Slashdot Mirror
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.
I'm surprised that photovoltaic is more cost effective than solar thermal. Using fresnel lenses that focus on heat exchangers that double as turbines, it can be cheaper than coal. See here:
http://www.celsias.com/article/utahs-solar-fired-furnace-power-california-less-co/
How about removing the tax credits for ALL forms of energy so we can have an undistorted idea of what the energy costs from each method, hmmmm?
Oh wait, the oil industry won't like this, will they?
When we use taxes to distort the markets for policy, the special moneyed interests ALWAYS get it so it benefits them and makes the intended result moot. Which means screwing over the folks who it was supposed to help in the first place.
Indeed. I'm convinced that if big solar plants are ever going to be worth building, they'll have to be based on a thermal approach rather than PV technology.
The molten salt system looks quite promising from the standpoint of solving the time of generation/time of use problem.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I still like nuclear.
The plant that's 4 miles from my house sits on less than 1 square mile and produces over 2300 MW, day or night.
The 12.5 square miles of flat desert land may be no problem out west, but finding several hundred acres of flat land here in the Appalachians just isn't happening. Besides, we'd have to cut down all the trees.
I think that's more an issue with a specific plant design than with the technology in general. Can't you use radiative closed-cycle cooling, like in a big automobile engine?
Fortunately, the places people tend to actually live are the places with water.
A nuclear plant could produce twice that on about ten acres.
Does that ten acres include the uranium mine and the waste disposal site? Because in-situ leaching isn't exactly eco-friendly.
We are all just people.
i strongly disagree. I live on the central coast and know where they planned to put this planet ( carrizo plains and/or california valley ). The land there is super flat to begin with and almost completely barren.
Conditions in this area are very ideal, the only opposition comes from the few people actually inhabiting this area: they don't want to look outside and see solar panels.
Yes, but the scale is tiny. Look: this argument comes up so often, I'm going to give it a name:
The Environmentalist's Fallacy
It goes something like this:
In reality, X produces far less overall pollution than Y.
I've seen this argument used to oppose:
All of these are great technologies. If we're ever to make any progress, we have to learn to think past the environmentalist's fallacy.
Realistically, part of the problem is load balancing. While solar might be particularly well suited to covering energy needs when air conditioners kick in during the summer, what happens when we plug in our electric cars at night, or rely on electric heat when natural gas and propane prices go even higher?
Perhaps we can use the limited information over power to load balance car charging during night hours, but even then we will either need nukes/coal, or invest in some highly expensive solar storage solutions (molten sodium, batteries, capacitors, flywheels, whatever). I think we're able to produce enough domestic power in the US to meet all our needs in the future, but the load balancing is what I think will be the most interesting thing to watch in the future.
Also, they have demonstrated their capability of suicidal and homicidal actions so have lost the privilege of nuclear capabilities.
Exactly. The factors that make us deem nuclear technology to be a "privilege" are the same ones that prevent it from being a viable answer to the world's energy needs.
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.
For some reason they're not co-operating in clearing themselves of the accusation that they started before informing the IAEA, and if nuclear power is their goal why would they do that?
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.)
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
As opposed to what? Fossil fuels? PV versus Fossil fuels such as coal are not in the same league as far as scalability goes. PV cannot replace fossil fuel plants at this time, regardless of the argument.
If your talking about pollution from Uranium mining, how about the pollution from mining that goes into extracting the metal used to build tools for creating solar panels? How about the chemicals that go into the creation of solar cells? How about the disposal of PV cells at the "end of life"? How long will a "nuclear" power plant last compared to a PV plant?
Compare apples to apples. There will be environmental damage in creating nuclear plants as well as PV or Wind plants. The question really is how much damage occurs "on scale". You cant compare 1 PV plant to 1 nuclear plant. You have to compare as many PV plants as it takes to equal 1 nuclear plant... THEN compare the waste. Why do I get the feeling that a PV equivalent scale to nuclear will end up producing much, much more waste in the end (considering current technology only). Then again, I am just a slashdot poster. YMMV.
20th century Marxism is not progress...
Excuse me, Greenpeace != All Environmentalists. In a lot of ways, they're just a nuisance who claim to speak for others. There are plenty of us "environmentalists" who are very pro-nuclear. I am one of them.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Canada uses CANDU nuclear reactors, which do not promote nuclear weapons since they use regular unenriched uranium. Canada also has no nuclear weapons. The idea that nuclear power is tied to nuclear weapons is absurd.
