Scottish Sceptic:
Actually, all energy “comes for free”: it was all created at the Big Bang and now cannot be created or destroyed.
But it is expensive to collect energy and to concentrate it so it can do useful work.
Fortunately, nature has done much of the collection and concentration for us.
The energy concentrated in ancient stars is available in radioactive materials, notably uranium. Energy from formation of the solar system (including collected radioactivity) is available as geothermal energy. Solar energy collected by photosynthesis over geological ages is available as fossil fuels. Solar energy collected by evapouration of water over large areas is available as hydropower.
Diffuse energy sources were used for millennia because higher energy densities were not available. These diffuse sources included wind power, biomass and power of the muscles of slaves and animals.
These diffuse sources were abandoned when the greater energy intensity in fossil fuels became available to do work by use of the steam engine. But, of course, hydropower was not abandoned because it has high energy intensity.
There is no possibility that an industrialised civilisation can operate if it abandons the sources of high energy density collected by nature and returns to using the energy that humans collect themselves.
Richard
Good point, all energy is free. The cost of making it usable energy varies by the source.
Renewable is kind of a meaningless term like the term “beautiful”. It’s meaning greatly flexible by time period, culture, and individual. Even by application; we do not use the same criteria for evaluating a fashion model as we do a power tool but both can be described as beautiful.
Renewable intuitively and by definition means “capable of being renewed”, but now it means anything related to a green energy agenda. Apparently sailboats have always used renewable energy and sailors like Columbus just never knew, they thought it was wind.
Like brand mangers know, using “new” in a product description increases sales, that is why they are always coming up with a “new” shampoo, “new” razor blade, etc. “Renewable” sounds better than “NeverEnding Energy”, or “Endless Energy”; you don’t want to ever use “End” in selling a product, unless it is religion. And like people know you are full of it if you called it, “Free Energy”, they also know it would end if they stopped paying for it.
IMO energy is not free, it is “there”. We just need to work out how to collecte it. And that costs!
Patrick:
I understand you to say that energy is not “free” but it has no cost.
That makes no sense.
Richard
I dont know how you came to that conclusion. Energy, in whatever for is right there, Tesla demonstrated that, we just need to collect and distribute it. That is where the cost is. Given your position on “energy” industries (Coal) I am surprised you made that comment.
Patrick
Given your position on brains (you have one) I am surprised you made that comment.
Richard
Based on its actual performance its correct rating is 45 MW not 392. It seems that it is bankrupt.
Do they need natural gas to ‘warm the plant through’ after each cold night?
Could they just use 1% of mirrors pointed correctly to warm the plant, melt the salts and get the temperature up before power starts to be generated?
One would have to be careful of not falling into the Spanish trap of using fossil fuel generated electricity and passing it off as solar to collect the subsidies…..
PS: I assume these plants have diesel backup in case the grid connection fails, which allow for an orderly shutdown of the plant and no melt down.
Do we know how much diesel they use?
Renewable Fuel Standards mandating that electricity distributors buy excess generation way above market price make the finances work. That is YIELDCO. Aka bugger your neighbor. Aka rent seeking. Without that piece none of this make financial sense.
Ivanpah beats the Swedish Marviken known as the only Nuclear Plant running on oil.