From the L.A. Times:
A generating tower at the world’s largest solar energy plant was shut down Thursday after a mirror misalignment caused sunlight to burn through electrical wiring and start a small fire, according to officials.
The blaze at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in the Mojave Desert broke out around 9:30 a.m., according to the San Bernardino County Fire Department. In a Facebook post, officials said that flames could be seen near the ninth floor of the Unit 3 tower, but that they had apparently died out by the time firefighters arrived.
…
Some misaligned mirrors instead focused sunlight on a different spot, which caused the electrical cables to catch fire, San Bernardino County Fire Capt. Mike McClintock told the Associated Press.
From Computerworld:
The fire at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating Systemin California forced firefighters to climb 300 feet up the tower to a water boiler that’s superheated by tens of thousands of mirror to create steam to run a turbine.
According to an AP report, San Bernardino County fire Capt. Mike McClintock said the small fire occurred about two-thirds of the way up the boiler tower. It was caused after some of the plant’s mirrors became misaligned and focused the sun’s rays on electrical cables, which caught fire.
h/t to Stand Stendera
The plant had been plagued by production problems, and state utility regulators had threatened to shut it down if it didn’t get back on track. They gave it a temporary reprieve.
It has been on track according to recent reports, but this latest setback may derail that effort.
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I’m sure when they were children, their mothers told them to be careful where they aimed those death rays. NOW, I’ll bet they wish they’d paid more attention to mom.
Does this mean we are going to have political fights over Solar Death Ray Control (like Gun Control only, ya know, Solar Death Rays), now? I wonder where the NRA will be on this issue. 🙂
The NRA’s official policy on gun control is to hit what you’re aiming at. Had these people done that, there would have been no fire.
I sure she said “You’ll death ray your eye out!”
I’m sure when they were children, their mothers told them to be careful where they aimed those death rays. NOW, I’ll bet they wish they’d paid more attention to mom.
You’ll shoot your eye out. — A Christmas Story
Yup, Remember what she said about playing with matches and bed wetting?
” Save your pee for the fire”?
If I were a fireman, I would climb their tower just as soon as I knew that the last of the 700,000 mirrors was lying on the ground face down, and that the incoming electric cables to the controlling computer bank, were disconnected from the breaker box.
Otherwise I would let it burn itself out.
g
PS And I would close down all of California air space, from any flying machines, including Go Pro Quad copters.
When that thing is fully ” fired up ” as we say in the trade, does anybody know just how much near black body thermal radiation that thing is emitting to space.
That has to be the brightest thermionic emitter on the planet.
Somebody designed this thing, right ? or did it just fall off the back of a turnip truck.
Turnips have to be there somewhere in the design team.
g
“does anybody know just how much near black body thermal radiation that thing is emitting to space.”
Are you suggesting that making objects very very hot is a way to reduce AGW?
Makes sense – well, as much as any other geoengineering proposition.
Well I don’t know how much you know about fancy “lighting”, but one of the commonest yuppie lighting gizmos is a thing called an MR-16 lamp.
It is a high Temperature quartz envelope 50 mm diameter, by about 35 mm long, available to run on either 120 V AC or 12 V DC. Well it’s a quartz halogen light bulb, and they hang them on string wires that are supposed to be sexy, but you can move them around by sliding them along the bare wires.
Well these things are available with up to 50 watt power rating, in either spot or wide area beam patterns.
The string wires, and the terminals on the back of the MR-16 bulb are quite incapable of conducting any of that 50 watt “heat” away from the bulb, and only a few percent of it comes out the front in the form of visible illumination (aka light).
So the ONLY way that an MR-16 light bulb is prevented from melting down, and dripping molten quartz all over the place, is that it is coated with a IR black coating that makes it a very efficient IR radiator at some very high quartz temperature.
The entire 50 watt power is dissipated as black body thermal radiation in a Lambertian pattern right off the 50 mm diameter face of the bulb.
So what happens when the solid state LED people set out to make a drop in plug and play LED replacement for a 50 watt quartz halogen MR-16 bulb.
