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US Halts Applications For Solar Energy Projects
Dekortage writes "The US Bureau of Land Management, overwhelmed by applications for large-scale solar energy plants, has declared a two-year freeze on applications for new projects until it completes an extensive environmental impact study. The study will produce 'a single set of environmental criteria to weigh future solar proposals, which will ultimately speed the application process.' The freeze means that current applications will continue to be processed — plants producing enough electricity for 20 million average American homes — but no new applications will be accepted until the study is complete. Solar power companies are worried that this will harm the industry just as it is poised for explosive growth. Some note that gas and oil projects are booming in the southwestern states most favorable to solar development. Another threat looming over the solar industry is that federal tax credits must be renewed in Congress, else they will expire this year."
Here is the printer friendly format for easier reading. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/us/27solar.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
They probably should have done this sooner, but it's better to do the EIS before the explosive growth of solar plants.
This way, they have a much better idea what the effects will be, and have more clear, consistent, comprehensive information and data on which to judge applications.
I think the companies are just upset because it might prevent them from securing investors during the time they can't even submit an application. But for the people, and the industry, it's probably not that big of a deal.
People need the electricity. The BLM should only need to answer one question: Will the proposed solar energy plant harm the environment more than a natural gas/coal/oil plant would to produce the same amount of power? If not, let it be built.
As a resident of Texas, I hate that we're building more and more coal-fired power plants when we have such abundant sun and wind out here that we could be using instead. Hell, I have to suffer through 2 months (and counting) of 100+ degree days, I'd like to at least be getting something out of all that sun other than dehydration and sunburn.
If solar (or ethanol or wind or ... anything) is as good as people like to believe, it can survive without tax credits.
...the environmental impact of solar energy was already officially established as "groovy, man, groovy!"
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Whoever makes it into the WH will make a big show of giving an executive order to open the applications back up. As to whether this is a good thing or not, I'm not so sure. Solar has been making some big strides, but if everyone is forced to wait a couple of years, who knows what may come out, and what the current implementers will learn in that time? It may just save two years of shitty implementations with obsolete-before-it's-built tech.
Bureaucracy is such fun isn't it? The world needs more Ron Paul type characters. /Did I just say that?
"overwhelmed by applications for large-scale solar energy plants".., that's good news. At least people are trying!
stuff |
The government that governs least governs best, goddammit. Of course this will harm the industry; It's an artificially imposed market restriction!
God forbid somebody do something without those geniuses at the government making sure it's ok first. Them being the kings of noticing unintended consequences in others' ideas. Oh wait...
This is only for use of land owned by the Federal Government. You can still do whatever you want with private land, providing you have the proper zoning and building permits from the local government.
I don't foresee many issues with local government in the middle of the desert.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
How can a solar power plant affect the environment any more than wind turbines slow down the jetstream?
Why don't they come up with the environmental criteria/requirements and state that the application submitter must complete the study and submit the findings with the application. If further study would be required, they could then investigate or push it back to the requesting company/agency.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
Personally I think it's probably better to distribute the power-generation facility onto the roofs of all the residents in these 'southwestern states'... Use the wasted space productively...
I'm in the process of installing an 11.9 kW system on the roof of my home in CA. It's costing about $80k (of which I expect to get $12-16k back in rebates) , and it'll take my electricity bill down from $800/month to ~$100/month. Saving ~$700/month makes payback in ~8 years, and the panels have a 25-year lifespan (at which point they're at ~80% efficiency of day-1).
Why cover the land ? Cover the roofs instead!
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Or about 1 million Al Gore type homes.
Oops - he made some improvements last year - so make that only 900,000 homes worth.
Is there any way that it could be worse than coal? Do you need two years to answer this question?
I don't know why this popped into my head.
Perhaps it would be a good idea to speak to the Indians about building solar power plants on their land.
We pushed them off of all the best land and consigned them to places that were arid and infertile. We consoled our consciences by telling ourselves by saying 'hey, we left them with a shitpile of land'. Of course the land wasn't good for anything . . . at least not then.
Additionally, the Indian reservations are a perennial backwater, mired in poverty and desperately in need of external investment. An enterprising company may be able to get access to large amounts of sundrenched land it needs while the Indians get the external investment they need - a mutually beneficial commercial relationship.
