Google Invests In World's Largest Solar Power Tower Plant

cylonlover writes "Google has chipped in a US$168 million investment in what will be the world's largest solar power tower plant. To be located on 3,600 acres of land in the Mojave Desert in southeastern California, the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS) will boast 173,000 heliostats that will concentrate the sun's rays onto a solar tower standing approximately 450 feet (137 m) tall. The plant commenced construction in October 2010 and is expected to generate 392 MW of solar energy following its projected completion in 2013."

Comments

Solar

[Anonymous Coward]

There should be more than enough energy in the Sun to power their servers.

Re:Solar

[God'sDuck]

There should be more than enough energy in the Sun to power their servers.

Unless there's an injunction. Oracle's already suing Google for using Sun's code in Android. I'm assuming they'll be adding this exploit to the suit.

Re:Solar

[The Grim Reefer2]

and is expected to generate 392 MW

If they increase it by 248MW, it will certainly be enough to power anyone's servers.

Re:Solar

[Anonymous Coward]

That was horrible. I mean, even for /. horrible. Thanks for ruining my day man. Next time, write that out, read it out loud, and then read it to someone else. Did they laugh? Did they smirk? Did they look at you like "why are you trying to be clever?" In fact, you don't even need someone else. Just read it back to yourself. If you 100% think that you should be posting that, then by all means, go ahead. But I know you wouldn't - no one in their right mind could think "Yeah, this'll make 'em laugh!"

In short: your post was horrible, and we're all dumber for reading it.

And my God have mercy on your soul.

Re:Solar

[aiht]

I laughed.
I guess I'm dumber now.

What would happen to the birds?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

I wonder what would happen to the birds who fly into the beam near the focal point. Or would there be enough thermal convection signals there to scare them off?

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[cobrausn]

Probably would not harm them as much as wind power does, depending upon who you ask.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Anonymous Coward]

A quick google came up with this (PDF warning)

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[ashidosan]

what would happen

Fwoosh.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Anonymous Coward]

there will be take away restaurant nearby, that specializes in poultry.
World energy and world hunger crisis solved!

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[mangu]

Bats have it worse than birds, for some reason that's still not understood. Since bats are one of the most important insect predators, this means more pesticides are needed to protect crops.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously haven't been to the Mohave. Restaurants are far and few.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[DanTheStone]

I thought they figured out it was due to the sudden pressure drop exploding their lungs? Did I hear incorrectly?

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[defunctpassword]

They had a setup like this out at Thermo California a few years back. You could see the heat exchanger glowing like a mini sun on top of the tower. I doubt many birds will get close to it.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Jeng]

Not wind, Solar.

Your linked article is about wind turbines, not solar power plants.

I kinda doubt that bats will get cooked by the solar arrays since they tend to only come out at night.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm guessing bats are going to be safe from the perils of solar energy. Thats just my own speculation.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, the "eco friendly" wind farms...

I guess environmentalists don't really care about distributed noise damage and stress (the very low frequency "thumps" wind turbine generates) to land animals and humans nor do they really care about significant decrease in bird populations.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[metrometro]

> I wonder what would happen to the birds who fly into the beam near the focal point

The question to ask is whether this would impact birds more or less than ecosystem-wide acid rain from a coal plant? I have no patience for people crying about largely ephemeral bird impacts from wind or solar power, but aren't bothered at all by the much bigger and well documented bird killer: cars.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Significant relative to birds dying of smog from coal plants?

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Samantha Wright]

Yes, and you'll note that said reply was in response to something comparing animal deaths by solar to animal deaths by wind. This is also known as a wandering discussion, and is usually truncated shortly after the mods show up with "-1, Offtopic" scores, but can be carried out for months once the story is off the front page.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[slackzilly]

Insects are attracted by light. Birds like insects. But then again, the insects would probably not hang around for to long..

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[icebike]

Right. 70 birds over 3.3 years.

And if you read it, it says 81% of the deaths were because of birds flying into the structure (broken mandibles), apparently mistaking mirrors for blue sky. There were 13 birds total that got singed because of entering the "standby points", patches of sky, where mirrors are focused when NOT in use. Simply dispersing these focus points solves this problem.

Your average flat roadway kills more birds in 6 month than this entire facility in 3 years.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[HungryHobo]

forget cars, try cats.:D

the less damage that is done by a power source the more people focus on the rare problems, unlikely scenarios or minor damage.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Jeng]

Guess I should have clicked on their links before replying to yours.

Oh well.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Anonymous Coward]

big oil tankers and container ships are way worse at polluting than all the cars on the planet.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[crakbone]

Well if its anything like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Solar_Project#Solar_One It will be so bright they will not want to look at it let alone fly near it. I was able to see this tower from miles away and it was bright. Even though the thermal concentrator was painted flat black it was like looking at the sun.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[nitehawk214]

Insects are attracted by light. Birds like insects. But then again, the insects would probably not hang around for to long..

Birds are like insects, hmm?

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Coincidentally, that's not what he said...

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[icebike]

He said birds LIKE insects, not birds ARE like insects.

But There are virtually no flying insects in the Mojave, and bugs are only attracted to insects at night when the sun is down.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[slackzilly]

No, I didn't say that birds are like insects. I said that birds like insects.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[pclminion]

Probably death. Same as would happen to a bird that flew into the outflow of the stack of a coal burning power plant. Or chopped up in the blade of a wind turbine. Or sucked up the chimney of a solar convector and ground up in the spinning turbine. Or blown away by the shotgun of the custodian of a solar panel installation for crapping all over his solar cells. For nuclear, I guess it might smack into the side of the cooling tower and die.

How many corpses of dead squirrels are on the roadways of Portland, Oregon? I'd guess it's in the thousands at any given moment, but we keep on driving. There seems to be no shortage of squirrels though.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[SiggyTheViking]

>>But There are virtually no flying insects in the Mojave
My windshield says something different, especially this time of year with the wildflowers carpeting the desert.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Simon80]

That's 40 weeks, not 40 months, and because of the possibility of scavengers removing carcasses, the rate is more like 100 birds per year. The authors also warn that larger facilities may result in a nonlinear increase in the number of bird deaths because of the increase in scale.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Anonymous Coward]

(PDF warning)

Who cares?

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[icebike]

Just drove thru there last week, and there was hardly any. My frame of reference was summer time anywhere in the midwest or south, where I have seen windshields become opaque in two seconds flat.

You simply never see large groups of fly catching birds in the desert. I've never seen a swallow there. Buzzards aplenty. But no flying bug catchers.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[camperdave]

You could probably cut that number down with those silhouettes that they use to keep birds from flying into windows.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[c0lo]

I wonder what would happen to the birds who fly into the beam near the focal point.

Are there many birds in Mojave?

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[icebike]

Right, 40 weeks spread out over two years.

Their scavenger removal studies were highly suspect, because they conducted most of them outside the fenced area, where coyotes have free roam.
 

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[517714]

If you had read the PDF, you would know that it was swallows that were the type of birds that were burnt. While I recognize that the Audubon study is necessarily flawed, not considering the possible beneficial impact on the birds' environment due to the plant, I do believe that their observations are more reliable than your purely anecdotal recollection.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[ArsonSmith]

My guess is a video will be made and posted on youtube.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[The Grim Reefer2]

big oil tankers and container ships are way worse at polluting than all the cars on the planet.

Shut up, go buy a Prius and don't worry about how the parts arrived at the assembly plant. You'll know you did your part for the environment that way. ;-)

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Americium]

How many birds die from flying into windows? Should we ban glass windows.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Americium]

yea, all those crops growing out in the desert.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c10/page_63.shtml
denmark 30,000 bird deaths from turbines, 1millilon from cars. in uk 55million birds killed by cats. refs in link

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Rei]

Oh, God -- got to love an article that starts out talking about wind power by bringing up Altamont Pass. Altamont Pass was a *1970s* wind farm. It was built with very little study (unlike today's requirements), and if you wanted to design a rapor cuisinart, that would be the way you would do it. They built it in the middle of a raptor flyway with low turbines with fast-spinning blades and a tower structure that encouraged birds to try to land on them. Comparing Altamont Pass to modern wind farms is just absurd. Despite them generating a tiny fraction of our wind power, Altamont and a couple other old farms cause over 80% of wind-related raptor deaths.