Well for starters, their 50 watt equivalent LED source is actually only going to take about 8 or 9 watt of DC electricity to put out the same amount of illumination as the 50 W quartz halogen, so you only need to get rid of 9 watt instead of 50.
Well you don’t even need to do that, because the LED might actually be more than 40 % efficient in converting electricity to “light” or visible EM radiation, so now you only have five watt of heat to get rid of and you want to get rid of essentially all of it, because the LED does not want to run at a Temperature of 600 deg. C or anything like it. Even 80 to 100 deg C junction temperature for the LED is highly undesirable.
So the problem is, that you cannot properly cool an LED MR-16 replacement lamp that is a 50 watt equivalent.
Well Soraa has done a respectable job of meeting that criterion.
The whole problem would disappear if they ditched the MR-16 concept, and designed a replacement 50 mm lamp fixture that properly provides for conducting the 5 watt of heat out of the base to the external package.
The idea of a plug in LED replacement for an incandescent lamp is quite absurd. The LED isn’t going to need to be replaced, so whay make it plug in in the first place.
Anyhow, the whole point of this shaggy dog story is that a macro scale SOLAR furnace, that converts the energy receiver into a nice black body radiator, that is a sizeable fraction of the brightness of the sun, is just stupid to begin with.
That tower needs to be coated with an efficient dichroic mirror coating, that lets solar spectrum (0.25-4.0) micron EM radiation in and does not let longer wave thermal radiation out.
If the boiler were to run at 600 kelvin, it would be generating a 2.5 to 40 micron IR spectrum, so you likely would put the crossover wavelength at around 2.5 microns, which would lose a bit of solar IR but keep the generated heat inside the target.
I think the whole thing is not only a piece of optical crap, but also a piece of thermal crap, and evaporated bird aromas thrown in for good measure.
G
A Green “Climate” industry which can whitewash and rationalize dead birds making smoke streamers through the sky will have no trouble with this minor fire issue.
Can I have fries with my barbequed bird, please.
They aren’t barbecued. They are sacrificed to Gaia.
That’s not sacrificed to Gaia; that’s sacrificed for Giai. Giai being Gore Is An Idiot.
Well you have to inhale them; they smell just like fried chicken.
g
I’ve drove past this plant many a time on the 15. It’s very impressive to see yet I have to shake my head every time. This technology is best described in one word: fail.
This should be the final nail in the coffin of this pointlessly expensive fiasco.
Yeah like coal mine accidents, oil spills, explosions at oil refineries, fires at power plants, pipeline ruptures, and fuel tanker truck accidents were reason to stop fossil fuel energy. Not to mention the effects on air quality (that we all breath).
You forgot to mention things like beer floods, molasses floods, dams bursting, cats and dogs living together, etc.
SMC: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood
David,
Cats and Dogs living together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfVcvyxLj-s
Sam,
Air is cleaner now than it has been for half a century or more in almost all places (except China which ironically continues to be held up as a shining example of how great the socialist model is for the environment).
All of the examples you cited were productive, profit-making commercial enterprises along the way, unlike Ivanpah which is not and will not ever be able to carry it’s own water, so to speak.
The accidents you mentioned did not disrupt the flow of electricity. The world’s largest solar energy plant just lost a third of its ability to produce energy. See the difference?
In the end though, nobody cares. The percentage solar plants contribute to the worlds energy needs is close to a rounding error. Which as this incident shows is a good thing.
http://edgarcountywatchdogs.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Sublette-Turbine_Fire-Blade.jpg
Any greenhouse gases released?
Is vaporized aluminum a green house gas?
Vaporized aluminum is a deadly gas to welders !
Prolly at least irritating to greenhouse workers . .
Are any greenhouse gases released?
No more than would be released by burning any other greenhouse.
Lots of them all the time. It’s got three huge honking gas-fired pre-heaters, one at the foot of each tower. It burns so much gas that it’s on the state list of major emitters. So much for solar being supposedly an emissions-free technology.
Geesh you’d think solar would be grateful to fossil fuels for making it’s existence possible.
