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World's Largest Solar Plants Planned In California
Pickens writes "Two photovoltaic solar power plants will be built in San Luis Obispo County in California, covering 12.5 square miles, that together will generate about 800 megawatts of power, the latest indication that solar energy is starting to achieve significant scale. 'If you're going to make a difference, you've got to do it big,' said Randy Goldstein, the chief executive of OptiSolar. OptiSolar will employ enough of its amorphous silicon thin-film solar panels at its Topaz Solar Farm project to generate 550 MW. Meanwhile, SunPower will install mechanical tracking for its more expensive 250 MW-worth of crystalline silicon photovoltaics at High Plains Ranch II in a bid to boost their efficiency by 30 percent from following the sun across the sky. The power will be sold to Pacific Gas & Electric, which is under a state mandate to get 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010. The utility said that it expected the new plants to be competitive with other renewable energy sources, including wind turbines and solar thermal plants. 'These landmark agreements signal the arrival of utility-scale PV solar power that may be cost-competitive with solar thermal and wind energy,' said Jack Keenan, chief operating officer and senior vice president for PG&E."
Reader thefickler notes some related news that researchers have developed a method of collecting infrared rays at night to supplement day-time solar power.
In case anyone wants some perspective on that 550 MW figure, the US uses about 430 GW of electricity on average.
We are never going to get one fifth of our energy from renewable in two years in this state. It ain't going to happen. Californians are under this delusion that passing a law can change reality. We're rather stupid that way.
We simply don't have the technology to produce 20% of our current electricity from renewable source within two years. This law will either be ignored or the state will end up suing itself for non-compliance. We might be able to do it if we dammed up some major rivers but we couldn't build the dams and get them filled in time.
We'll eventually get cheap and efficient solar cells we can roof our houses and pave our streets with. But bulldozing twelve and a half square miles to erect mirrors is going to cause a lot of permanent damage to the environment for almost negligible gain. It's stupid in a way only California can be stupid.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Yes, mod parent -1, because talking common sense when talking about environmental and social concerns is practically sacrilege. Why -1? Because he isnt in your environmentalist hippie nuclear power hating cult? Give me a fucking break. If nuclear power produces that much more power, in a more confined area, for less money, and produces negligible amounts of pollution whats the problem?
I would love to see solar and wind to become the only needed power source, but that isnt a reality. While this article shows that solar is an improving technology, it is also showing that we have a long way to go for a real alternative to our current reliance on the only real options available: continued use of fossil fuels or nuclear. Reducing consumption is argument non grata. For example: Your still waisting electricity to post on slashdot.
20th century Marxism is not progress...
Make the market efficient enough that the trillion or so spent on the Iraq war comes out of the oil company pockets, instead of adding to them, and I'll agree with you.
When the industry/consumer actually pays _all_ the costs associated with the technology, then we can do away with taxes that favor one approach over another. Until then, I'm all for taxing polluting & non-renewable industries and giving tax-breaks to non-polluting & renewables.
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My point is that government regulation and intervention is often a good thing. Let's look at energy specifically. Coal is cheap if you ignore its huge, disastrous externalities. In an unregulated market, we'd all be using coal. Now, we can ban coal outright, but that's very disruptive. A far better idea to simply make it expensive (or equivalently, make its competitors cheaper).
In this way, government tax manipulation makes markets work better.
Wrong. You do not need nuclear power to make nuclear weapons. Nor do you need nuclear weapons to have nuclear power.
If you are accounting for that, account for the silicon extraction and production as well. Not to mention the toxic chemicals used in semiconductor manufacturing processes.
Nuclear power means nuclear weapons. The two are inseperable. The only way to eliminate nuclear weapons is to destroy nuclear technology and ensure that nobody ever rediscovers it.
Wow. The parent poster may be actually insane. Not just nutty in an eccentric, slashdot, sense, but someone with a full-on schizophrenic break with reality.