Also, the moratorium will tend to press potential investors away from public land and could give reservation based solar farms the chance to leapfrog development in other areas.
friends don't let friends teleport drunk
What, are you running a datacenter in your house, holy cow! That's more than I pay in rent for a very large 2 bedroom house.
I have 3 computers on at any given time and my electric bill is almost never over $50, even with AC running. I'd crap myself if I got a bill over $100.
Now I do live in Pennsylvania, but it can't be that different.
I am gapping I think.
How will these solar installs (whether thermal or PV) possibly do more environmental damage than drilling more wells, burning coal, burning oil or dealing with the aftermath of a spent reactor?
Unless I am missing something big, lets keep approving AS we do the study. Who is really this scared of Solar. Not us common folk! Is it the coal industry, oil, wind? It has to be somebody, because this does not seem to make sense.
The power companies are not just going to let us all start paying them less. Oh they might not notice when it's just you dropping your monthly payment by 85%. But let us install your kind of set up on a majority of the homes in the U.S. and you bet your green ass they will notice and they won't sit for it one second.
We won't see any serious effort to "solarize" the U.S. in the manner you describe until the power companies find a way to get a piece of the action.
I'm not saying that it's right or that it should be this way. I'm just saying it's a reality that has to be reckoned with.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
hmmm I wonder if someone "important"
http://redgreenandblue.org/2008/06/15/senator-attacks-solar-energy-industry/
isn't ready to get in line so they
http://green.bligblog.com/oil-companies-and-solar-energy-682.html
are slowing down applications until that "person"
http://thepanelist.com/Hot_Topics/Alternative_Energy/_200805271019/
is ready.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
This is the same regulatory framework that stymied geothermal development in the 1990s, and a favored control mechanism by the environmentalist lobbies. They have made it very difficult to develop in the western deserts for other people, they just never expected it to impact their pet projects. An introductory course on unintended consequences.
The oil and gas development bit is a red herring, as mineral extraction (e.g. oil and gas development) is specially protected by very old Federal statutes that mitigate the regulatory overhead that the BLM can impose on power plant projects.
"The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe."
Is it too much to ask to get rid of the freaking "power xxx homes" nonsense and put things in terms of MW or MWh?!
This is supposed to be news for nerds, not news for soccer moms whose only perspective on life and electricity is their own home! (Small subset of soccer moms, that is.)
I have to suffer through 2 months (and counting) of 100+ degree days,
This is probably a really dumb question, but as I Brit I have never figured out why settlers chose to live in America. I mean, the climate seems to spend half the year trying to KILL you. I've been to Boston in January and got snowed in my hotel with 6-foot/2-metre snowdrifts that arrived in ONE NIGHT. I've been to Houston in May and been stuck in my hotel lest the 48c/115f heat burn me to a frazzle. I went to California in February and they had to close the coastal highway because the sea had smashed it up.
I don't doubt for a moment that the USA is a lovely place to live IF you have air conditioning and central heating, but when the first settlers turned up a few hundred years ago, long before climate control, exactly what made them think "This is place to live! This location is ideally suited! We shall search no further!"?
Now I realise that the Pilgrims were essentially an extreme religious cult who got booted out of the Netherlands for being too nutty (and believe you me, the Netherlands is a pretty liberal place, getting kicked out of there really does take some doing - they must have been like Waco-quality loons). I know they also faced persecution in England for much the same thing. I also know that the British/Netherland climate of, essentially, rain rain rain, cloud, rain, does get a bit depressing, but at least the weather here never tries to KILL you. Any day of the year, anywhere in the country, you can step outside for the whole day and you won't die.
Whereas the Pilgrims set up home in BOSTON for the WINTER?
Then there's the wildlife. We don't have any dangerous wildlife, we shot it all, whereas you lot appear to have a country full of poisonous plants and poisonous/pointy-toothed predators. If the American weather isn't trying to kill you, there's some ivy or crocodile waiting to give you grievous pain.
And then you sing songs about how great your country is. Sure, your people are virtually all fabulous (and anyone who says otherwise clearly hasn't met many of you personally), and ten out of ten for looking on the bright side of things, but your country is trying to kill you - how can that not introduce an element of self-doubt? How can you chaps be so religious when every time you step out of your house/car, some part of God's wonderful environment tries to nail you in the head?
When it comes down to energy conservation, do you never hover your finger over the thermostat, hesitate and think "Wouldn't it be a lot more energy efficient if I lived somewhere else entirely?".