Now who would have predicted that could happen.
any reasonably competent mechanical engineer during the design process.
No need for a mechanical engineer. It was a blinding glimpse of the obvious to (almost) anyone.
Mechanical engineer?, check your energy well for a mechanical engineer We have no mechanical engineer. In fact, we don’t need a mechanical engineer. I don’t have to show you any stinking mechanical engineer.
Everybody knows the mirrors are controlled by software! We have our best programmer on it right now. We know he is working on it because we found empty RedBull cans and fresh potato chip bags in the trash when we came in this morning.
Murphy.
RWturner May 20, 2016 at 7:57 am
posted a picture of what appears to be some of the damage. You can find it in the comments of the article:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/05/20/aussie-climate-professor-governments-may-need-extraordinary-emergency-powers/
Ivanpah suffering an engineering failure on top of failure to meet cost projections. Typical green project. I do suppose the government (we poor fools) are picking up the cost of repair.
Hmmm .. misaligned mirrors .. is that PR talk for hacked computers? .. nah, can’t be .. I’m sure they have everything under control .. under control .. under control …
Most likely a software bug…
Houses have bugs. Software has mistakes. Completely different.
Micro$oft Patch !
g
Ivanpah becomes self-aware at 9:30 a.m. Western time, May 19th. Some of the mirrors decide to take out the Master Control Program. In a panic, the firemen try to pull the plug.
Ivanpah becomes self-aware, and being a computer, realizes how insane its existence is. Suicide is the logical response.
LOL! +100 to you both (Janice the Elder and Joelobryan).
” Sterilize ! ” You are in error ! In this case you may ” Cauterize ”
g
And what happens when there is a power failure/outage during the day and the Sun moves to the correct position to melt the whole building or just enough to weaken the structure supporting that reservoir of high temperature salt? Next disaster will happen, guaranteed.
I’m sure there is some fail-safe mechanism, that safes all of these mirrors instantly. A shaped charge behind each mirror would work nicely.
Nothing like a molten salt bath to start your day off. They would all become pillars of salt.
Hey, it’s new technology and a pilot plant. That they were able to get production up to 67,300 megawatt-hours electricity in February, up from about 30,300 a year earlier is great! That’s a whole bunch of oil we didn’t need to import from our buddies in the mideast.
It also suggests that the technology works. Because this plant was new technology, costs are going to be high. Whether they now know how to duplicate the plant and make it cost effective is an interesting question. It’s all pretty basic technology though.
Hey, that’s funny..thanks : )
67MWH is pretty much nothing. I doubt the Saudi’s, or the Texan’s, or the North Dakotan’s, or the Alaskan’s, or the Canadian’s, or the Venezuelan’s noticed the difference in terms of oil production.
This kind of technology has worked for years. It’s never been cost effective. With current technology, it’s not likely, if ever, to be cost effective…when compared to other sources of energy, e.g. nuclear or fossil fuel.
That was 67,300 megawatt-hours, not 67MWH. It’s about 116 thousand barrels of oil, if I did the math right. Per month.
My bad, you are correct, 67,000MWH…still almost nothing. 116K barrels of oil per month is nothing, when compared to the 35K barrels of oil per day that is processed in the smallest oil refinery I have been in. In most of the refineries I’ve been in, that would even be one days worth of production.
oops, last sentence should read, ‘…wouldn’t even be one days production.’
the beer and late night are starting to affect my typing. 🙂
Not to mention they use NG to power electrical generation in California instead of oil. No need to import oil for electrical generation when we have plenty of NG here.
67,000 MWH’s is a pittance. There are about 720 hrs in month, so it had an average power of 93MW. And of course you would have to subtract the natural gas balancing and the enormous construction costs to get net. An output of 93MW is less than 5% of the output of a 2 tower nuclear plant or 10% of a medium coal or nat gas plant. That amt of power is meaningless to the overall grid.
So Ivanpah put out 93MW on 4,000 acres while the nuclear plant to close to my house put outs 2400MW on 1,000 acres, and most of that is buffer zone. The power output per acre for the nuclear is 100x times the solar. And of course Ivanpah is way more expensive. But somehow we are saving something with this JUNK!
