From the road to green hell is paved with good intentions (and dead birds) department and MarketWatch comes this unsurprising news:
A federally backed, $2.2 billion solar project in the California desert isn’t producing the electricity it is contractually required to deliver to PG&E Corp., which says the solar plant may be forced to shut down if it doesn’t receive a break Thursday from state regulators.
The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, owned by BrightSource Energy Inc., NRG Energy Inc. NRG, +0.79% and Alphabet Inc.’s GOOG, +0.02% GOOGL, +0.15% Google, uses more than 170,000 mirrors mounted to the ground to reflect sunlight to 450-foot-high towers topped by boilers that heat up to create steam, which in turn is used to generate electricity.
But the unconventional solar-thermal project, financed with $1.5 billion in federal loans, has riled environmentalists by killing thousands of birds, many of which are burned to death — and has so far failed to produce the expected power.
more here
wow thousands of birds !!!! thousands sure is a big number !!! Is it at all significant ? I doubt it I am surprised no one here mentioned the insignificance of that number
There are maybe 20 BILLION birds in the USA
john – you are right that an unanchored appeal to a big number of birds killed is kind of emotional but meaningless. Comparing the killed birds to their total US presence is kind of emotional but meaningless as well. If all power in the US was as hard on the birds as Ivanpah assuming killing 1000/year, then power production would kill well over 1/4 of the 20 BILLION birds in the USA. If it’s over a couple thousand that’s more than half.
Ivanpah seems to be right on track for power production Why didn’t Anthony choose to give us any numbers ?http://cleantechnica.com/2015/09/07/breaking-ivanpah-generation-track/
And all the regulators and the PG&E people and the Ivanpah people needed to do was…….read your cleantechnica article!?!?!
They could have saved a ton of money and time. Why didn’t you let them know?
Since this plant had huge fixed costs that can not be recovered and should be ignored as “sunk costs” in relation to decisions on the further operation of the plant – it should be rightfully identified as a colossal screw up if the plant can not produce enough to just offset it’s ongoing incremental costs. Even if it were just a seriously bad decision, looking forward ignoring sunk costs, this plant SHOULD look wonderful and should be mistakenly touted as wonderful by all on the green fringe.
State of the art solar power plant failing even when it’s located slap-bang in the middle of a scorching desert? Says all you need to know about the complete fantasy of ‘renewables’.
The following text and numbers show how the planned-for performance, capital and operational expenses and earnings at Ivanpah compare with another electricity producing plant. The predicted Capacity Factor of 31 % indicates a 120 MW expected actual average output from this CSP plant. That is the number we shall work with for simplicity disregarding that 8 % of that electricity comes from gas, not sun.
The 2200 M$ price per those 120 MW represents 18 $/W investment. By way of comparison, another nonpolluting source of electricity, nuclear power plant, the Millstone reactor No. 2 in Connecticut, operating at 880 MW since 1975, cost 0.5 $/W then; Ivanpah is thus 36 times more expensive (inflation excluded).
With about 1000 employees receiving salary and benefits, the annual outlay for that alone is roughly 100 M$. Selling the annual 3.8 EJ at the projected 0.028 $/MJ yields 106 M$. Ouch – only 6 M$ left for other expenses, notably for natural gas whose burning produces 8 % or more of the total output. For comparison again, the Millstone nuclear plant complex employs also about 1000, and its two reactors have been producing 1870 MW actual electrical output. Assuming the same salaries, benefits, and the electricity selling price, the operating expense is 15 times higher at Ivanpah.
Note that the above two outlays are 35 and 15 times higher (not percent higher), and that this huge discrepancy exists in an industry where a difference of a few percent means the difference between success and bankruptcy. The magnitude of the discrepancy hints also at the reason why the “free” solar electricity is so expensive.*
As for the occupied land comparison, those 120 MW spread over 13 km2 represents 9.2 W/m2. In contrast, ground based nuclear plants produce some 2000 W/m2 thus utilizing the land area some 200 times more effectively. And they can be erected in any climate and in proximity to users.
If the purpose of the CSPs is to cut CO2 emissions, that expectation is unrealistic. The construction, operating, maintaining and eventually dismantling this plant will at best match the amount of CO2 claimed to be saved in non-burning fossil-fuels for that relatively small amount of electricity. And producing intermittent electricity causes CO2 generation elsewhere.
And there are other items to consider with respect to the net output and CO2. It was not apparent from the description whether the electric output was measured at the outlet from the generators (or transformers) or whether it was that output minus the electrical demand on the grid for electricity consumed from dusk to dawn in the plant, such as for lighting, air-conditioning, washing mirrors, water pumping, restarting machinery, etc. The plant also burns gasoline, diesel fuel and, prodigiously, natural gas as said in the email. These considerations should be included in the performance data for the net electricity delivered and CO2 saved. Perhaps they will be available someday.
Concerning the DOE covering the invested billions, it was not just tax- and rate-payers who paid. Google, among others, invested millions from its “green” fund, the same Google that abandoned its own PV solar facility and related R&D last year (2014).**
*In the summer of 2015 the wholesale price was 2.0 cents per kWh in New England, a region with the highest rate in the US at this time. And those two cents cover also taxes, debt-servicing, dividend payments, etc. and provide profit.