(Iceland - it's the future of datacentres, believe you me.)
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
You're just about dead-on with the 80% efficiency after 25 years, I have a polycrystalline Kyocera solar panel made in 1983, in full direct sunlight it generates a measured 24 watts of electricity, exactly 80% of the original 30 watt rating.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
I find it interesting that this 'necessary delay' is happening right at the same time that Bush is pushing for oil development in more ecologically sensitive areas like Alaska. Is he hoping the delay will make oil exploration more necessary, or that the public will get the impression that there are big enviro concerns regarding solar power? When people read that the gov has halted something to 'investigate environmental concerns', they assume that there must be some concerns in the first place.
I'm not saying there aren't enviro considerations with solar- but why wasn't this done years ago? And why not study solar projects already up and running? The timing is interesting is all I'm saying. And two years!? Give me a break.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1993
How many economic disasters must occur due to speculative greed before the lesson is learned?
Here's an idea: you're a member of an oil cartel. Project that due to "demand" that oil will rise to $170 a barrel. Now watch your reserves gain 20% in value just because you said so.
Solar Thermal is cheap now, but works best on large scale plants.
The thin film solar cells and cheap solar cell concentrators will be hitting the market in the next year. Right now, Europe's subsidized solar plants are sucking up the solar panels.
Just as long as you can prove that you don't benefit from the infrastructure and common defense. How much you do pay is another matter.
yes, yes it can.
FWIW, I spent ten years doing environmental work, including NEPA.
At present, each proposed action must perform its own National Environmental Policy Act assessment, whether that is an Environmental Assessment or a more comprehensive (and expensive) Environmental Impact Statement.
BLM is streamlining the process for the long-term by preparing a "Programmatic" EIS; that is a comprehensive document that assess an entire class of proposed actions over a large geographic area, in this case building solar power sites in the referenced states. With that in place, companies that apply for permits have guidance that lets them know where the best locations are. They can then reference the Programmatic EIS and get environmental approval much faster and cheaper.
It slows things down to wait for it to be completed, but long-term, it will be a much faster process in terms of EIS preparation, review, public comment and acceptance.
I am not a mechanical engineer, biologist, or a chemist, and my technical knowledge of solar energy is lacking at best.
However, I am still observant enough to note a few facts:
1) There are no Ents, and in fact plants are extremely stationary compared to animals
2) No animal life, with necessary amounts of energy to run around, derive that energy from photosynthesis. Instead we have to consume daily quantities of other life.
3) Billions of years of evolution, at present, has more complex and effective systems than our technology.
It just seems like if evolution has failed to produce a photosynthesis model for the quantities of energy that our species tends to deal with, the overall potential for how far we can really take this technology may not be as far reaching as some make it out to be.
Can anyone who is more 'in the know' abate some of my ignorance here?
If they'll start wars and destroy our economy to sell their crap, why would you ever think they would allow solar energy to make their crap worthless?
No man can claim that you reached your ideas by succumbing to mass media propaganda. Those who are taken in will find it hard to believe that they are. It's nice to see another modestly rational person in a sea of insanity.
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson
To give a brief industry prospective, whether this is good or bad is entirely dependant on whether your company was part of the initial "land rush" to file a BLM permit. If you were, then you just put your company in a much better position vis-a-vis your less speedy competitors.
A couple industry realities that play into the importance of this decision:
1. Location, Location, Location.
Location is critical to establishing an economic generation project. Forget about the cost of the land -- that is generally incidental. But the location makes a critical difference in how much it costs to get your power to market. This principle applies to all technologies, but particularly to commercial scale solar. One of the major costs in developing a new power plant are the interconnection costs -- that is, the costs of reinforcing the already-built transmission system to handle the additional output of your facility. Depending on where you interconnect with the transmission system, this can cost very little or hundreds of millions of dollars. Obviously, if you are on the high end of that number, there is less possibility that your project will be built. In extremely cases, the unavailability of a particular piece of federal land may kill the project, if the nearest privately owned option would result in unacceptably high interconnection costs.
Note: there are a variety of different ways the transission upgrades for these projects are funded, and California in particular has some creative financing mechanisms that reduce the interconnection costs -- but even then, they are still a major consideration.