It seems more like newer uses for older technology.
Yeah Greg, and what’s a few fried birds and a couple of fires, gee we must be horrible to worry about environmental damage when it comes to new technology. /sarc.
And as I said below.. those bird kills will probably only happen for the first year or two. !
Dropping down to near zero after that..
… As they run out of birds to burn? I’ll have to remember that excuse the next time an oil spill happens.
“We fully expect the number of dead birds washing up on shore to drastically reduce now that they’re all dead.”
They counted 220 bird kills from the oil spill in California last year and the Santa Barbara County District Attorney has filed 46 criminal charges against them. How many criminal charges should be filed for 2200 bird kills at a thermal solar plant?
“Hey, it’s new technology and a pilot plant.”
Um, no and no.
@Greg:
You say: “That’s a whole bunch of oil we didn’t need to import from our buddies in the mideast.”
I don’t know if your comment at 7:18 pm is sarcastic or sincere. For the umpteenth time however, allow me to repeat what I have to keep having to remind people here at WUWT: We in the U.S. DO NOT use crude oil to generate electricity except for a meager 1% of it. Solar and wind energy, no matter how much you try to scale it up, it is not going to make any meaningful difference in our demand for crude oil, domestic or imported. We use crude oil for transportation fuels, petrochemicals and artificial materials like plastics and polyester.
See here: http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=427&t=3.
CD, you are correct to point that out. A heck of a lot of your imports are coming from Canada because US-based ‘agents’ have managed to stall every pipeline that leads out of central-western Canada. 350.org is here in Waterloo right now trying to get the entire industry ‘disinvested’. As a result, oil from Alberta has to be trained out of the country south, mostly dumped on the central northern US market. This keeps the price of gas down in the Dakotas, but costs Canada 50% of value.
In other words, the rent-a-gangs (as the BC Premier called them) showing up to block all the pipelines are being funded by the likes of the Sierra Club through local NGO’s who of course love the income. One local NGO head admitted on CBC radio they received $17,000 a week of US funding for multiple years to campaign against any western pipeline to the coast.
A new favourite tactic is to hire First nations residents to create loud noises about the ‘environment’ and how ‘dangerous’ everything is. Check the news reports. Selling ‘noble savage’ environmental concepts plays well in the urban press.
As for the solar fiasco and ‘saving oil’, how much oil did it take to create this tower of financial power? How much oil will be needed to generate the income necessary to raise the taxes to pay back the loans? If we are going to run a renewables economy, they can start by charging a fair rate of return on the investment, and use the electricity to make solar panels. Let’s see if the energy put into the panel production is less than those panels produce.
If so, what is the break-even cost of a panel?
How much will the electricity from that PV panel have to sell for to pay for the cost of the electricity that went into making it, when that electricity comes from Ivanpah?
Subsidies don’t work. They are lazy.
….and, if anyone is interested, the EIA has updated their website that I linked to above. Solar’s annual contribution to our electricity generation total is now at 0.6% as of April 1st of this year. If I recall correctly, that is up from 0.4% in 2015.
Sure, one can claim that solar generation has risen 50% in a year’s time. It is still a laughably meager total, especially when one considers that the solar PV panel was invented 62 years ago in 1954. Any technology that takes in excess of 62 years to scale up the meaningful commercial levels probably never will.
Crispin in Waterloo has described the situation in Canada perfectly. The sleaziest tactic of all is bribing FN tribes. It is eco-imperialism.
Crispin in Waterloo:
Are PV panels a major cost in a grid-connected PV system?
Slywolfe, asking Crispin in Waterloo:
Yes. But they are only a part. Land. Installation. Infrastructure to DO the installation. (Roads, power, water, concrete, housing, transportation to a site in the desert a loooooooong way away from civilization. (If it takes 1-1/2 to drive to the construction site, you lose 3 hours per day per worker just getting to work! More for every ton of materials that have to get there. And be removed when finished. ) Long-distance connecting lines to the high-volt grid. The routine maintenace and servicing for hundreds of thusands of solar panels.