Then they bring up the American Bird Conservatory. The American Bird Conservatory, like the Audubon Society, supports wind power when it's designed with birds in mind. The very paper that ABC cites for their numbers ("A Summary and Comparison of Bird Mortality from Anthropogenic Causes with an Emphasis on Collisions") states "The high level of mortality associated with the Altamont wind plant has not been documented at newer wind plants constructed at other sites." The paper's conclusions are amazingly *supportive* of wind turbines (noting, for example, that wind turbines average 1.5 bird fatalities per year, while communication towers average 8.1). They come up with a figure of 3.04 bird fatalities per MW per year for wind power. They estimate that wind power killed 20-37k birds per year as of the 6.4GW installed capacity as of 2003 (compared to the 500M-1B birds killed by anthropogenic causes alone). ABC's "1 million birds" number is nowhere in the first paper that they cite. One can only conclude that they did some crazy extrapolation which was heavily biased by Altamont and other early wind farms which did not consider birds in their designs and used older, fast-turning blades. They also mention another paper by FWS, but fail to give a proper reference to it; I searched the FWS's site and can find nothing to back it up.

That whole WSJ article is based on a big lie -- that only wind power gets an exemption from bird kills. In the US, cars kill 60-80m birds per year, with more from planes and trains. 100m to 1b birds in the US per year die from window strikes. The number for US high tension lines is roughly 130m. For communication towers, the estimate is 4-5m (and rapidly growing). 67m are estimated to die from pesticides. And on and on. How many of these death sources do you think are getting sued?

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Somehow I don't think a solar plant is going to cause much harm to a creature that only comes out at night.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[bluemonq]

Because the parts for your gas/diesel car teleported itself to the final assembly point once it was manufactured.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[catchblue22]

I wonder what would happen to the birds who fly into the beam near the focal point. Or would there be enough thermal convection signals there to scare them off?

If this is in the middle of the desert, I doubt that there would be a high concentration of birds, largely due to the lack of water. I'm not saying that there would be no birds, but surely this ecosystem couldn't support a large population. On the whole, I would think that the ecological consequences of putting solar plants in the desert would be relatively small, especially compared with say, cutting down the rainforests, eutrifying coral reefs, draining wet-lands, or suburbanizing large tracts of agricultural land.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Rogue Haggis Landing]

I have no patience for people crying about largely ephemeral bird impacts from wind or solar power, but aren't bothered at all by the much bigger and well documented bird killer: cars.

Change one letter and you get an even worse threat: cats. From the New York Times, quoting the relevant section because of the paywall:

The American Bird Conservancy estimates that up to 500 million birds are killed each year by cats — about half by pets and half by feral felines. ... By contrast, 440,000 birds are killed by wind turbines each year, according to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, although that number is expected to exceed one million by 2030 as the number of wind farms grows to meet increased demand.

So, if you're opposed to solar and wind power because of your concern over birds, you'd better not be someone who lets your cat go outside.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[bluemonq]

Sigh, lack of edit. Anyway, as I was about to say, the better question is, how much energy did it cost to make those parts in the first place?

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Rei]

At Solar One, there were 13 birds that died that way in a 40-week study period. Most bird deaths at Solar One were collisions with the heliostats, nor burning. And, to be quite blunt, *some* birds are going to collide with anything you build. Birds die in collisions with rocks and trees, too (and *tons* die in collisions with our other structures -- power lines, windows, communications towers, etc).

Solar One was believed to be unusually attractive to birds because it was cited in the desert near an irrigated agricultural area, which provided an oasis where insects were plentiful for them to eat. It's expected that there will be fewer bird deaths per MW in more remote siting.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Rei]

Only if you look at particular pollutants (aka, not CO2) and ignore that the impact of those pollutants depends strongly on where they're emitted (if there's nobody to breathe a particular pollutant before it breaks down, does it really matter that much?).

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[cobrausn]

That whole WSJ article is based on a big lie -- that only wind power gets an exemption from bird kills. In the US, cars kill 60-80m birds per year, with more from planes and trains. 100m to 1b birds in the US per year die from window strikes. The number for US high tension lines is roughly 130m. For communication towers, the estimate is 4-5m (and rapidly growing). 67m are estimated to die from pesticides. And on and on. How many of these death sources do you think are getting sued?

I think that was the point they were making - that oil companies were being unfairly singled out because, well, they're oil companies and people hate them. It's fairly likely that other companies are responsible for more deaths for birds protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act than they were and were not targeted by lawsuits.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[geekoid]

I don't think bats will have much problem with the focal point of a solar tower.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[geekoid]

except CA did a study in 2003 that show 3000 birds where killed annual by one windmill array.

The thing is, the best place for windmills is the best place for birds. And bats.

Now think of it when there is enough to make up a significant power impact? Or the fact that there isn't enough land in the US FOR them to make a significant impact?

frakin' do some math.

If they make a 50MW windmill that takes up the same space as a 2MW windmill, let me know. Until then they aren't practical for wide use.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[icebike]

Or a cheap chicken wire mesh that the birds could see over each mirror. It would cut light reflection slightly.
But for 70 birds over two years it might not be worth the cost.

This study was done at Nevada Solar One, which has water cooling ponds.
If you don't expose those ponds you reduce a lot of attraction for the birds.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[geekoid]

That's because a large majority of insects travel at higher elevation. anywhere from 100 feet to 10,000 feet.

"But no flying bug catchers."
Millions of bats would disagree with you.
.

Apparently there is all kind of life going on at night. I mean, not a lot of animals are stupid enough to hangout in the Mojave during the day. we are talking about a place that in some days the reptiles prefer the shade.

Non of which matter for a solar array, but is very important when considering windmills.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[geekoid]

Far more birds are killed per windmill then per cat.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not so much the level of damage as it is the concentrated location.

If there's a bat with a broken neck right below a windmill and there's no typical signs of an animal having done so - hey presto, that specific windmill killed the bat.

If there's a bird looking like it was accidentally put into an oven before it was properly plucked, gutted, etc. below your solar tower - hey presto, that specific solar tower killed the bird.

If there's a bunch of trout lying dead at the bottom of a dam and upstream there's a suspicious lack of trout that used to be there - well golly, that specific dam just might be decimating the trout population.

But if bat populations mysteriously dwindle and bird populations dwindle and fish seem to contain more mercury and mutations across a wide variety of locations... well who do we blame for that? Coal plant A some 20 miles away? Coal plant B that's 50 miles away? The Coal plant industry at large? Not much of a specific target.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bats have it worse than birds, for some reason that's still not understood. Since bats are one of the most important insect predators, this means more pesticides are needed to protect crops.

Yeah, stupid bats should only fly around at night time...oh wait.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[eriks]

Uh, if we had as many windmills as cats, I'd think we'd figure out a solution...

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[icebike]

Non of which matter for a solar array, but is very important when considering windmills.

Or Not.

The Windmill kills Birds data is largely due to outdated technology no longer being deployed.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/04/common_misconce.php

Just watching western US wind farms you notice that the modern blades are turning so slow that even an impact with a bird would probably not kill it.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Jarik C-Bol]

"fwoosh" i would suspect.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[rahvin112]

There is a significant difference between birds dieing running into things and birds dieing because they were coated in oil. For one thing the type of birds being killed are significantly different. For another we can't stop birds from flying into objects and killing themselves (if they didn't fly into a turbine they'd probably fly into a tree), we can stop birds from landing in oil spills caused by people.

Very different scenarios, very different causes and very different mortality rates. They shouldn't be treated the same.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can tell you exactly what happens: they die. I work with concentrated solar systems, and though I have not seen it happen myself, a few of my colleagues have. Of course, it would depend on how close the bird gets to the focal point, how fast it is flying, etc.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Jeremi]

Uh, if we had as many windmills as cats, I'd think we'd figure out a solution...

An easy solution: put bells on all the windmills.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[cobrausn]

There was no mention of an oil spill in the linked WSJ article. The birds decided to land on (and in) uncovered treatment tanks on private property. The article pointed out that other companies, such as utility companies, have been sued for millions because their power lines killed ~ 200 eagles. About 80 per year die due to wind turbines, yet no lawsuit is in order.

Not here to say that the birds can all go die in a fire, just saying I see the favoritism at work.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBvSIyMny3M

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Anonymous Coward]

So basically either this is a good place to go out camping or it will create nocturnal birds through evolution.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[wolvesofthenight]

Sandia National Labs has one of these towers (though it is not used for electric power generation). From what I hear (2nd & 3rd hand), if a bird goes into the central beam nothing comes out - the entire bird is vaporized (with maybe a dusting of ash left). Now, if you are wondering about bird deaths per MW I don't know. As others has stated, these things are probably kill fewer birds than many other human activities.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[rxmd]

If we look at the basic pattern behind your arguments, we find the following:

• Plant X is a very old design - with modern designs that couldn't happen
• The number of deaths is exaggerated anyway
• Other death sources are much more prominent, but are ignored

You use them for wind power (Altamont Pass is old anyway, there aren't really that many bird deaths anyway, more birds get killed by cars than by windmills). However, interestingly enough they're exactly the same kinds of arguments a nuke defender would use (Fukushima is old anyway, not that many human deaths can be directly attributed to it anyway, more humans get killed by cars than by nuke plants).

