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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...
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.