And then replacing the panels at their 7-9 year life. If not, their output drops to less than half of first-installed rating.
Now, if the solar panel is on roof-top. some of these go away. Grid power is to the house, land is bought – only the expensive roof top mounts are needed. Daily and monthly maintenance is needed – particularly of the batteries. 7-9 year replacement of all panels and supports are still needed. But you only get a little power from a rooftop array. Part of the day power for only a part of the single house’s daily load.
How significant is the cost of grid upgrade to handle variable and intermittent power?
“And then replacing the panels at their 7-9 year life. If not, their output drops to less than half of first-installed rating. ”
RACookPE1978, that’s not even close to the truth. Most panels carry a 20 year warranty for output. They can drop 20% in 20 years, not 50% in 9 years.
Paul and the rest:
The POV crystalline panels drop about 20% in 20 years assuming the epoxy coating is not damaged. It has been like that for a long time. So good quality panels are far better than the flexible kind. So a 22% efficiency system drops to 18% over 20 years.
A friend put them on his rooftop recently and is getting paid CDN$0.345 per kWh by the power company. That is 10 times the cost from Darlington nuclear power or Pickering.
It is obviously someone’s fantasy to have ‘solar power’ on their development agenda. One is not allowed to go off-grid, BTW, if you sign the contract. Ontario has a $7 bn subsidy plan to force home heating to be moved from cheap co-produced natural gas (which is otherwise burned to get rid of it) to electric heating, such as geothermal. I investigated geothermal. It appears not to be worth it though they do (mostly) work. There is nothing really attractive about it. When the electricity is off in winder storm you freeze to death. A propane or gas connection is still needed.
Perhaps we need a natural gas generator to power the geothermal compressors when the power goes down. There is no end of complexity we can add if it is ‘free’.
How much natural gas did they burn to produce that 67,300 MWh?
Please include references to backup your claims.
If my back of the napkin calculations are correct. 67,300MWH in a month equates to roughly 93.5MW. The plant is supposed to be capable of 392MW. 93.5 MW isn’t even the capacity of one of the three units, according to Wikipedia (ya, ya, I know, Wikipedia isn’t a scholarly source). This is supposed to be efficient and cost effective?
“That’s a whole bunch of oil we didn’t need to import from our buddies in the mideast.”
Wonder how much oil it took the make those thousands of mirrors?
It’s a rounding error. It’s less than 5% of California’s annual coal consumption, which is the smallest of all the fuel sources California uses including renewables. It’s an undetectible fraction compared with the emissions-free electricity lost when San Onofre closed and California emissions went up. Secondly, California doesn’t get its oil from the Middle East. It gets most of it from Texas refineries which in turn are largely supplied from the US, Canada and Venezuela.
It also suggests that rare migratory birds were not incinerated mid-flight during the outage
and the natural gas from fracking that is used to produce 1/4 of the output was not spent.
The only way to duplicate he plant is to have another Senate Majority leader and his son ensure the Chinese get Stimulous funds from taxpayers through a money laundering scheme. The likelihood of that happening again is nill unless they are friends of Klinton Inc..
That’s 67TW’s at the generator. After you subtract the energy needed to run the plant, the net output was negative.
Less than 1% of electricity is generated from oil in the US. Very little (if any) oil was saved.
Fire is good. Our first way to generate heat from trapped carbon. It’s worked for 10,000 years and is still working. I had a barbecued burger tonight. Wish I had a small solar furnace in my backyard and I wouldn’t even need those naughty carbon atoms.
Ronald, buy a magnifying glass, see if you can barbecue your burgers with that.
Give me a big enough magnifying glass and I’ll barbeque the world. 🙂
Are you related to Marvin the Martian?
Hey SMC,
You forgot to ask for a place to stand.
g
Greg, well no. They burn gas and somewhere a real power station has to cover their output. Some “pilot” plant
Cost 2.2 billion, income 25 million……………………………………………When will it close?
When the the Climate Lysenkoism ends.