I'm not saying either is right or wrong, but it's just very interesting to note just how similar the line of argument gets as soon as people are on the defensive.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[jo_ham]

Yes, because it's a sensible, rational line of thought that looks at the picture as a whole. It is totally unsurprising to me that it can be fitted to almost any discussion that gets media coverage, generally because the media (or people with an agenda like anti-nuke/anti-windfarm/anti-healthcare etc) like to go for sensationalist reporting and disinformation. It's no wonder that defensive rhetoric from proponents of the various targets of this propaganda is broadly similar in style.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[The Grim Reefer2]

Yes and no. I would guess you could expend twice as much energy locally and still be better off than shipping. Those tankers and container ships are consistently overlooked in regards to efficiency and pollution but are still running on the same tech from the 1950's and 60's.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[dbIII]

In Australia we had a similar thing to kinder surprise where the chocolate contained the parts of a model of an extinct animal and a note describing the creature and how it became extinct. Several of the animals modelled where killed by cats and one species of flightless bird on a small island was even wiped out by a single cat.
Sadly the Cadbury Chocolate Yowie is itself extinct.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[colonel spalding]

Exactly. It is so much the better option and I would imagine with time and thought problems could be improved. The time to move is now. Go google. We need more googles, more Richard Bransons (virgin air etc).

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apart from the fact the article has nothing to do with this story, It's not the blades hitting bats/birds that is the main killer. It's when they fly close enough to pressure changes which bursts their lungs.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Asic Eng]

If there are, keep an eye out for Google's new venture: Mojave Fried Chicken.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[BlackPignouf]

I've been to PS10 & PS20 (close to Sevilla, Spain) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS20_Solar_Power_Plant
You can't believe how bright the rays are close to the tower, and I sure as hell would'nt like to fly there.
Still, one of the workers told me they do find an occasional fried bird.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Combatso]

Then they settle at night in a warm place, like a solar tower,.. and at sunrise quickly warm up to a comfy 1000 degrees

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[BigDogCH]

The story of the single cat was probably this one. It is based on truth anyway. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephens_Island_Wren

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[kauttapiste]

I think they might get angry. Google should be afraid, very afraid.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[tehcyder]

Insects are attracted by light. Birds like insects. But then again, the insects would probably not hang around for to long..

Birds are like insects, hmm?

Mod parent -1 "epic fail in misunderstanding a three word sentence".

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Captain.Abrecan]

There is no focal point. The walls of the tower are covered in water pipes that go to a steam drum.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[Anonymous Coward]

They had a setup like this out at Thermo California a few years back. You could see the heat exchanger glowing like a mini sun on top of the tower. I doubt many birds will get close to it.

The moths, on the other hand...

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Far more birds are killed per windmill then per cat.

Yes, but there are valid reasons to own a windmill.

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[nitehawk214]

mod GP idiotic

Re:What would happen to the birds?

[spicate]

What's your source for there not being enough land for windmills? Other people disagree.

Excellent

[Anonymous Coward]

Activate Archimedes II

Re:Excellent

[jbonomi]

First thing I thought of as well... http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Helios_One

Re:Excellent

[Grael]

My first thought when I saw this was an image of Helios One. Then when I read it was in the Mojave, I instantly thought OH GOD I HOPE THEY NAME IT HELIOS ONE!

Drop in the bucket

[elrous0]

$168 million sounds like a serious investment, until you consider that this thing is projected to cost $1.37 *billion*.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[w_dragon]

Over 10% is hardly a drop in the bucket.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[by (1706743)]

If you were buying a $600,000 house, could you justify buying a $70,000 car because it's a drop in the bucket? Google hardly has a majority contribution (plurality maybe? Haven't read the article...), but about 12% is a non-trivial contribution in my book.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[elrous0]

I think the summary should have included the total cost. One could read it and come away thinking that Google was completely bankrolling the project, when this is actually just a fraction of the money that will be required to build it.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[kevinNCSU]

$168 million sounds like a serious investment, until you consider that this thing is projected to cost $1.37 *billion*.

You a Chemist? I don't know what the hell kinds of buckets you use but mine tend to carry more than 9 drops ;)

168 mil / 1.37 billion = a little more than 12%. I'd consider 12% of my salary or budget a pretty significant investment, and if I was taking a test I'd consider a question worth 12% of the grade worth a pretty significant investment in doing well on it.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[elrous0]

I think the summary unfairly implied that this was a majority investment. 12% is, to my mind, a very small investment. But, drop in the bucket or not, it's still nowhere even close to the kind of investment that will be required to actually see it through. I think that needs to be clarified.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless the bucket is 500 microliters in which case it is just about right.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[nedlohs]

"chipped in" implies a maority investment?

Re:Drop in the bucket

[elrous0]

Actually, I wanted to correct this. $1.37 billion was just the loan guarantees it was given for construction. After researching it a little more, I found out that this doesn't cover all the actual cost. Actual construction cost is estimated to be more like $2.14 billion.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it not? Do *you* have $168 mil in the couch?

Re:Drop in the bucket

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd have to be a fucking idiot to read the summary and think that google was *completely* bankrolling the project. It's neither stated, inferred, nor implied.

So stop backtracking and blaming the summary and just admit that you're a moron and a failure when it comes to basic reading comprehension.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[Anonymous Coward]

Over 10% is hardly a drop in the bucket.

Yep, that's definitely a respectable sized splash

Re:Drop in the bucket

[nitehawk214]

"chipped in" implies a maority investment?

No, it implies they are playing golf.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[tmosley]

Wait, the total cost is then about $3.50 per watt? Christ, they should have just subsidized cheap panel purchases. If this kind of scale up can't create more economy than that, then this approach is not going to work.

The money would have been better spent on outfitting solar power manufacturers with solar cells, so people stop complaining about how solar panels are really fossil fuels. Some people just don't understand the difference between marginal costs (like fuel that is dug out of the ground), and capital costs (solar panels that pull power from the sky so long as they last). This difference means that, given a sufficiently long lived solar installation, the initial cost doesn't matter. You will make your money back eventually, and once you do, you have a free source of power.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, and it has the power output of a nuclear reactor. That's like 5-10 times less that a new reactor would cost. All told that plant sounds like a pretty good investment.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, TFS would have been a good place for the total cost.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[0123456]

This difference means that, given a sufficiently long lived solar installation, the initial cost doesn't matter. You will make your money back eventually, and once you do, you have a free source of power.

The only problem is that most solar installations aren't 'sufficiently long lived'.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the summary should have included the total cost. One could read it and come away thinking that Google was completely bankrolling the project, when this is actually just a fraction of the money that will be required to build it.

1/1 is a fraction. 1/10 is a fraction. I assume that the fact that it is not an irrational amount of money implies that it can be expressed as a fraction.

BTW it did say "Google has chipped in" so if you read it as Google bankrolling the project, I'd say its a reader error.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[Thelasko]

392 MW sounds like a lot, until you consider that's only ~8% of Fukashima.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[elrous0]

For the 100th time, stop trolling my posts, Mom!

Re:Drop in the bucket

[edalytical]

In Arizona the 3,875 MW Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station cost $5.9 billion. I think your numbers are off!

Re:Drop in the bucket

[arbitraryaardvark]

1.4 billion project, to produce enough electricity for 140,000 homes, if i'm doing the math right, works out to about $10,000 per home. that seems like a reasonable payback. if google has a 12% share, that's around 17,000 homes. how many employees does google have? more than 20,000.
so, if they throw in a bit of conservation, google is buying solar power for its workforce's homes, at about $10,000 each. Seems like they break even on the investment while getting decent pr out of it. If it costs $1.4 billion to build, does that make it an easy target for terrorists (from, say, redmond) to hit with a dirty bomb?

Re:Drop in the bucket

[Anonymous Coward]

No. And go clean your room!

Re:Drop in the bucket

[anagama]

How much will Palo Verde cost to decommission? How many years will the waste require cooling while providing nothing in return? Decommissioning the solar plant would require what, some long hammers, a couple bull dozers, bit of dynamite to topple the tower, some dump trucks and a few crews of workers going at it for a couple months?

What about ongoing maintenance? I have no data but I'm guessing a bunch of mirrors is a lot easier to maintain than potentially deadly fuel and waste. Easier of course means cheaper.

