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Freeze On US Solar Plant Applications Lifted
necro81 writes "Barely a month ago, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management announced a freeze on applications for solar power plants on federally managed land, pending a two-year comprehensive environmental review. After much hue and cry from the public, industry, and other parts of government, BLM has today announced that it will lift the freeze, but continue to study the possible environmental effects. To date, no solar project has yet been approved on BLM land."
Because Big Oil doesn't like Big Sun.
My god, what next!? Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
Yes, it's from ... Ghostbusters!
We'll just figure out what the effects are after we're hooked up to your juice.
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
Some are even predicting U.S. solar plant applications could be ice free by as early as this summer.
Solar power sounds great and is very trendy. Why evaluate the possible consequences for our actions when we can plow ahead blindly? Going ahead with energy policy without considering the environmental effects has worked well for us so far!
Besides, being in favor of solar power helps you score with hippie chicks.
They will kill all natural plant life, absorb all available sunlight, douse the planet with darkness, freeze up the North Pole, stop the North Atlantic Conveyor, interfere with the mating rituals of rhesus monkeys and cause the whales to change their tunes. It is the end of the world as we know it!
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
It was government listening to the solar lobby
Pretty much. What's stopping the solar lobby from buying their own damn land and building whatever they want there (other than the obvious promise of cheap/free government land)?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I wonder if the BLM has approved any oil wells on BLM land......
While we whine about 'environmental considerations' of grabbing free energy from the sun, other countries are actually doing something about it. I was just in Germany where solar cell farms have been built in many places along the autobahns. Further, there are huge windmills everywhere (turning VERY slowly--Any bird which hits one of these is not paying attention. In France they've gone whole-hog nuke for electricity. There isn't a project alive that we can't make take ten times longer and make ten times the cost over our 'concerns.'
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
this was mostly misreported by news agencies. They made it sound like nobody could build solar power plants, when it only applied to "federally managed land."
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Birds instantly cooked in mid air due to highly focused sunlight.
We're so lucky that the solar cells can now be grown on trees, and don't come out of some high energy use chemical process anymore. That's finally really clean energy.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
In the same week, a group of New Mexico utilities have announced a RFP for a new solar project. This is interesting since a significant amount of land in rural New Mexico is Federally controlled, either by the BLM or military.
-mls
I have to wonder how many of the corporations/people who are asking for permits actually have the intent (and ability) to build solar array farms, or are they just hoping to grab the land rights now so that they can hold it hostage and sub-lease it later to others?
Someone give me some possible downsides to solar energy. I'm not being sarcastic - I've never heard this line of thought that solar energy is bad for the environment and would like to hear the reasoning behind it.
this being /., the mods should have been 'interesting' as 'insightful' implies actual experience with said women
They're still not going to actually _approve_ any of these applications. Instead, they'll just let them pile up while they "study" the issue.
If the Department of the Interior were in control of Saudi Arabia there wouldn't be a drop of oil coming out of it...
Nothing, but just as with the oil and gas companies, it is much less expensive to lease land from the BLM. Also, you can get a lease on a vast expanse of land which you might not be able to buy contiguously through other channels.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
and while they're at it perhaps they could invest the money needed to finally get fission working too.
I think you mean "fusion". Fission is what the present nuclear plants use. As to fusion, I'm hopeful yet skeptical, as when I was a kid fission (nuclear power) was going to make electricity "too cheap to meter".
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I do believe you'll find that use of actual photovoltaic solar cells, which is the only thing most people seem to think of when Solar is mentioned, is one of the LAST things on the minds of businesses looking to do solar power. High energy solar power production is primarily done using mirrors to heat steam to drive a turbine. Essentially the same technology most other power plants use, but using sunlight to heat the water instead of nuclear fission/fossil fuels. Hence, the difference between solar energy production and more traditional forms is the difference in what is used to produce the heat, and I think you'll find an array of mirrors a bit cheaper than a nuclear containment vessel or a boiler and the associated pollution control mechanisms.
The most interesting thing about this whole debacle has been seeing how many people have so little clue about solar thermal. When the story first broke you could see all these Republican apologists ranting about the horrors of photovoltaic production just as we see in this thread here on Slashdot on the other end of the story.
And then if it wasn't the atrocity of silane gas and photovoltaics then it was about how they were going to have to install all these new power lines. Again, we're seeing this same ignorant idiot trash spewed all over Slashdot.