2. Project Financing.
Ten years ago, it was common to finance large power generation projects on spec. The theory was, built it and they will come. That largely ended with the power crisis. Today, it is much harder to secure financing without a power purchase agreement ("PPA"). Currently a number of states are seeking bids for solar PPAs through Requests For Proposals ("RFPs") and other bilateral contracting options. In order to compete in an RFP, you generally need to show some level of site control and basic timeline and economic information. The fact that the BLM has stopped taking new applications is a great boon to those who already have their site proposal pending before BLM, and not good news for others. Time really is critical to these developers and the recent morotorium is going to prevent many companies from competing for these RFPs.
3. The Production Tax Credit.
In one of the more boneheaded moves in history, Congress has chosen to renew the Production Tax Credit ("PTC") every year or two. Whether you think a government subsidy is good business or not (personally, I think it's good), the PTC is critical to making the numbers work and getting a project financed. Currently, there is a major incentive to rush projects into commercial operation before the expiration of this year's PTC. Any additional administrative delay is potentially fatal to the financing of some of these projects.
4. Stupidity & Laziness.
Give me a break BLM. Just do the !@#$ing work and issue a Programatic Environmental Impact Statement covering all/most solar facilities in the desert south west. As a public policy matter, these projects are critically important to the survival of the earth. Get off your asses and get it done. (Though in fairness, the California grid operator and others throughout the country are equally overwhelmed with new solar project requests. But they at least are making major efforts to remove regulatory bottlenecks, not imposing new ones.)
The coming giant capacitor facilities will hold the power made during the day for use at night.
Of course, clouds are still a problem.
Wait, so what are they getting at? That gathering power from the life-enabling sun is more harmful to the environment than burning coal into the atmosphere? Did the US Bureau of Land Management ever freeze coal power plants for 2 years to study the environmental impact?
I can understand that the shorter life of the solar panels / solar plants have a 20-30 lifespan, so there will be some waste, but thats much less than waste than many other power sources (coal).
Just hire some more people to process the applications and do the impact studies. Construction on alternative energy supplies needs to start now. We are already past the levels of co2 in the atmosphere some scientists consider safe.
Obviously no large scale construction should be undertaken without consideration of the environmental impacts; but given the massive scale of the threat from global warming it's in everybody's interests to spend the cash to make sure alternative energy sources come online as soon as possible.
solar... does NOT work.
C'mon, give me a break.
The sun is the source of all our power. Even coal is just a particularly filthy source of solar power. And we could solve all our energy problems using only clean forms of solar power if we spent, oh, say, one half the amount of money squandered on losing a war in Afghanistan and replacing a corrupt and brutal regime in Iraq with a corrupt and incompetent regime.
Really, your argument is specious at best, and laughably inaccurate. We have the resources, with current technology, to solve our problems with solar, OR nuclear, OR biomass, OR more drilling. At least one of those solutions would probably be temporary, and there's no reason we can't pursue more than one. Your biases in favor of nuclear and against solar are irrational.
Solar power companies are worried that this will harm the industry just as it is poised for explosive growth.
Wasn't it explosive growth of the oil industry without proper environmental research and oversight what got us into this mess in the first place?
Any company that says "I don't like the government employing restrictions in the name of environmental protection" is clearly not a company I want to support, and this is surprising to hear coming from a SOLAR POWER companies who are supposed to be our allies in the GLOBAL WAR ON ENVIRONMENTAL TERROR (or whatever we're calling it today).
Funny. When they wanted to put the fence along the Mexican border on the fast-track to completion, they managed to find a way around environmental regulations for that.
Yeah, let's kill innovative new technology in the cradle! If there are any bad effects at all (for example, someone complains that the solar plants look too shiny), we bureaucrats could get in trouble! We'll study it for a few years, and maybe they will all go away.
Your ignorance is shocking, and your presumption that know else knows there is a 'nighttime' makes you look like an ass.
Solar thermals trap the super heated liquid that can generate steam to turn turbines throughout the night.
Clouds don't impact their generation much at all.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
After all, a solar plant isn't bringing in anything new that's not already there. For the same reason that it can't increase output by "throwing more coal on the fire" (if it's not sunny, it's not sunny), it wouldn't be able to use sunlight that wasn't already there in the first place. If the sunlight weren't hitting the station, it would still be shining on the same place.
Moreover, since heat and energy are to some extent interchangeable, converting heat (radiation) into an electrical energy source should mean that the heat has - in fact - changed form. If it's not heat, then it's less hot...