Construction costs aren't the only metric.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, the total cost is then about $3.50 per watt? Christ, they should have just subsidized cheap panel purchases. If this kind of scale up can't create more economy than that, then this approach is not going to work.

...given a sufficiently long lived solar installation, the initial cost doesn't matter. You will make your money back eventually, and once you do, you have a free source of power.

Did you notice that the end of your argument contradicts the beginning of it?

Re:Drop in the bucket

[edalytical]

If you think those numbers are significant, by all means produce them.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[fritsd]

You a Chemist? I don't know what the hell kinds of buckets you use but mine tend to carry more than 9 drops ;)

This kind of bucket maybe: Eppendorfer Reaktionsgefäß (always wanted to use that word in a Slashdot discussion!)

Re:Drop in the bucket

[GlibOne]

You knew someone was going to do the math. 75708.23568 drops = one gallon in a bucket Source traditionaloven.com $1.37B / 168M = .123 so it is 9310 drops, to 3 places due to pricing accuracy. It is a crap load of drops.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[ChunderDownunder]

no doubt Google has plans for investment in a bunch of renewable energy projects across the globe. The US administration mightn't be in a position to introduce a carbon offset scheme any time soon. But to remain competitive in international markets that do price pollution, Google will proudly proclaim they're already carbon-neutral since, say 2014.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[Jeremi]

The only problem is that most solar installations aren't 'sufficiently long lived'.

The average energy payback period for a solar installation is 1-4 years. The expected lifetime of a solar installation is 30 years. Source.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[Jeremi]

392 MW sounds like a lot, until you consider that's only ~8% of Fukashima.

It's actually a lot more than the output of Fukashima these days.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[Jeremi]

does that make it an easy target for terrorists (from, say, redmond) to hit with a dirty bomb?

The point of a dirty bomb is that it is dirty -- i.e. you want it to blow up in a place where a lot of people live and (hopefully) make them sick. Blowing up a dirty bomb in the middle of a desert where nobody is around to get sick seems like a waste of a good bomb.

As for whether it would be easy to blow up in general (dirty aspects aside)... perhaps you could blow up the central tower, but the mirrors constitute the bulk of the infrastructure, and they would be spread out enough that you'd need an awfully big bomb to destroy many of them.

If you wanted to destroy $1.4 billion worth of infrastructure, there are many other targets that would give you more destruction and/or terror for your money. Blowing your terrorist wad on a little-seen facility in the middle of the desert isn't going to get you on the front page; blowing up a stadium full of sports fans, OTOH, probably would.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[SydShamino]

So 12.5 of these things would take about 182 square kilometers and produce the same power as Fukashima. Of course, Fukashima now takes about 1260 square kilometers and growing, so the solar farm seems pretty good against your choice of nuclear plant to compare...

Re:Drop in the bucket

[tmosley]

You didn't understand the argument. My point is that there are much cheaper, more easily deployable solar power solutions than this boondoggle. Specifically, solutions that don't require a bajillion acres of desert, ie simple solar panels that have a QUICKER payback, meaning more money sooner.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[tmosley]

And that depends on the type of installation. A photovoltaic system can be expected to last at least that long. Who knows with this thing. I bet the tower collapses from metal fatigue in 10-15 year.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[baker_tony]

Is there a slashdot comment filter so I can remove posts from angry kids under the age of 16?

Re:Drop in the bucket

[cnaumann]

How many hours a day can this plant produce 392MW? Maybe 8? The article does not say, but my bet is that generting capacity is only about 3% of Fukashima.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[bobstreo]

But if it fails you probably won't need to evacuate between 10 and 50 miles from the site.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[Anonymous Coward]

And people would rather live next to this and have to cut back on their wasteful energy usage, than live next to Fukashima...

392 MW is a lot, when I run my entire home (and future electric car) off a 1.7 kW solar system...

Re:Drop in the bucket

[bstender]

But if something goes wrong, say it shatters from a meteor strike, it could turn a significant area into a bad-luck zone for the next 10,000 years.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you get that many significant digits.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[anotherzeb]

Plus, how much will it cost to maintain / replace parts against cost of maintaining Fukushima and providing the plutonium (or whatever was used there)?

Re:Drop in the bucket

[Solandri]

But if it fails you probably won't need to evacuate between 10 and 50 miles from the site.

Make it large enough to generate as much power as Fukushima and the area 10-20 miles around it would be permanently evacuated. All that land area would be covered with mirrors.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[pablo_max]

Not to mention this thing sits in the middle of a giant desert. So, not really displacing too many people or critters.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[Patch86]

12% is, to my mind, a very small investment.

I take it you'll be matching it, then?

Re:Drop in the bucket

[pedestrian crossing]

And that depends on the type of installation. A photovoltaic system can be expected to last at least that long. Who knows with this thing. I bet the tower collapses from metal fatigue in 10-15 year.

And leaves behind tons of radioactive waste and a polluted aquifer, and costs billions to decommission.

Oh wait, you were talking solar, not nuclear.

Never mind...

Re:Drop in the bucket

[mjwx]

"chipped in" implies a maority investment?

No, it implies they are playing golf.

No it implies they put in enough for the carton to be allocated one six pack to themselves.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[AmiMoJo]

You also have to consider the type of land and impact on neighbouring sites that these two technologies have. No-one wants to live near a nuclear power plant, but due to infrastructure requirements they are usually built relatively close to populated areas. Even once the Fukushima evacuation zone is lifted people living there are going to find their houses unsaleable.

On the other hand solar uses land that would otherwise be wasted and due to not needing as much maintenance or access for delivery/removal of hazardous materials it doesn't have to be near population centres. Even if it was in your backyard a catastrophic failure won't be nearly as bad.

Isn't CA on a fault line and due for a large earthquake? Seems like these factors should be given high priority.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[Capt James McCarthy]

Don't worry, I'm sure our lovely government spending plan will provide them plenty of your tax dollars. Tax dollars paying for a for profit initiatives (or for-loss initiatives like the postal service, amtrak, airline subsidies, etc), but that's another rant.

Re:Drop in the bucket

[DarthVain]

Ya I thought 170$ Million was a bit cheap for 400MW solar energy... I was at a wind farm that cost about 500$ million for about the same, and wind is supposed to be more economical... (comparatively to solar anyhow)

3600 acres = 1457 ha

[mangu]

That's 14.57 square kilometers, the size of a small to medium-sized town, maybe 20000 to 50000 inhabitants.

Re:3600 acres = 1457 ha

[h4rr4r]

So? Lots more desert than that. Also in the USA a town with 20k folks is probably more like 20sq km.

Re:3600 acres = 1457 ha

[rahvin112]

Do you have any idea how big the Mohave is? You could fit several European countries in it. It's not even the largest, just the one with (IIRC) the lowest rainfall and cloud cover with bonus points for being the closest to the major CA population centers.

We have about 6 deserts in the US that could fit dozens of facilities this size with a minimal wildlife impact (they spread the concentric circles of mirrors out by about triple the mirror size). In fact I wouldn't be surprised if we could build mirror farms like this in rural deserts and end up with an area the size of France covered in mirrors. People really fail to grasp just how big the American southwest is.

Re:3600 acres = 1457 ha

[icebike]

Easily lost in the Mojave. http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&tab=wl

Re:3600 acres = 1457 ha

[tmosley]

They are only producing 10 kW per acre. That's pretty shitty, in my book.

Re:3600 acres = 1457 ha

[Anonymous Coward]

Those acres are just sitting there doing nothing right now, so what's the problem? We aren't running out of uninhabited desert any time soon.

Re:3600 acres = 1457 ha

[Americium]

Thats 2.5 watts/ square meter.

That's less than 1% efficiency.

But if it's super cheap, who cares.

Re:3600 acres = 1457 ha

[skids]

You know, these days it is really easy not to be off by an order of magnitude. Just ask the people with all the Os.

Re:3600 acres = 1457 ha

[Americium]

You mean 100kW per acre.

Re:3600 acres = 1457 ha

[Americium]

Since you were off by 10 so was I, so make it a little less than 10%.

Re:3600 acres = 1457 ha

[tmosley]

Apparently I was off by a factor of 10.

But then, the point is that it ISN'T super cheap. It's $3.50/watt. You can buy commercial panels for less than that on a retail level. They might as well have paid for people to put panels on their roofs. It would probably have made a lot more sense than building this huge complex in the middle of nowhere and shipping the electricity to somewhere--which itself has a cost.

Re:3600 acres = 1457 ha

[Americium]

It's even worse, total cost is estimated to be around $2 billion, so it's $5/watt.