In the USSR, Lysenkoism ended when Stalinin’s hand picked successor fell from power,
Silly rabbit. Climate Math is different from ordinary math. 1 +1=3. That’s how they roll.
If only climate math was that dependable. In climate math 1+1= whatever number you need it to today. And tomorrow if you need it to add up to a different number you can just adjust it.
Whenever misaligned mirrors burn through one of the gas-fired pre-heaters.
Just remember those mirrors are flat, and they make a beam that is about the area of the mirror, which I think is about six meters square, with a beam divergence angle of about 0.5 degrees, the same as the angular size of the sun. So that’s about 36 kW of solar power for one mirror out of whack.
And that beam can easily propagate to 30,000 feet and fry an aluminum passenger bird too. there’s no reason a few thousand of them might get a M$ glitch that focusses all of them at 30 k feet altitude.
So far as I know, there is no practical way to monitor EVERY mirror to detect when it is not hitting the tower, and flip it into the face down sleep mode.
You could in principle, have a small element of each mirror, probably with a deflecting prism, or just a mirror, that puts a small offset spot for each and every mirror, on to a sensor. You would transmit a laser directed at each mirror sequentially, and its reflection would be received back, only when the solar reflection was centered on the boiler.
Tricky to set up, but any mirror that did not report in correctly would be put to sleep in the mirror down mode.
But hey, why worry about the lethality of this death ray. The whole damn idea is stupid to begin with, and a total waste of valuable real estate.
G
Someone ought to get hold of a whole heap of nuts and bolts, ball bearings etc…
, and drop them on the mirrors from a great height !!
I’m going to guess there’s enough sand, rocks, and tumbleweeds that nuts and bolts aren’t even necessary…The desert can be a windy place.
Yeah, a really good sandstorm should take care of those mirrors. Here’s hoping. !!!
I did have an idea how they could save all those birds from getting cooked….
….. put rows of wind turbines around the solar farm.
Chopped up and then flash fried… now I’m hungry for some KFC. <¿<
I guess the thought of placing thermal sensors or bolometer safety network on the tower at various point vertically would have been too expensive?
Would you like to be the fire person going up the tower to put the fire out? I sure wouldn’t; unless of course it was totally dark with the sun safely below the horizon.
That was my thought too when I read that.
This Ivanpah thing is like one of those ancient Roman or Greek temples to one of their gods.
From Wikipedia on ancent Greek temples:
“Each ancient Greek temple was dedicated to a specific god within the pantheon and was used in part as a storehouse for votive offerings.”
These temples were of course hoped to bring some favor or benefit to humans from an unseen deity. It required nothing but faith to believe that the gods could both be merciful and vengeful in their dealings with humans.
Ivanpah is dedicated the Climate changeist’s deity Gaia. If we can show Gaia that we are trying to find “renewable” power, no matter how expensive, then maybe she won’t subject us to thermageddon for our CO2 emission sins.
If private entities want to continue their Climate Change worship and belief in carbon sin, then that is their concern, their money.
But the US and state governments, and their conscription of taxpayers and utility ratepayers to support a religion, they need to get out of the Climate Change religion business.
Ah, but the Roman sacrifices actually DID benefit the general public: if you sat through the big wig’s prayer, you got to eat the bull at the end!
Now all we get is the BS from start to finish. At least the Romans gave out actual beef.
In those applications using high power lasers there is an OSHA requirement for “beam blocks”. These must be controlled by a keyed (like a padlock) switch so only authorized users can enable the light flux.
So we have a 1 milliwatt laser instrument that needs (by OSHA decree) a keyed switch so only “trained personnel” can “turn on the light” ?? But these dummies in the desert can just willy nilly point the rays from the SUN wherever they might end up… What could possibly go wrong (asked from an ant’s perspective)….
Maybe all those heliostats need an individual beam block ? Oh wait, that would require another trillion dollars of taxpayer money to make this gigantic magnifying glass safe to operate in a desert…
Cheers, KevinK
.