Fire has killed a lot of people, too.
We do have the problem solved, technically. The engineering solution is pretty clear; breeder reactors, reprocessing, burying whatever remains in geologically stable areas. There just isn't the political will or common sense to proceed with the solution.
New nuclear plants use 1/10th the water, produce 1/10th the waste, and can recycle much of that waste. We've solved the issues. Problem is a misinformed and fearful public and politicians.
Today, 50 years later, we still don't have the faintest idea about what to do with nuclear refuse. Until this problem is solved, suggesting nuclear as the one solution to every energy problem is at best short-sighted.
Yep, throwing the pollution in the atmosphere and groundwater, like with fossil fuel plants, is clearly safer than concentrating the waste in one place. That's why I toss my trash all over the neighborhood, rather than bag it for the trash man every week.
BTW, even "clean" coal plants throw out more radiation than nuclear plants, plus they have nice things like arsenic which doesn't have a half life to worry about. Here is one link for your perusal: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
Instead of comparing nuclear power to mythical power plants that are free and non-polluting, perhaps it would be more helpful to compare it to things that are actually around. Some places can economically use solar power to great effect, but you should worry about whatfossil fuel plants are throwing into the environment before complaining about the horrors of nuclear waste.
Except that our "friends" the Liberals and Green Folks WON'T LET US build more Nuclear Power Plants, even though their friends the French derive over 80% of their electrical power from Nuclear, and other countries like Japan derive the bulk of their power from Nuclear too!
France reprocesses it's nuclear waste back into fuel because the generating process isn't 100% efficient. All you have to do is to process the fuel rods and concentrate the still useful material and remove the waste, and "Voila!" as the French say... You have more fuel.
All the nuclear waste generated by all the nuclear plants in the world would fit into a container the size of a standard desk, I've heard.
I like solar. It's infinitely renewable (at least in human terms), and as we develop the technology it becomes more efficient and cheaper. It takes much less to build and manage a solar plant than a nuclear plant.
I'd like to see us build BOTH. The U.S. is mostly empty, unused land. We have plenty of space to build solar farms.
I'd go further and say that every building in the country ought to have solar collectors on their roofs AND solar water heaters for pre-heating water to further save power.
The more we can get our electrical generating capacity off fossil fuels the better we'll be.
We need Nuclear for base-load power, and solar would be great for peak load times when the sun will be out, and extra energy is needed to run cooling plants like air-conditioners.
Also, places near large bodies of water could use that method that is being used in Chicago (I believe) where very cold water is pumped up from the bottom of the lake and used to cool buildings.
We need to conserve, because it's smart. But we need to expand energy sources to grow.
One cannont grow by conserving. Nobody ever made a million by starting off with a dollar and saving .10
I see your point. But we can mitigate the problem:
According to wikipedia, we can build turbines that reach 90% efficiency. That leaves us with 100MW of power to dissipate (not a 1GW "hair-dryer").
First of all, the output of that turbine is going to be barely warmer than the surrounding air. (Think about it: if it weren't, you could use it as the input to another turbine stage.)
Sure, there will be a lot of this output, but it won't be particularly hot. Also, I imagine you'd use a condensing turbine, so you get most of your original cooling fluid back. What's left is a large volume of warm, dry air. Lots of industrial processes produce that kind of output today, and we don't see birds dropping out of the sky.
Whatever technology they use it'll be out of date before they finish installing 12.5 square miles of the stuff, and replacing it will mean starting from zero.
Compare this with thermal plants (mirrors focused on something to heat it up). The mirrors and focusing system remains the same, you just change the central element.
Thermal plants are far more sensible at the moment. This plan is yet another example of environmentalism gone mad.
No sig today...
An ancestor of mine was killed in the works of a water powered grist mill in 1747. Another was killed in a buggy accident in 1911. I can drive in half an hour to the site of a coal mine disaster that killed over 200. If we build wind mills by the tens of thousands it's going to cost lives.