That does seem ridiculous. But this is a new technology, so perhaps with mass production costs would collapse? Perhaps after they have built this one, building another one will be really cheap.

Otherwise I don't understand why they are doing this either.

.

Re:3600 acres = 1457 ha

[Anonymous Coward]

People really fail to grasp just how big the American southwest is

that's a good point, if you've never driven through New Mexico it's hard to get your mind around just how sparsely populated and desolate the SW United States is. You could fall asleep driving, drive off the road, and just keep going for a 100 miles and never hit anything.

Re:3600 acres = 1457 ha

[geekoid]

how the hell are you getting 3.50 a watt? DO you assume they are going to make all the money back in a year?

Re:3600 acres = 1457 ha

[Terwin]

Now that is hardly fair, in 100 miles you are bound to cross dozens of creeks. You can tell because the average grain-size is nearly twice that of the surrounding area... and there is a very slight dip.(the likelihood of finding one with actual water in it can be dismissed as noise)

Re:3600 acres = 1457 ha

[trout007]

I was out in Arizona and I knew I was pretty far away from civilization because when I went to change the radio station it automatically went up the dial then back around to the same station.

I wonder if you shade enough of the desert can you cool it down to where you would change the local climate? I always wondered if you could put a big aqueduct from the Pacific to some of these dry lakes that are a few hundred feet below ground level out in the desert. Then let the water flow in and turn some turbines. It is so hot and dry in those areas the water in the lake would dry out pretty fast keeping the water coming. Then you could harvest and sell the sea salt.

Re:3600 acres = 1457 ha

[rahvin112]

Watt is a time based measurement. Your $5 assumption assumes the cost is spread over 1 year using the MWh number quoted. Power plants have life cycles in the 30-50 year range (ie. most are designed for 30 and survive much longer).

Re:3600 acres = 1457 ha

[Anonymous Coward]

I remembered this mentioned on the drive to the pacific episode of Top Gear: Jeremy Clarkson said the desert they had to drive in has *no* living anything, not even biological (though obviously I don't know that much), and that it hasn't rained there since records were first recorded.

Here's the snippet from Wikipedia:

The Atacama Desert is one of the few deserts on Earth that does not receive any rain. It is a plateau in South America, covering a 600-mile (1,000 km) strip of land on the Pacific coast of South America, west of the Andes mountains. The Atacama desert is, according to NASA, National Geographic and many other publications, the driest desert in the world,[1][2][3] due to the rain shadow on the leeward side of the Chilean Coast Range, as well as a coastal inversion layer created by the cold offshore Humboldt Current.[4] The Atacama occupies 40,600 square miles (105,000 km2)[5] in northern Chile, composed mostly of salt basins (salares), sand, and felsic lava flows towards the Andes.

So if the Mojave gets any rain at all, then it wouldn't be the driest :)

Re:3600 acres = 1457 ha

[blair1q]

And about half of it is still federally owned.

Re:3600 acres = 1457 ha

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have any idea how big the Mohave is? You could fit several European countries in it.

3 Slovenias, or just less than 2 Moldovas. "Several" is misleading. The median European country is about the size of the Mojave. (You're point is valid, but your comparison stinks.)

Re:3600 acres = 1457 ha

[klapaucjusz]

That's 14.57 square kilometers, the size of a small to medium-sized town, maybe 20000 to 50000 inhabitants.

According to Wikipedia, the Mojave desert is 65,000 km2, which is more than twice the surface of Belgium, or roughly one tenth the surface of France. (Yeah, America is big.)

A more interesting statistic is the amount of power produced by this installation, 400 MW, which is about 1/4 of a nuclear reactor, or one large wind farm.

-- jch

Re:3600 acres = 1457 ha

[tmosley]

I'm really surprised at the number of people who don't know the difference between power and energy.

A watt is a unit of power, which is analogous to current. You divide the total cost of the project by the number of watts. A watt-hour is worth something like $0.0001.

On a solar installation that costs $3.50 per watt, it takes 35,000 hours to break even, assuming no operating costs. That is almost exactly 4 years. Not bad for a solar installation, but pretty terrible when compared to the installed cost of $2 for the newest generation of cheap solar cells. These don't have to be centralized either.

Re:3600 acres = 1457 ha

[benjamindees]

Yes, costs will collapse. The only question is whether it will take three years or ten. This technology is mostly just sand, aluminum, and steel. All of those are limited only by energy costs, not materials.

Re:3600 acres = 1457 ha

[DiSKiLLeR]

People really fail to grasp just how big the American southwest is

that's a good point, if you've never driven through New Mexico it's hard to get your mind around just how sparsely populated and desolate the SW United States is. You could fall asleep driving, drive off the road, and just keep going for a 100 miles and never hit anything.

Honestly, thats nothing.

Try driving through Western Australia.

Australia is almost the same land area as the continental United States, except, unlike the US, its almost ALL desert.

Re:3600 acres = 1457 ha

[Anonymous Coward]

Mojave is about 65 000 km2... Granted, a country like Belgium (that is where Brussels is) is only about 30 000 km2 and could fit in the Moraje but Belgium is a very small country. So, sure, take Belgium, Luxemburg, Andore, Monaco (I'm talking continental Europe here) and they'd all "fit" in the Moraje but France alone, Germany alone, Spain alone, Italy alone, etc. would definitely *NOT* fit.

Don't get me wrong: I understand the states are huge but saying you could fit several European countries in the Mojave, although true, is a bit misleading.

Re:3600 acres = 1457 ha

[7-Vodka]

Jesus christ where can I buy $2/watt solar panels? I'm drop 10k tomorrow.

Is $168M the total cost or just a share?

[phaserbanks]

Curious to know the total cost of the project, i.e. dollars per Watt. The article doesn't specify whether Google is the sole investor.

Re:Is $168M the total cost or just a share?

[phaserbanks]

Thanks elrous0

Re:Is $168M the total cost or just a share?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the text is very vague. Someone said capital cost will be $1.37 billion and generate 392MW power. This would put it at $3.5/We installed capacity. Assuming this is peak generation, then the cost go up 4x (assuming no clouds, and 100% uptime), to $14/We.

In the desert, with additional maintenance over the years (ie. broken mirrors, unless they are steel mirrors of course), the cost is more likely $15-20/We.

Anyway, this is a larger scale test for solar and still lightyears short of what is needed. In comparison, coal or nuclear can provide with 1000-1500 MWe, or 4000-5000MW thermal. To replace something like a very large coal installation (about 5GWe sustained) at 8-10% collecting efficiency (like the plant that will be built), the total area required would be 250km2, or an area 10 miles by 10 miles, or a circle about 11 miles in diameter, at the very minimum.

I'm certain this will work very well in desert areas (Saudi Arabia, Nevada, parts of California), but it will not be very feasible in high population density areas like China or India or most of Europe.

Re:Is $168M the total cost or just a share?

[chill]

Europe is debating doing this sort of thing in Algeria and Morocco and stringing wires across the Straits of Gibralter.

China is not uniformly population dense. The Gobi Desert is large and as sparsely populated as any other major desert. Again, a problem of running long wires.

India...you may have a point.

Re:Regulators, regulate!

[sexconker]

Contingency plan: It's a desert.

Re:Regulators, regulate!

[Captain Splendid]

Let's see... a bunch of molten salt seeps out on the desert floor, and its cooling is accelerated by the tsunami. Meanwhile, the Pacific and the Mojave, nether strangers to lots of salt, shrug it off.

Sounds good to me.

Mirrors

[Anonymous Coward]

How do they maintain the integrity (uniform reflectivity) of the mirrors when they're constantly being blasted with sand? Does efficiency rely on this factor?

Re:Mirrors

[ThatMegathronDude]

The Mojave doesn't have much wind.

Re:Mirrors

[icebike]

Blasted?

Sand storms aren't all that common in most of the the Mojave.
Its mostly a bunch of cheap mirrors. Replace them when needed.

Re:Mirrors

[Skidborg]

I suspect their height might be partially to avoid this too.

Re:Mirrors

[Skidborg]

Eh, scratch that. Only the centre tower is all that tall.

Hi Apk. Imagine seeing you here.

Re:Mirrors

[thermopile]

They have regularly scheduled maintenance, too -- the heliostats are placed far enough apart to be able to drive a truck through them and spray down with water every so often.

Re:Mirrors

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you so stupid?

Re:Mirrors

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you, so stupid?

Re:Mirrors

[Skidborg]

Oh noooooooo! I'm being haunted by the ghost of a grade school bully.

nitpicking physicist here

[dlenmn]

is expected to generate 392 MW of solar power

FTFY

Re:nitpicking physicist here

[mangu]

is expected to generate 392 MW of solar power

FTFY

No, it's expected to collect solar power.