** http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/google-engineers-explain-why-they-stopped-rd-in-renewable-energy
Stan Jakuba
Good information. Since most of the large scale “strange new idea” renewable projects like Google’s have a curious drawn out pattern to shutdown, what we really need to see is the cost-to-taxpayers ticker tape for this behavior. Vinod Khosla and others were up to the same grant and loan money laundering operations then. Also, it’s important to note what else Google was up to during these years. It was hosting large fundraisers for the Climate Change President while also seeking delays to any legislation that would halt its zero tax rate on foreign earnings transfer operations out of the EU market. I rather doubt that the internal thought pattern and set of related actions at Google will ever come out for public viewing. We do need a permanent wikileaks operation assigned to Climate Change though for agencies, companies, and nonprofits.
How many personnel does it take to manage a 500 MW utility scale solar PV plant? I visited a 35 MW PV site in NM and it had two, well one that I could find to talk to and two vehicles there.
Some large scale examples follow.
Topaz, CA 550 MW
Desert Sunlight, CA 550 MW
Agua Caliente, AZ 290 MW
Also, if you’re going to get into land comparison then you need to account for coal ash storage and nuclear waste isolation provisions.
A 720 MW natural gas combined cycle plant in New Hampshire employed 19 people, IIRC. That included office personnel, janitor, etc.
A 66 MW wind project (about 22 MW average output) employees some 2.5 fulltime people. A lot of the normal maintenance is replacing the Mobil-1 transmission oil a few times a year, maintenance costs should go up substantially during the project’s lifetime.
The birds will be celebrating!
Birds don’t belong in the desert. They need to congregate in chosen centers with other birds so as to reduce their carbon footprint.
These birds are deniers and so either need to be reeducated or suffer the consequences of their non sustainable lifestyles.
My last power bill ranged from $0.05 a KWH to about $0.055 a KWH. With line charges taxes and everything it worked out to $0.14.1 a KWH. All generated by coal. Germany, the leader in alternative energy scams, they pay $0.35 a KWH. Denmark is worse at $0.41 a KWH.
If they could sell these garage door sized mirrors for $12,941 each, they could recoup the cost of the plant. Be the first in your neighborhood with a giant mirrored garage door. Very unusual and will increase the market value of your home.
Until some motorist is dazzled by the glare, crashes and sues you for a million dollars.
For you Google Earth people, the view location is: 35°33’24.91″ N 115°28’14.59″ W
You can zoom in to see each individual “garage door” mirror. And you can also see how much space this takes up in the desert. How many conventional power plants, or oil wells could this amount of space allow?
Oh dear, such a shame (ROL).
Shut it now before it hoovers up more tax $$$$s
Why not send out letters to ratepayers and taxpayers in California asking for donations to a fund to provide for early shutdown of Ivanpah. It would help save the children….and the birds…..and taxpayers.
The chickens are coming home to roost in faraway places it seems-
http://joannenova.com.au/2016/03/oil-giant-venezula-green-giant-tasmania-both-running-out-of-electricity/
Here in Oz the mendicant island State of Tasmania is full of Green daydreamers and that have been subsidized by the rest of the country for years and now they’re having to painfully resort to emergency diesel power for their blind ignorance and stupidity-
http://themarcusreview.com/2016/03/16/tasmanias-energy-scandal/
The only question being will they learn from the hard lesson and wake up permanently from their Green wet dreams?
How are the grand CSP solar projects doing in Australia? Those came alongside expansion of solar PV as if to ignore the cost differences between the too even then.
See the bird fryer in action…. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ivanpah+bird+streamers+
Is Ivanpah a banned word among green energy advocacy groups and their legislators, like say Voldemort? If so, there may be cloak room attempts to keep Ivanpah off the radar screen as long as possible and thereby extend the taxpayer losses.
http://www.brightsourceenergy.com/the-top-five-things#.VHYo574XtDI
“The Top Five Things Some Media Can’t Seem to Remember About Ivanpah”
4) We Don’t Control the Weather – Weather is variable, and the weather this year at Ivanpah has generally been substantially worse than projected on a historical average basis, resulting in reduced output for certain months. In fact, the amount of sun for 2014 has been about 9% below predicted and wind events were more frequent than that predicted by the historical data…
5) Natural Gas is Used to Maximize Renewable Energy Generation in Accordance with State Law – During the startup and commissioning process, the plant operators have increased their understanding of plant operations, including the prudent use of natural gas for safe and reliable operation of the solar receiver and steam turbine.
I have a bad picture of the site from my passing airplane, we were well off but it was still quite bright from the air. Very much having a person shine sunlight by mirror into your face. I always love the irony that we are being accused of the mass extinction of the bird population and somehow a massive bird cooker or chopper (windmill) is somehow a cool. But maybe with its failure they wont have to kill off all of those desert species to rape huge tracts of land for these monstrosities.
Could a terrorist group use the mirror array to crash planes?
Sure, after a little repositioning. See a James Bond movie Die another day.
There are studies that show bird deaths from different sources of power generation. It is probably worth a search.
Looking at this enormous solar energy complex, the gigantic soil destroying wind mill farms, all I see is enormous environmental destruction. This green energy baloney is an environmental disaster.
Too bad for the anti-greens: the California PUC has approved the modification of the contract. Ivanpah lives on!
Now to modify the developer, Abengoa just went bankrupt. http://www.nasdaq.com/article/spains-abengoa-files-for-chapter-15-bankruptcy-in-us2nd-update-20160329-00828