Just a side comment. You mentioned that you have pond-pumps running. I picked up one and have seen some other decent ones that run on individualized solar-panels. They're actually pretty neat, and you can decouple them easily from the regular electrical system.
I've seen people with pump-houses that look like cute little dog/animals-houses (some incorporate bird-baths or birdhouse-type designs as well), put the pump solar-panels on that and it should work pretty well without looking ugly.
The point wasn't so much what they were good for there, but what they're good for everywhere. The BLM doesn't really manage anything except some roads, and those roads are not repeat NOT being maintained for your benefit, but for that of the government.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Obligatory Ayn Rand quote ---
When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed.
- I live the greatest adventure anyone could possibly desire. - Tosk the Hunted
...kill the bureacrats, and THEN the lawyers.
All I can say is RIGHT ON!!!!
FragHARD or don't frag at all
At first when I saw your idea, I thought it was great. Unfortunately, if this type of arrangement was set up any way similar to that of the Indian reservation casinos, there will be big problems. For example in my home state of California the more powerful tribes have lobbied hard to prohibit other smaller tribes from creating casinos.
Before anyone replies to me, I in no way am saying we shouldn't look to the reservations for solar plant space, but at least take it into consideration. In fact, I think this is great as a way from diversifying from casinos and dumping grounds.
I know you were joking but there is a serious answer to your question: Farming.
If you have driven from NYC to California, you know what I mean. It is the richest farmland in the world. And we have entire states of it. 100's of thousands of square miles.
Back in the "olden days", that probably looked like heaven compared to Ireland, Scotland, England, etc.
"I'll take a sunburn and sweat if I can just keep my damn crops alive!!!!!"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I am not bashing this guy, he can write whatever he wants, but before he gets modded to +5, interesting, make sure he knows what he is talking about. (I am ASSUMING he is not intentionally misleading the masses, and has no agenda)
His math is off, his efficiency figures are way off.
Please, those of you who believe in truth, mod up some of the replies that contain factual info.
Thanks
That's a very interesting post, but I'm not sure what the question is. Certainly I, personally, can meet all my electrical needs with the energy provided by sunlight to my property using currently available technologies. I could make enough to sell to my neighbors, too, but only because I am pretty frugal by modern standards.
Human power sources are all indirectly solar, as you probably already know. Houses are heated by wood, methane, or coal, or some other source of converted plant mass. (There are some folks who think petroleum is not a photosynthetic product, but even if they are right, we could not directly access oil's energies without using materials and energies derived from sunlight through the food chain, and the sun is still responsible for the planet's structure and resource distribution.) Very few houses are heated by nuclear energy, and the parenthetic comments regarding oil are equally applicable to radioactive elements anyway.
Ecologists talk a lot about something they call "carrying capacity". Just as a rocket scientist is concerned with "impulse", (because the energy output of a rocket is meaningless without comparison to payload weight) the natural scientist is concerned with the qualities and amount of land required to support a specific population of interelated species (a simple example of inter-related species might be humans, intestinal bacteria, and maize - all are interdependent). If you require a specific amount of energy, and it takes X acres per person to produce that energy, your social, military and governmental structures have to provide the correct number of acres if your population increases. Or people starve, and revolt, and your culture collapses progressively until there are fewer people.
Infinite expansion is the philosophy of the cancer cell. This is how cancer converts its host from a viable cancer environment to a pile of rotting meat. Our governments consider our economy to be unhealthy unless it is rapidly expanding. This means we must continuously increase the carrying capacity of our ecological niche, so that our population and its economic activities do not modify our host organism, Mother Earth, past the point where we can survive in any fashion we can enjoy.
We have the technology to heat our homes and solve all our energy woes with conservation and renewable carbon-neutral sources. Cars, generators and appliances that run on methane are already in mass production and methane is very easy to make from plants and animals. I believe it could be done in five years or less with a concerted national effort. However, that would involve replacing the oil-fueled political power structures that drive our economy with completely new power brokers who would be unpredictably (probably darwinistically) selected during the conversion process. Converting to renewables whilst keeping the "old guard" in power is taking much longer, especially since none of the old money entities trust each other at all.