Re:nitpicking physicist here

[jpmorgan]

No, it's going to collect a lot more than 392MW of solar power, if wants to put out 392MW of electrical power.

Re:nitpicking physicist here

[Glock27]

is expected to generate 392 MW of solar power

FTFY

My first thought was that the 392 MW would be at noon on June 21. The important figure is of course the average MWH it will generate per day/year.

I'd guess it'll have a hard time seeming significant compared with nuclear power. I was just reading about the new Indian nuke plant complex the Russians are building, which is expected to generate 62 GW...or about 150 times as much, day or night, sunny or cloudy.

Re:nitpicking physicist here

[Anonymous Coward]

This is also a meaningless figure. 392MW of electrical power constantly? Instantaneously? On what duty cycle?

Re:nitpicking physicist here

[Anonymous Coward]

I like eggs, Howard.

Sun?

[NEDHead]

I thought they got bought, or something...

Terminator

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds familiar...

I guess it comes on the heals of kernel.org's release of skynet.

Re:Regulators, regulate!

[cusco]

The Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth, is on the Pacific coastline of Peru and Chile. Trivia: they fed sand from the Atacama to the Viking lander test instruments, and didn't find life.

I think they got the name wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure it will be called Helios One...
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Helios_One

Finally, something serious

[Anonymous Coward]

And not the usual geek Space Nuttery... Put it in space! Yeah, like Solaren? The only thing they've done is transfer money from gullible investors into their pockets.

Why Tower over parabolic trough?

[spiedrazer]

I'm sure there are numbers, but from a completely un-informed standpoint it seems to me that the paraboloc trough designs where a slurry tube runs through a mirrored trough would be cheaper to produce and maintain? http://www.powermag.com/renewables/solar/Saguaro-Solar-Power-Plant-Red-Rock-Arizona_468.html

Re:Why Tower over parabolic trough?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the Article--
"Although solar power tower development is currently less advanced than the more common trough systems, they offer higher efficiency and better energy storage capabilities. Parabolic trough systems consist of parabolic mirrors that concentrate sunlight onto a Dewar tube running the length of the mirror through which a heat transfer fluid runs that is then used to heat steam in a standard turbine."

Re:Why Tower over parabolic trough?

[Anonymous Coward]

1 set of expensive pumps vs thousands?

Re:Why Tower over parabolic trough?

[s122604]

It seems like at some point the industry is just going to give up, and go to photovoltaics

G.E. just had a breakthrough in thin-film efficiency

I guess it isn't quite there yet, bean counter wise, but no moving parts and no steam is nice...

Re:Why Tower over parabolic trough?

[camperdave]

At a guess,

1. it's cheaper to build a flat mirror than a curved one.
2. A flat mirror can track the sun in two dimensions
3. greater chance of a coolant leak with the miles of pipe in the parabolic design
4. greater concentration of heat means greater efficiency

Re:Why Tower over parabolic trough?

[camperdave]

Hello! Slashdot! What happened to the

operative? Those points are supposed to be part of an ordered list!

Re:Why Tower over parabolic trough?

[Anonymous Coward]

Those don't work at night. The massive tower design used in Mojave generates so much heat at the focal point and stores it in so much water it continues to produce steam, and thus power the turbine, all night long. As the biggest weakness of solar power is obviously the limited availability of the sun, having a method to store solar energy for continuous energy generation without the use of giant batteries is a big plus. The parabolic dish described in your linked article is tiny compared to the towers in Mojave and Spain and thus doesn't cover that advantage.

Also, as someone who works for Abengoa and is in regular contact with APS, it would have been freaking awesome for the Slashsdot news article to have mentioned either one of those companies. But no, let's just blather on about the investment company, who gives a rat's ass about the folks doing the actual work? Jackass writer.

Re:Why Tower over parabolic trough?

[JaredOfEuropa]

Molten salt solar plants have some promise, as they are capable of generating electricity well into the night. But my money is still on PV; these things are getting better and cheaper to the point where it does start to make sense, bean counter wise. I can get a decent (2400Wp) home PV installation today that will pay for itself in about 10 years... with a subsidy per kWh generated. Not a bad investment, and I suspect that in 10 years or so we'll be able to buy installations that have a similar ROI without any subsidies. At that point it will make sense to build PV installations into the roofs of all new homes.

Wind on the other hand seems a dead end street; I doubt there will be many significant breakthroughs in cost, TCO or efficiency. They require space, are impopular due to horizon pollution, and are expensive to maintain (our govt was planning to build a wind farm out in the sea, you can only imagine the staggering cost of maintaining a setup like that!).

Re:Why Tower over parabolic trough?

[russotto]

G.E. just had a breakthrough in thin-film efficiency

There's been a "breakthrough" in thin film efficiency twice a year for a long time now, and nothing ever comes of it.

Re:Why Tower over parabolic trough?

[timeOday]

Nothing comes of it? Read all about it:

GE has developed the highest efficiency, full-sized CdTe thin film solar panel ever reported; is building what its say will be the largest solar panel factory in the US; has made two considerable business acquisitions that support its solar endeavors and has taken 100 megawatts worth of orders for its thin-film solar panel products.... When at capacity, the new plant is supposed to produce enough panels per year to power 80,000 homes annually. GE currently estimates the facility will employ about 400 people.

More broadly, the cost of solar has plummeted, and the installed capacity is skyrocketing. Those are actual data, not predictions.

I'm excited about this. I live in New Mexico where sunny skies are the norm. If I got a motorcycle with a swappable battery so I could leave one home charging while I take the other on my 20 mile round-trip commute, I wouldn't need much from the grid or gas station at all.

Re:Why Tower over parabolic trough?

[blair1q]

Scroll down to the powerpoint slide at the bottom and squint through the badly reduced text. (note though that they mixed up the pictures between the central collector and the parabolic dish)

It says that the trough has the best land use, but isn't as efficient, and uses an oil-based thermal fluid, which can't be cheaper than water, and would have to be disposed of somehow when it needs replacing, whereas the solar tower just recycles its water to wash the mirrors.

Re:Why Tower over parabolic trough?

[Jeremi]

here's been a "breakthrough" in thin film efficiency twice a year for a long time now, and nothing ever comes of it.

If you think nothing ever comes of it, you haven't been paying attention.

Re:Why Tower over parabolic trough?

[russotto]

GE has developed the highest efficiency, full-sized CdTe thin film solar panel ever reported; is building what its say will be the largest solar panel factory in the US; has made two considerable business acquisitions that support its solar endeavors and has taken 100 megawatts worth of orders for its thin-film solar panel products.... When at capacity, the new plant is supposed to produce enough panels per year to power 80,000 homes annually. GE currently estimates the facility will employ about 400 people.

Seriously? 100MW worth of orders? Enough panels to produce 80,000 homes? These potatoes, they are quite small.

Re:Why Tower over parabolic trough?

[Neil Boekend]

For large scale photovoltaics isn't feasible, unless someone invents a way to purify silicon cheaply from very dirty sources (like sand and rock). For a solar tower (mirrors) the pureness of silicon isn't as important as for photovoltaics. The photovoltaics also need a glass substrate. Although silicon is one of the most prevalent elements it is usually useless because it's way to "dirty" (other, difficult to remove, elements in it). They have silica mines and there are not a lot of them (of course there is still way more than there is gold).
If someone would find a way to clean the sands of the Sahara and build some solar towers there to zone-refine it (done with melting the silicon) we would be golden. However, cleaning sand isn't possible yet.

2.7% Efficiency?

[RockClimbingFool]

That seems a bit low.

3,600 acres = 14,568,683 m^2

~1,000 w / m^2 incident solar energy in the Mojave

That would give an total solar energy input of 14,568 MW of power to this installation.

392MW / 14,568 MW = 2.7%

Re:2.7% Efficiency?

[Anonymous Coward]

3,600 acres = 14,568,683 m^2

~1,000 w / m^2 incident solar energy in the Mojave

That would give an total solar energy input of 14,568 MW of power to this installation.

392MW / 14,568 MW = 2.7%

You're assuming every meter of ground will be used. There needs to be space for maintenance, buildings, security, etc. The piece of land is 3600 acres, not the total area of reflectors

Re:2.7% Efficiency?

[smelch]

I don't think that really matters though. Overhead is part of the efficiency of a system. Just because it completely ignores some of the energy doesn't mean we should pretend the energy isn't there.

Re:2.7% Efficiency?

[Anonymous Coward]

Plants (the green kind) are stuck at somewhere between 5 and 10% efficient, and they have been at this for a few million years longer than we have.