I was refreshing myself on Wikipedia concerning Ivanpah. Total power is supposed to be 392MW and it covers about 4,000 acres. Now, my local coal fired plant has 3 operation units. The smallest is 600MW. The other two are 1000MW each. The plant covers about 100acres. Ivanpah doesn’t even have the capacity to replace even the smallest unit at my local plant and, it covers 40 times the land area.
It’s called energy density.
Yeah but coal doesn’t work at night does it ? Oh sorry the mirrors won’t work at night ,go the CAGW producing power plant .
Sarc
One open pit coal mine alone in Wyoming hase disturbed 43,000 arces,, before it is finished it will be over 70,000′; your local coal power plant is the small tail end of a giant coal extraction and transport system. Electricity requires a system. Solar is the 21st century, PV cost as dropped from 70 dollars per kW in the 1970’s to about 47 cents currently. Think about exponential change, we are sitting at the bottom of the S Curve of adoption. Sites like WUet are linear in thinking, like incumbent basic thinkers always are,
What mine would that be Sam?
That would be the goldmine of green energy subsidies.
North Antelpoe Rochelle mine in WY. There are 12 such mines in WY.
The mine is filled in and reclaimed when the coal is gone.
Solar is 3rd century, trying to be updated and failing.
If you think that they are ever going to get solar much below 47cents, despite the trillions in subsidies, then you are delusional.
Like all trolls, you are leaving out the major costs, the batteries and or back up fossil fuel plants that have to be kept running in the background in case a cloud passes over your magical tower.
Ah, North Antelope Rochelle…thought so. The acreages you tout are for the leases, not the actual mine itself. The total amount under lease is questionable. Regardless, the actual surface mine, while very large for a coal mine, pales in comparison to the size of some of the gold, silver, copper and other surface mines. As usual, just CAWG disinformation.
Well a kW of solar PV electric would be 5 square meters (50 square feet) of single crystal 20% efficient Sunpower systems panels, and I don’t think you can buy that much panel for 47 cents, and that’s just for the panels, not for the 100 year storm proof installation hardware, and the required real estate. And that is with the panels properly pointing at the sun.
So I’ll pass on your solution thank you.
G
I have not been able to find any data about how much electricity it takes to operate the mirrors. It would require two servo motors on each mirror, in order to position them continually during the day, to track the sun across the sky. Has anyone seen anything about the power consumption of those motors? They would all have to be serviced regularly, also, to avoid misalignment problems.
Wouldn’t a single servo do the job if the mirrors’ axes were parallel to the earth’s?
Would that work for the seasons?
I assume, in reference to … “ servo motors on each mirror, in order to position them continually during the day, to track the sun across the sky.”
lee – May 21, 2016 at 9:27 pm …… was asking:
HA, maybe the resident climate scientists, engineers and/or programmers miscalculated the “spring to summer” SEASONAL shift of the Sun’s position as it approaches its Summer solstice, ….. and if so, …… there was no “mirror misalignments” as reported, to wit:
Quoting article:
Robotic “driving” software ….. does not, … either randomly or infrequently, initiate a programmed “misalignment” of a repeated real-time process.
NO NO NO !!!
Each and every one of those mirrors has to have its OWN PERSONAL guidance program.
No two of the mirrors follow the same steerage algorithm. You need a separate micro-controller for each mirror. They are totally independent optical systems.
G
It sounds like a Series of Unfortunate Events 😉
Let me guess:
1) Solar, including thermal solar, is a mature technology and is replacing coal right NOW and will provide baseload soon.
2) But because the plant isn’t working, it will have been a prototype and not a mature technology (yet) and it’s allowed to fail and we are learning a lot and solar technology will be make progress thanks to its failure.
Right?
Right.
And don’t forget,
3) Being on the right side of history or something.
And the bird kills…. they probably only happen for the first year or two. !
… like the Snail Darter?
well that will be enough to run you out of birds.
g
The Sun God is angry, prepare a sacrifice!
Wouldn’t it be ironic if an exploded bird in it’s final death dive landed on a combustible component?
If not, then outright hilarious.
I was going to make a learned and constructive comment, but instead I’ll just say:
Ha ha! You just got burned green solar warriors!