This is a little disingenuous. The NRU at Chalk River used to run on high-enriched uranium, and now runs on low-enriched uranium. Source.
Furthermore, the NRU, like the NRX before it, is heavy-water moderated, which is efficient at producing plutonium. Source.
Production of the world's medical isotopes using the NRU is one of the Canadian excuses for being able to produce bombs in a several-month time frame. It's true that Canada has never actually produced a nuclear weapon, but it's also true that some of the programs at Chalk River are "dual use".
Lakes?
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
You know, especially after seeing the recent opposition to solar farms based on "altering desert ecosystems", I'm convinced that the oil industry will put on an environmental face when convenient. None of the environmental groups I've participated in were anything but appalled by that stonewalling of solar power. There is no monolothic environmentalist group to have a fallacy; rather, there's shared concern from many groups for the state of the earth, and the faux-green capitalist crap trying to cash in on it.
The UK shows how much load balancing can be done: because millions of housholds put on electric waterheaters after the end of the most popular soap the have a 2000 MW spike every weekday. And they are able to compensate for it by using gravity reservoirs on the other side of the island.
The first link I gave included estimated nuclear waste disposal costs. Of course they have it easy since they can just ship most of it to France where it's reprocessed into more fuel. Here in the U.S. we're trying to bury "waste" that still contains 90% of its original energy consequently making it unnecessarily "hot" for an unnecessarily long period of time at unnecessary expense. If we reprocess, we should have enough uranium for thousands of years. Plenty of time to develop cost-effective renewables, if not fusion.
The U.S. is almost alone in not expanding nuclear power (Germany banned it, and consequently buys a lot lot of electricity from France which is 80% nuclear). The U.S. hasn't been building nuclear plants because they take longer to get approved and construct (due to excessive regulatory requirements and lawsuits). So coal plants end up being less risky and requiring less capital investment, so that's what the power companies here build.
200 years ago most of the US was thinly settled wilderness.
Care to accurately project what the US will be like in 200 years?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
So much obfuscation ...
So I'll bite.
> How large lumps?
Large enough for the combined mass to no longer be sub-critical. For U-235 it's about 50 kg. This doesn't need to be exact; just make two 30kg pieces and you're there.
> How pure do they need to be?
OP had this: weapons grade; read more carefully. better 85% U-235
> How quickly do you need to bring them together?
Probably around 300 m/s
> How long will they have to stay together?
> How powerful will the explosion be?
Nearly the same question. Doesn't really matter; it'll go boom with any reasonable design. Maybe not a big boom, but ... maybe.
Most of these questions are silly, pre-supposing an implosion type device. Although I'd probably want a Po-Be trigger for a gun-type too.
> What shapes should they be?
> 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?
> 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?
The problem with your efforts to obfuscate the issue is this: It really isn't that hard to make something which goes boom --- IF YOU HAVE ENOUGH FISSILE MATERIAL. To your credit, you acknowledge this. But it cannot be overemphasized.
But please don't try to pretend that anyone who can purify enough U-235 can't overcome the other, relatively simple technical challenges inherent in a gun-type design.
Even those who simply buy the fissile material would have a good chance of making something scary. Maybe not devastating, but scary.
Care to accurately project what the US will be like in 200 years?
While the US wasn't settled heavily 200 years ago, Europe was - and they have plenty of records, businesses, and buildings that are over 200 years old.
Heck, we've dug up graveyards and garbage dumps in the thousands of years old.
I'm just saying, for the pollution caused, properly recycled nuclear waste, or breeder reactors, end up producing 10X the power for a given amount of waste that stays radioactive for a much shorter period of time.
Given that - suddenly Yucca mountain makes a lot more sense. Given that, a nuclear plant can store a couple centuries of waste, minimum, on site vs 20 in it's pool.
I don't read AC A human right
I agree with you. Consideration of risk and liability are preventing a lot of progress.
For example- we could easily be on mars and on the moon if we were willing to take the losses that the american settlers did (50%? 60%?) And even knowing the risks, people would line up to be settlers on mars and the moon if you would just let them.
We are killing the space program with an insistance on zero risk.
However....
While I'm willing to take enormous risks personally and let others take big risks - I'm not willing for corporations to make a fortune today at the cost of ruining our country / world for the next 200, 2000, or more years. We underestimate just how horrible the downside of nuclear risk can be. Just like we underestimated how bad the downside risk of subprime credit could be.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.