Re:2.7% Efficiency?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they are averaging over a year whereas you're using numbers at full daylight.
It does seem a bit low, but what should it be?

Re:2.7% Efficiency?

[Anonymous Coward]

The nuclear bonds in one lump of coal could power the USA for decades. Coal plants are just horribly inefficient at extracting the energy that exists there. I don't think we should pretend the energy isn't there.

Re:2.7% Efficiency?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the space the mirrors are spread out over, not the surface area of the mirrors. The mirrors are spaced apart to provide room for maintenance access roads, etc. I suppose it depends on how you want to measure efficiency, but if you don't include the power hitting the ground I imagine it's several times higher than your figure above.

Re:2.7% Efficiency?

[smelch]

Poopknuckle... you win.

Re:2.7% Efficiency?

[Americium]

It's not 1000w/m^2, that's what hits the atmosphere. And I think you forgot about nighttime.

So it's closer to 5-10% efficiency.

But $/watt is much more important in the USA, since we have plenty of land.

Re:2.7% Efficiency?

[Rei]

1) You forget about capacity factor.
2) You forget about generation losses
3) Solar farms are generally sparsely spaced in order to prevent self-shadowing and to make maintenance easier.

Re:2.7% Efficiency?

[RockClimbingFool]

Its 1.4 kW to satellites in space. At lower latitudes, approximately 1 kW makes it to the surface. Its obviously less at higher latitudes.

Reading other posts it sounds like it isn't storing energy in a large molten salt battery, so that 392 GW may be peak production.

Re:2.7% Efficiency?

[Americium]

I have to admit, I actually read some articles. It's over a TW peak and 392 GW average, but there is no storage, so this can only supply power during the daytime hours.

Re:2.7% Efficiency?

[RockClimbingFool]

I think you need to include all of that area. Looking at a typical solar panel, not every square inch of it generates power. But the entire panel surface is used to calculate its efficiency. A 1 square meter panel still needs 1 square meter of your roof, even if only 0.95 square meters is generating power.

If the spacing between reflectors is required to make this plant run, as well as any other components taking up square meters of real estate, than that is the area you use for calculations to scale this design up and down. It factors into the cost.

Re:2.7% Efficiency?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds about right.
The cheap kind of solar panels (the only ones that could be used for a project this large) are quite inefficient. The sun doesn't shine at night so more energy has to be converted during the day and stored in some way (which also brings in more losses). And this is a desert - heat haze and blowing sand reduces the amount of solar energy that will reach the structure.

Re:2.7% Efficiency?

[RockClimbingFool]

If you look at my other post above, it looks like an averaged power output of 392 GW is around a 10% efficiency. So it isn't too bad.

Re:2.7% Efficiency?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is assuming that all of the land is used to capture solar energy. The area you should use is that of the mirrors, not the entire facility.

Re:2.7% Efficiency?

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't sound too outrageous to me.

That value of 1000 W/m^2 is at noon in the middle of summer with no cloud cover, so time-averaging it over the day and year reduces it substantially, to about 350 W/m^2. Also, steam generators are typically only about 30% to 40% efficient, so we're already down to about 10% assuming that the entire 3600 acre compound is perfectly reflecting the sun's insolation onto the collector (and that the collector/generator occupy an area of zero), which is, of course, not the case.

A straight calculation of the efficiency of conversion from solar to electrical energy is rarely the most important factor in solar power. For desert regions where real estate is cheap and the land is not otherwise being utilised, it's the dollar cost per kW which is far more important.

Re:2.7% Efficiency?

[Feinu]

Reading other posts it sounds like it isn't storing energy in a large molten salt battery, so that 392 MW may be peak production.

FTFY. Considering that the entire surface area is only receiving 14 GW of power, trying to generate 392 GW would be rather challenging. For interest sake, the plant only converts 2.7% of the solar power for the entire area into electricity. This figure is not the efficiency, though, since the entire surface area is not covered by mirrors.

Re:2.7% Efficiency?

[DrBoumBoum]

You're thinking 1 GW peak and 392 MW average.

Re:Regulators, regulate!

[slackzilly]

Would an accident to this power plant cause gigantic amounts of radiation?

Why so tall?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why so tall? Height is of great benefit to wind turbines and solar chimneys, but how does it help heliostats to have extra distance for the rays to diffuse?

Re:Why so tall?

[imric]

Off the cuff, I would say to maximize the area of each individual mirror exposed to the sun over the course of the day. The higher the tower the better in that case.

Re:Why so tall?

[anagama]

It's so tall so they can use more mirrors and get more juice out of it. If it was at ground level, maybe a single ring of mirrors could direct light at it. If it's at 20', maybe two or three rings. When it's way up in the sky, you can get many rings of mirrors with a direct line of sight to the target.

It's a Google Article!!!

[Dutchmaan]

Paranoids to the right...

Fanboy's to the left...

NEXT!

Re:It's a Google Article!!!

[dkleinsc]

What about poets, who cower on a bower before the power tower hour after hour, becoming ever more dour and sour while glowering at flowers?

Re:It's a Google Article!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fanboy's to the left...

Extraneous apostrophes in the bin.

Re:It's a Google Article!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not poetry, it's more like crappy rap.

Re:It's a Google Article!!!

[Combatso]

the tower wont power during a shower

So they invest in green energy

[slackzilly]

How evil of them..

Re:So they invest in green energy

[cf18]

They will use this tower to power their Archimedes II orbital laser.

Re:So they invest in green energy

[slackzilly]

At least they will destroy stuff in a green way :p

Re:So they invest in green energy

[dunkelfalke]

No, that one is already built

Re:So they invest in green energy

[dunkelfalke]

Shame on me, this is the wrong one. Solar One project would be the correct one, but it is AFAIR demolished now.

Story may not be right

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

> There should be more than enough energy in the Sun to power their servers.

Can we just go ahead and say there is more than enough energy in the Sun to power their servers? I know all the epistemological concerns about truthiness, but I don't think most of them really apply here...

Also, does anyone know whether Google is investing or we are? How much of a tax benefit do they get from this?

Re:Story may not be right

[smelch]

Well they certainly aren't getting more than their investment back from the US, so I would say Google is investing in this.

Re:Story may not be right

[softWare3ngineer]

They already got it back from the government. Unless you think Google gave them 30% of the gross income(50 billion) they made last year, like many individuals do every year.

Re:Story may not be right

[smelch]

Wow, so you're one of those "the government didn't take their money which is the same as giving it to them" people. Well you sir should just shut up then because thats an asinine position to take.

Re:Story may not be right

[bberens]

Q: What is the difference between the government cutting you a check for $1 and giving you a tax cut of $1?

A: Semantics

Re:Story may not be right

[smelch]

Then the government is paying for everything we all do. Hey everybody, you've been buying me government subsidized weed for years by virtue of not taxing me 100%.

Re:Story may not be right

[imric]

So - corporations normally don't pay taxes, eh? People who have allowed themselves to be hoodwinked that badly are why we are IN this mess.

And: let me guess... you think that giving wealthy individuals tax breaks will generate jobs, too.

Man the neocons really screwed with your head, didn't they?

Re:Story may not be right

[tacarat]

Both options probably cost $10 and a stamp per citizen.

Re:Story may not be right

[catchblue22]

Q: What is the difference between the government cutting you a check for $1 and giving you a tax cut of $1?
A: Semantics

Yeah, perhaps, except that when a government collects income tax in a progressive way, some of the money collected by the government is likely to have come from someone more wealthy than you. That's kind of the point of the system, to prevent the rich from getting too rich, and use money that would have otherwise been spent on luxury for more useful projects (like the Interstate highway system). I don't think America's formerly large and prosperous middle class would have developed if the highest income tax bracket wasn't taxed at 92% from 1944 to 1964.

Re:Story may not be right

[MindSlap]

Q: What is the difference between the government cutting you a check for $1 and giving you a tax cut of $1?

A: Semantics
</quote>

Really?
Then obviously you assume all money belongs to the g'ment and what you have is only by the grace of the g'ment. Nevermind that you worked hard for it...right?

Only a marxist believes such tripe...

So....
Good luck with that in the face of those that believe their earnings from their own labor is their own. (Quaint idea I know..but its something I personally subscribe to).

There I go with that personal freedoms attitude again...so mod me down as usual.

Re:Story may not be right

[david_thornley]

Suppose you owned a business (which is possible, but if so a little study of microeconomics would serve you well). Suppose you were selling something for $5, because that's the price that got you the most profit. Now assume your fixed expenses go up. The right price to sell the thing at is still $5, since that still gets you the most profit (although less than you had).