We also have the technology to render the atmosphere unbreathable by humans without processing. If that happens, and clean air and water are no longer a natural commons, I guess the neo-conservative nirvana will have been reached. Perhaps this is what all the neo-conservative and pseudo-libertarian ranting about "The Tragedy of the Commons" is really about - a pure meritocracy, where ability to survive is strictly dependent on one's access to privately owned resources such as air purification and algae farming. The most murderous hoarders of technology will live like Kuwaiti sheiks, and the few remaining commoners will live like the slave laborers in Dubai. I don't know, but I do know that you can't talk about energy policy without talking about social and economic structures and about the amount of human suffering you wish to bequeath to the future.
The old joke was that if Communists ran the desert, there'd be a sand shortage. Now we know that when environmentalists run it, there's a sun shortage.
This is actually very convenient! How much baking/TV/laundry are you doing at 4AM? People are most active with their electricity during the day (peak is usually around 4-5PM) and so is the sun.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
We're at about 20% of what biological history of the world has considered as ideal CO2 levels.
Global cooling is a bigger threat to the earth than global warming. There is more plant-life on the world today than last year. The most life-infested the Earth has been was during warmer times than we have now.
You start sapping energy from Sol that usually would go to warming the planet, providing light, photosynthesizing -- and then you go putting turbines into the jetstreams, putting turbines into the currents, tapping the core for geothermal energy, -- sucking energy out of nature's processes, and you're probably going to be making a more marked impact than digging up and burning the remains of dead plants. We don't know how many drops we can take from a lake before it's suddenly dry. That was oil's problem, but at least that doesn't directly affect weather patterns.
Most renewable energy is spookier than fossil fuels when it comes to possible implications. Nuclear Power is about the only exception to this rule, and yet the one or two "Boo!"s that we got from that are enough to scare the general population retarded.
Meet your buddy sodium nitrate. It is a salt that is a solid at room temperature and even up to several hundred degrees temperature. However, once it is heated by the oil in the tubes of the trough solar field or within the heliostat of a power tower it turns into a liquid.
The sodium nitrate solution or solar salt is typically just a small percentage of the actual thermal storage solution. The majority of the thermal mass being composed simply of silicate or limestone gravel. Thus, the thermal storage can easily be scaled to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of tons of storage primarily using on-site materials. It's an extremely efficient and low cost storage solution and depending upon the scale of the installation can provide hours to days of power without any sun. Since solar thermal sites are typically situated in areas of high insolation such as deserts, a condition were days passed without sun would be extremely rare. Thus, this is indeed a technical replacement for baseline power such as coal or nuclear.
The leader in the market for nitrate salts used in thermal storage applications, yes there's already a market in these things, is a product called HitecXL. I encourage you to google for it and inform yourself on this topic before you continue advising people about the "huge drawbacks".
Because in six months the fuckin' Republican scum will be flushed down the toilet.
I have to admit I was pissed when I first saw this because I'm a huge supporter of solar thermal and have been for years. I was an avid lurker on the early solar thermal list-serves in the nineties and became totally fascinated with it in those days and have been stuck on it since. So, my blood pressure shot through the roof when I saw this. I mean the gall, using an environmental impact requirement. I mean, it's almost funny if it wasn't so upsetting.
Then as I had time to mull it over it kinda made me grin. I mean at least it shows that this is scarry enough to the Bush administration that they're fighting back. That's a good sign in itself. If I was an executive looking for funding, I'd tout this as a badge of honor. Look, this scares Republicans. Hmm, looks good going forward eh?
And then I realized it's June. Those pieces of shit are on the way out in six months. Let them declare a twenty year moratorium on applications at this point. It's all the same in terms of the real world. Investors aren't stupid, just follow the money. It's clear we're up for a change and the more the Republicans show their distaste for solar thermal the better its future is probably going to be.
I guess the deserts are populated with rock-huggers, so we have to ensure that these solar projects don't damage the rocks in Arizona...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
FTA:
The 125 existing applications are for land covering almost one million acres and with the potential to generate 70 billion watts of electricity
1,000,000 acres = 4046 km^2, this is an area equal to a square 63km on side.
This square could actually cover up the entire lower San Francisco bay area, from San Francisco to San Jose, covering Oakland, Hayward, Freemont, Pleasanton, Livermore, San Mateo, Palo Alto.
For comparison, proposed ANWR oil drilling would have only 2,000 acres (8 km^2) of drilling pads.