In defense of the 'nutter', nuclear power is so expensive it's not really worth investing in, unless you are planning to build some nukes.
One, By the same arguement, Solar and wind power aren't worth investing in, because they're more expensive per kwh than nuclear.
Two, nuclear weapons aren't made from reactor waste much anymore - we have more efficient methods.
The waste from the nuclear plants in Canada, France, UK, and USA aren't used for creating nuclear weapon materials.
I don't read AC A human right
1. Elimination fission-based nuclear power technology.
2. ???
3. No more nuclear weapons.
North Korea didn't use fission as a major power source but they still got nukes, same with Pakistan, same with Israel.
Nuclear power is becoming more and more economical, so if your plan for eliminating proliferation relies on fighting the laws of economics you're pretty much screwed from the start. You also need to demonstrate a correlation between nuclear proliferation and nuclear power use.
(To save you some time: <quote>You also need to demonstrate a correlation between nuclear proliferation and nuclear power use.</quote> <p>Precisely. That's why nuclear power is not a viable answer to the world's energy needs.</p>)
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
A nuclear plant would also require water for cooling, which is rater absent from the California Valley area of Eastern San Luis Obispo county where these things are being built.
Nature doesn't keep secrets. You can't uninvent anything, ever. You just have to learn to mitigate and live with it.
The basic principles behind a nuclear weapon and nuclear power are the same, but having a nuclear reactor won't get you much closer to a nuclear weapon all by itself. The bombs themselves are dead-easy. Really all you need to do is quickly bring two sub-critical lumps of weapons-grade fissile material together and BOOM.
Getting the fissile material and enriching (essentially, concentrating it down) it is the tricky part that takes government-level resources to accomplish. Fuel for a nuclear power plant and its wastes are useless for making a bomb without the critical enrichment step.
That being said, there are some very real concerns over existing nuclear power plants. No private company will insure them, the high risk and long payback period on the initial investment scares away most investors, and they can't be shut down and spun back up as needed for fluctuating power demands, so they're not suitable for everywhere. Blindly declaring "build more nukes!" isn't going to be very helpful. We need to give careful consideration to if, how and where we build more; and focus on promising new designs that mitigate many of the drawbacks (pebble bed, breeders, thorium, etc.)
The point in renewable technologies is that any additional power that we can get outside of the fossil/nuclear fuel box is a good thing. The power demands of society will continue to increase. I'm not completely convinced that petroleum (note I don't use the term "fossil fuels") is a limited resource. However it is quite possible that we will continue to consume it more quickly than it is replenished by whatever process pumps the stuff into the earth's crust. Nuclear (uranium and plutonium) energy sources are scarce and hard to get to. One of the big reasons we're in Afghanistan is because they have huge uranium deposits there. I'm getting off on a tangent so I will try to draw a couple of analogies here.
Just because you might never win the Boston marathon doesn't mean that you shouldn't do cardio training to keep yourself healthy. Just because you will never be a body builder doesn't mean you shouldn't exercise and have a good diet. Just because you can't afford a Ferrari doesn't mean you shouldn't drive. Just because wind and solar power might not ever produce base load power doesn't mean that we shouldn't harness them to the best of our ability. Just because one particular technology might be "better" than another does not make the other technology worthless. To use a computer analogy... "Why do you even bother with a stupid desktop computer? Obviously a supercomputer is much more powerful."
A nuclear plant could produce twice that on about ten acres.
True, but you can't install your own nuclear power plant in your basement (well without getting into trouble) and get off the grid all together.
I'm all for large development of solar panel because eventually that means the panels that you can install yourself will be developed sooner than later and therefore sooner you can get off the grid all together and never have to pay a power company a dime ever again.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Hmm... why is it that
* a country who itself
- owns tons of nuclear bombs, biological and chemical weapons (all WMDs),
- the biggest military in the world
- and dangerously crazy people in the government,
- and that wants to oppress the whole world(*)
* wants to stop another much smaller country
- with dangerously crazy people in the government
* to build
- nuclear bombs
- and power plants
* to protect itself from that big country's embargos?