The truth is, this is about solar thermal and this has been throughly vetted in public documents that are freely available to anyone with the slightest interest in the topic. Such far-left comunist hippies as Arnold Schwarzenegger drafted the document which explains in great detail that they have planned the solar thermal projects in question specifically to intersect with existing grid-interties.
No! Gasp, you mean somebody already thought of it?
Yes, read it yourself. Extra! Extra! Read all about it!
It's the Western Governorsâ(TM) Association. Clean and Diversified Energy Initiative. Solar Task Force Report. Get it while it's hot kids.
http://cleantechlawandbusiness.com/cleanbeta/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/solar-full.pdf.
But what I really like about this whole story, yeah I have enjoyed this story from beginning to end, is that it raised the prominence of solar thermal in the mass media. All the long-haired dope smoking hippies bloggers in the world couldn't have achieved what the Bush BLM managed in a single month.
Thanks BLM!
I agree with you, although, I wouldn't want to be so alarmist. With a few notable exceptions, most nuclear plants globally have a reasonable track record of safety, so far at least. Be wary though, as the old saying goes: if you build a foolproof technology, they'll just breed a better fool...
/.'ers strongly believe that this is not a problem. I disagree. You're dealing with once in a million years events, geological, astronomical and political. Hell, a nuclear waste dump would be the ultimate dirty bomb. Now, beyond the ethical question of downloading this responsibility of maintaining our waste safely onto successive generations (another discussion in itself), who's ultimately holding the bag financially for this long term storage?
Joking aside, my problems with nuclear are many. First, it's not a green as proponents seem to think. Before you can generate steam, you must mine, transport and refine the uranium.
Next you have the issue of the waste. Eventually it must be transported and stored. Say what you will about our ability to store this stuff for a million years, frankly, it's an unknown. I'm aware that many
Another problem is that eventually someone has to decommission all the nuclear plants that have been built. How do you do this and has this cost been factored into the price? How many plants globally have been successfully decommissioned and who gets to pay for it? Is Yucca mountain designed to have old reactors tossed into it?
Finally, here in Canada, the nuclear industry has been plagued by major cost and time overruns and even once built, reactors are not achieving the up times that were promised. It's an industry that could not survive financially without government assistance. I suspect that the same is true for many other installations world-wide.
In the end, the most persuasive argument against nuclear for me is that we (especially in North America) simply don't need nuclear. As a society we would be farther ahead to put the effort and money associated with nuclear into a combination of Geo-thermal, Solar-thermal, Wind and one day even fusion.
Pretty much. What's stopping the solar lobby from buying their own damn land and building whatever they want there (other than the obvious promise of cheap/free government land)?
The Bureau of Land Management is ostensibly holding this land in the public trust. To what use could we possibly put a bunch of desert that would be better than reducing our dependence on fossil fuels? Build dirtbike tracks?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Sorry when the facts bother you, but solar only recently made it past the "break even" point in regards to energy produced over energy put in during production.
Today on slashdot, lying liars and the lies they tell.
The truth is that we have known for over thirty years that Solar Cells recoup the energy invested in their production in under seven years and may actually do it in less than one year.
Now, a nuclear plant however ...
...could be safe and efficient, but none of the designs we are using now are particularly deserving of either description (although they are not spectacularly unsafe and are probably safer than many of the coal and oil plants operating in the USA.) And the plants which have been proposed to be built any time in the near future are just more of the same shit.
We would need to start using breeder reactors to reprocess nuclear fuel in order to make building more nuclear make any kind of sense. This is not impossible.
On the issue of solar passing the break even point, however, you are like Bush talking about WMDs in Iraq. Full of fucking shit and with no possible defense other than being misled. Too bad you got modded up (obviously by big oil! heh heh)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"Therein lies your ultimate hypocrisy: you're talking about caring about the environment and then acting like you have a god-given right to drive around on dino juice"
No he isn't, he's talking about building infrastructure that will continue to see use after the end of gas powered vehicles. Electric cars still drive on roads.
If you look closely, it is YOU who is foisting the straw man of "dino juice" upon him. There are more kinds of pollution than what comes out of a tailpipe. Noise, heat, etc. Taking palliative measures to reduce these things, which still exist with electric vehicles isn't the vile idea your screed makes it out to be.
You just jumped on your high horse and assumed you had the answer, when you didn't even understand the question. If there's anything I dislike about this new environmentalism, it's how often I see people doing exactly that.