Energy density:
70 GWe / 1,000,000 acres = 70 kWe/acre = 17 W/m^2, which in in the neighborhood of 5% of typical average insolation (~250 W/m^2) so I agree with these numbers.
The main acreage use of nuclear fission power plants are the exclusion areas of 500 to 1000 acres. You could easily site 4 x 1GWe class nuclear reactors in a 1000 acre site, for a density of 4 MWe / acre (that's what you get when your electrical generators are a billion times closer to the nuclear reactor :)
During summer with central AC not blowing all day during the crazy heat waves (100+F degrees) and my room is like 85+ degrees with it! Including fans blowing! And of course having computers on doesn't help. :/ I know a friend who has to spend $500+ during those times. Yikes.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Dubya: Now, now boys. Relax.
Oily: But Dubya, our profits are gonna get socked if these damn solar doohickeys keep springing up ever'whar!
Coal: Yeah, and our strip-minin' will go to hell!
Cheney (laughs): I've got the answer. We'll steal from the environmentalist wacko playbook. Let's say we want to do an environmental impact study of solar panels!
Dubya: Well gollee, Dick! That's smart thinkin'! OK boys, go back to makin' yer billions. Just don't forget to cut Dicky and me in on the stash.
(Meeting ends.)
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Ensign is taking in the front and the rear from uber-powerful extraction industries.
I imagine they lube him up really good before penetration begins...
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Seriously, where's the scrutiny of the cost/benefit of coal & oil? Factoring environmental damage, the same conclusion should be made for petroleum plants: halt all new construction. Neither conclusion makes sense. Better to continue investment in solar, because any incremental gain is better than no gain.
Why doesn't one of these companies just offer make deal with home owners and install there solar plants on individual roof tops. They can use the current very favorable agreements where homeowners can sell power back to the grid.
I'd take that deal.
They can come in, wire up my roof, and sell their power to me and the utilities, and I would pay my utility bill as usual, but to them and the utilities.
My payoff is knowing I am using solar instead of oil without having to kick in any upfront $$$ and they can keep all of the profits, so they get the use of my land(roof) and wires for free.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Good call - Anyone know if this is already being done?
Yes it is already being done as a supplemental power technique. Whole Foods is testing such systems at several of their stores. They basically purchase power at a pre-established rate for a period of years (20 or so I think) from the company which builds and maintains the solar cells. Since the number of days of sunlight in a given year is predictable AND the sunlight tends to be most intense when air conditioning needs are the highest, it apparently greatly offsets their power needs at peak times. Doesn't get them off the grid but it apparently does reduce their draw from the grid significantly.
Yep, with a 100% efficient solar panel over the roughly 3m^2 of surface, you might actually gather the full 1334 watts of available power per meter squared on a bright, cloud-free day, giving a full 4002 watts, almost 6HP! That's almost 20% of enough to run a small motorcycle, but you gathered it using a solar car!
OK smart guy explain this. I'm pretty sure the beancounters at Whole Foods are smart enough to do the math on whether rooftop solar is a good deal. You're making a mistake in presuming that rooftop/cartop solar has to be the primary power source to be useful or a good idea.
Why draw 100% of your power from the grid or gasoline when you don't have to? If the solar cells even partially recharge an electric powered or plug-in hybrid car it could be conceivably worth it. Say for example while it is sitting in a parking lot.
Personally I wonder why every cell phone and laptop does not have supplemental solar cells attached. Won't power them but it would extend battery life and prevent drainage when not in use.
The crazy environmentalist end up blocking renewable energy! .... WHY CAN SLASHDOT ENTRIES BE FACTUALLY CORRECT? ITs not a "two-year freeze" its a freeze that's estimated to to take two years. You guys are evil-doing propagandists.
To generate the amount of power used by america using currently feasible (economically feasible) solar panels...
Why is it always a 100% or nothing argument? Solar power has a useful place as a supplemental power source. Why is that so difficult to comprehend? It doesn't have to provide all our power to be a useful source of energy and in fact a diversity of power sources is generally a good thing. The most attractive thing about a plug in hybrid vehicle is that I can power it with coal, nuclear, solar, geothermal, wind, hydro, in addition to oil. I'm no longer 100% tied to a single source of power.
For obvious reasons nothing will grow below a solar panel.
Ummm... mushrooms?
...several states worth of surface area will have to be stripped of every last feature, every last plant, every last animal ... which ones ?