Hmmmmmmmmm???
Ewwwwwwww!!!
Exactly.
(*) Oil did not get more expensive. The price for oil *normalized*, after the USA could not force the OPEC to sell out under market price anymore, because the Chinese told the OPEC that if the USA does stop buying, they'll buy it instead.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
How will you dump the waste heat in the desert? ANY thermal plant works by, in effect, charging a toll on heat flowing from a source (focal point of a mirror, a fire, a nuclear reaction, etc) to a sink (cooling tower, large body of water, dry air cooling structure, etc.). If a nuclear plant has so much trouble dumping the heat in an arid region, why won't a solar thermal plant have the same trouble? (Or even more if the source temperature is less that the 500C or so for a reactor.)
Sadly, that *is* how a lot of people think. Not only that, but they did a survey years back and found that a huge chunk of people thought Three Mile Island was a near-Chernobyl level disaster with deaths and lots of released radiation, rather than an fine example that even those old safety systems actually worked.
The bulk of the human race is living in a fantasy world where about 5/6 of what they believe is utter bullshit. And it seems pretty constant across the globe. Different areas just have local varieties of bullshit.
Those figures don't include waste storage or decommissioning, which can run up quite a high bill. And of course the generating price depends in uranium ore cost, which could rise quite a lot if everyone turns to nuclear.
Also important to remember: in most nuclear power generating countries new plants where never outlawed. If any company wanted to build one they could. The fact that they haven't says something about the cost/benefit analysis (yes there's also the NIMBY problem but still).
Ok, if you say so. However, just a few catches.
How large lumps?
What shapes should they be?
How pure do they need to be?
How quickly do you need to bring them together?
How long will they have to stay together?
How powerful will the explosion be?
How powerful explosives do you need to bring them together quick enough?
Will you need a neutron source to ensure the chain reaction begins at the right moment?
If so, how will you build it? Will you use Polonium-Beryllium or D-T fusion?
How do you ensure the neutron source triggers at the right time?
When should the chain reaction start to ensure a powerful yield?
How many neutrons does your neutron source produce?
Does it produce the same number of neutrons every time?
Is the fissile material you use pure enough for a gun triggered design (hint, plutonium will not be)?
If not, how do you build an implosion type weapon?
What explosives can you use for the explosive lenses?
What shape should the lenses have?
What is the detonational velocity of the explosives you use?
Otherwise I agree with you. Once you have worked out those tiny details there, and a couple of others like them, you just need to bring two pieces together. Of course, this all assumes you have the fissile material to begin with. Weapons grade Uranium is not exactly easy to manufacture, and getting Plutonium-239 pure enough from Pu-240 that you can use a simple "bring the pieces together" design is extremely challenging.
These would be climatologists.
are the same people that won't allow the only reasonable alternative (nuclear)
These would be Greenpeace.
is all anyone should need to realize global warming is a hoax.
These would be idiots.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
"Iran signed the NPA; they were completely free to use nuclear power. The only problem is that they allegedly started their nuclear program without informing the IAEA, which means they broke the terms they agreed to in the NPA." They have not broken the NPA, the broke some of the aditional safety protocols agreed to. After that they have signed additional safty protocols and the AIEA have flooded with reports on the compliance of Iran following suit with their will, ElBaradei is convinced no nuclear weapons is being worked on so is USA's NIA. "Their actions only make sense if nuclear weapons are their goal. (Also they are refusing pre-enriched uranium from Russia; why? The only logical reason is that they want to be able to enrich to weapons grade, and Russia would only sell them reactor grade.)" Or simply put, they want to be self-sufficient, i mean, its not that Russia is reliable with their energy fuel.
My -1 Troll is actually a +1 funny. And my -1 flame is actually a +1 insightfull.