Or we could just put them on top of all the land we WE ALREADY HAVE stripped to put buildings on.
When wind power started getting to the point where it made economic sense, they started turning against it.
Now they do the same for solar.
Someday the envirocult will be seen for what it is.. another in a long line of Leftist movements all directed towards the same goal -- expanding government power.
People are going to clue in eventually.
I hope.
BLM got tons of political power from environmentalists funding them to close roads so people couldn't take their vehicles off the designated roads in protected areas. The considerate folks never took their vehicles off designated roads, and the incosiderate folks completely ignore the closed roads and make their own way anyway, typically doing hundreds of times the damage that was caused previously.
Yup, remember when there was a Dept of Defense freeze on wind farms a couple years ago. Homeland Security wanted to make sure it did not affect our security. It had the effect of delaying the whole industry. Yup. Can't be too careful about those
wind farms and solar energy thingys. Sekurity and terrerizm and stuff, gotta be careful.
This is the same old shit, throw a monkey wrench into the competitors gears with the fed powers controlled by scumbag lobbies for the established power companies, why do we fall for this crap over and over? Because the public has the attention span of a fruit fly.
But clear the decks here come the coal plants and nukes!
Personally I think it's the famous third world beauracratic trick of blocking with paperwork until a suitable bribe is paid. It's staring to look like that lobby money paid by other energy interests was a good idea from their viewpoint.
Let them screw it up.
Every technology worth implementing is screwed up the first time. This will not be an exception. Let them screw it up - it's part of the technology learning curve. The sooner we start screwing it up, the sooner we'll get good, solid, reliably solar technologies. Anything we do that slows down this process will only make things take longer and cost more.
So obvious what's going on, it's funny.
"The supplies of coal, oil, gas and fissionable materials is severely limited,"
The last three are questionable at best, but the first assertion is laughable. Coal is limited? We have more coal than we'd ever use in centuries. The United States alone has one quarter of the Earth's coal, some 250 gigatonnes. In all our history, we've used less than a fraction of one percent of that supply. Even if we turned coal into gasoline with current fuel economy standards, we'd never run out of coal in several lifetimes here in the US. And that doesn't include all of the other fossil fuel sources we have, like shale and tar sands and good ole' petroleum. We also have a lot of uranium untouched in North America.
So by all means, advocate that we continue to develop tech like solar and wind. By all means, argue against fossil fuel use on pollution grounds. But quit using the chicken little argument about fossil fuels being close to all used up. It simply isn't true when you look at all fossil fuels, even if you believe we've hit peak oil.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
"It's called SOLAR THERMAL. [wikipedia.org] And you use molten salt or graphite [wikipedia.org] to generate electricity at night."
Solar Thermal certainly sounds promising, but if it was as advanced or sufficient for our needs as you imply, why aren't we using it? Or are you going to toss a conspiracy theory at us about oil companies?
I've already said this in another thread; when solar becomes cost effective and practical and plentiful, then it will gain wide use, and not until then.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
It isn't true that "oil deposits in US federal reserves forbidden for drilling could supply the entire world demand for close to 500 years". Total US oil reserves are less than 3% of the world oil reserves, and could supply just the U.S. needs, if somehow we magically extracted all of them instantly, for about 3-4 years. So maybe if you factor in a bunch of new discoveries 10, even 20 might be plausible, but hardly 500.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Whole Foods' whole business model involves projecting a "green" image while selling premium groceries at a significant markup over regular grocery stores. Their calculations for whether to put up rooftop solar panels have a lot more to do with their green image than with whether the electricity is actually cheaper, which is why you see them doing it, but not Safeway (which doesn't have the same image concerns).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Whole Foods' whole business model involves projecting a "green" image...
That's absolutely true but they aren't the only ones doing rooftop solar by a long shot. Whole Foods image considerations just make them more likely to be early adopters since they get (potentially) an additional boost from marketing their "greeness". The economics rooftop solar seem to make sense even without marketing considerations. Nearly all the costs of a solar energy installation are fixed so it is a nice long term energy hedge.
You don't have to take my word for it. A quick google search will turn up hundreds of existing and proposed projects. Rooftop solar is still in its infancy to be sure but I'm confident we're going to see a lot more of it in years to come.
You know, I *did* put a smiley. I was kidding. Typical holier than thou Slashdotter.