Now suppose the government takes 10% of your profit. The right price to sell is still $5, because the high profit point is still the high profit point even if you're only getting 90% of it.

Now, if your cost for each individual thing goes up (variable costs), you're going to raise the price, because the profitability curve changes shape.

I've been assuming this was for a competitive market, but monopoly pricing works much the same way, although prices and profits are typically higher.

What a rise in fixed expenses can do is push a business from profitable to unprofitable. Similarly, a tax on profits can lower the profit to the point you don't consider it worth being in business any longer. They won't change the optimal selling price, and therefore (unless the business goes out of business) won't seriously affect the consumers.

Assuming corporations are setting their prices for maximum profit, they can't pass costs on to the consumer. They have to eat taxes in the form of reduced profits.

Re:Story may not be right

[imric]

Bwahahah! Goofy little guy, aren't you?

So when prices are set by 'demand', that doesn't mean demand for the product, but the price that the corporations fix, err, demand! And after all, corps don't make any profits to tax... Now I know all pricing power belonging to big corporations is a neo-tea-republican wet-dream, but we aren't QUITE there yet, bubby, despite your best effort to distort the markets in favor of large corps over consumers. You haven't QUITE destroyed the consumer market in the US in your quest for US workers in as much desperation as third-world-workers. Not. Quite. Yet.

ROFL. You guys crack me up. Your inability to think past a sound bite, your love-hate relationship with authority, your rampant venality and your lack of any kind of feeling of civic duty towards the country you shout jingoistic slogans about make you guys cartoon-like. If your policies weren't going to kill poor women, children and seniors I'd just watch and laugh, laugh, laugh.

Re:Story may not be right

[Jarik C-Bol]

Thats not what he said. He was pointing out that, for the most part, every cent the government has, comes from its citizenry.

Re:Story may not be right

[stevew]

The folks replying to you gave thorough explanations - you retort with vulgarities. Guess who lost the argument. Oh - and my login id is older than yours too! PLLLLLGGGHH!

Re:Story may not be right

[kaatochacha]

If you really believe that the highest income earners actually paid 92% , you're naive. So which is better: An artificially inflated percentage that is easily avoided , or much lower percentages that are almost impossible to squeak out of?

Re:Story may not be right

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

Shouldn't a rise in taxes shift the supply curve slightly as fewer investors are willing to invest in the field for the lower ROI, thus raising prices?

Although granted, there are plenty of markets where the effect will not be particularly significant [e.g. because perhaps all of the investors are willing to accept a marginally reduced ROI given the transaction costs of investing in a new industry if the companies are not publicly traded].

Re:Story may not be right

[imric]

Vulgarities? And where might they be? *shakes head* I can only assume you were speaking to the fellow I was responding to. Or do you too believe that corporations determine prices arbitrarily, that they make no profits to tax, and that tax breaks don't count somehow? Think before you answer now *grin*

Re:Story may not be right

[Zan Lynx]

Uh huh. I've seen this argument that corporate taxes aren't really passed through before.

It isn't true though.

Changes in production cost that affect all the competitors will raise the end price. This happens with minimum wage hikes and it happens with corporate tax rates. It happens because all the companies are affected at the same time and so there is no benefit to selling at the old price.

The effect is a bit like price fixing. Because the increased rates affect everyone, everyone can raise prices to maintain the old profit margin without losing customers.

For example: If a consumer wants to buy an entertainment DVD then he has to purchase from a corporation. Since all the corporations have had their taxes raised and raised prices, he has to pay it. Now, he might shift his entertainment dollar somewhere else. But since all of those corporations like Netflix and the movie theaters also have the higher tax rate they are also charging more.

Re:Story may not be right

[Anonymous Coward]

Q: What is the difference between the government cutting you a check for $1 and giving you a tax cut of $1?

A: That check is taxable income, so it's more like $0.75, or $0.45 if you live in New York. And depending on the government's definition this year, that tax cut may or may not be taxable.

Re:Story may not be right

[imric]

So - 'it isn't true' if there is no competition.

Re:Story may not be right

[imric]

And - you know, I re-read the thread - you know from where I joined in? - and realized why MindSlap or whoever's post annoyed me - it was a content-free attack, and based on neobagger dogma - dogma that is destroying the is destroying the US economy, damaging the ability of the US to compete. A real hot-button.

I admit it - I was successfully trolled.

So. Thanks for making me re-read, and sorry for the hostility of my initial reply.

Re:Story may not be right

[imric]

Looking at the post I was replying to I see I was trolled, if unintentionally. Hell I'm still irritated. From a content free post that wasn't directed at me.

Sorry for the hostility in my previous post.

Re:Story may not be right

[catchblue22]

If you really believe that the highest income earners actually paid 92% , you're naive. So which is better: An artificially inflated percentage that is easily avoided , or much lower percentages that are almost impossible to squeak out of?

So your argument is that the 92% income tax was inherently easier to avoid, while our current lower income tax regime on the wealthy is more difficult to avoid? I think that is questionable. For one thing, from 1944 to 1963, there were substantial and real barriers to moving large amounts of money across international borders. An example of this, though it is from Britain illustrates this: During the 1950's, wealthy Brits wanted to avoid paying the high British tax rates of the period. One way they had of getting their capital out was to build elaborate sailing yachts and sail them out of country. Their money was invested in the yacht itself, which they would then sell in different countries. The lengths they had to go to get their money out of their country is strong indirect evidence of the efficacy of barriers to international money flow. For evidence of this, read "Once is Enough" by Miles Smeeton.

Contrast this with today, where money flies across the world at the speed of light. Wealthy people use offshore tax havens to avoid most of their income taxes. They simply ask any money they are paid to be deposited in their Swiss or Cayman accounts, where it is effectively untraceable. I would argue that today, tax evasion is far easier than it was in the 1950's. In truth, this is likely one of the major causes of deficits in Western nations.

Your meagre argument is has little substance and is based largely on innuendo, and not on fact and logic.

$1.37B is not the cost

[billrp]

That's the amount of the federal loan the company got. Add to that Google's $168m, and add other investments, but they won't say what the projected actual cost is. And the effective generation rate of the ISEGS is about 15%, which takes into account darkness, cloudy days, etc. They say the output is 392MW, but you need to discount that to get the effective delivered capacity of 60MW. So if the cost is $1.5B then the cost per kW is about $25,000, which is way high. Nuclear plants are up to about $10,000/kW.

Re:$1.37B is not the cost

[thermopile]

Wait, wait, wait. I was an engineer closely involved in a review of this project, and the BrightSource engineers were vehement in their protests against this kind of argument. I feel compelled to share their thinking.

This is NOT intended to be a 24/7 power supply. It is only a "surge" power supply, intended to produce (and sell) power when power is most needed: during the afternoon hours when things get really hot in LA and everyone starts cranking their A/C units. In fact, the heliostats are arranged to favor the afternoon sun -- if you look at the pictures, you'll see the heliostat is not a perfect circle. There are more mirrors on the east side of the tower, so that when the sun is in the west, more light gets reflected back onto the tower.

They openly admit they couldn't compete if they were trying to be a 24/7 power supplier. And that's not the point. They don't have energy storage (molten salt, etc.) to be able to keep producing heat at night -- that would be additional infrastructure to support selling power when there's a lower profit margin. They can sell power at a higher price when power is most needed, in the afternoons.

Others on the internet have accused this plant of being a "natural gas plant" in disguise, which is laughably wrong. The natural gas boiler is *tiny* and serves only to warm up the boilers faster in the morning hours.

Re:$1.37B is not the cost

[canajin56]

Good point, only the people behind this already did the math, and 392MW is the averaged value, not the peak output.

Re:$1.37B is not the cost

[DerekLyons]

This is NOT intended to be a 24/7 power supply. It is only a "surge" power supply, intended to produce (and sell) power when power is most needed

In other words, the poster whose argument you are protesting is correct - this is a very expensive part-time plant, resulting in a very high cost/kW.

Re:$1.37B is not the cost

[Your.Master]

Factually correct, however it is misleading. He compared the cost per kilowatt hour to nuclear, which provides baseload capacity throughout the day.

Power is not fungible through time. "Batteries" are of extremely limited use at this scale. Part-time, when the part of the time is during peak load, is an *advantage* at a given cost per kW, not a disadvantage (the disadvantageous part is already factored into the cost / kW).

For instance, if this one provides $25000 / kW at times when the demand for energy is $10000 / kW-year, and Nuclear provides $10000 / kW, and sells at the same rate for 1/5th of the year (~ 5 hours a day of peak), and $1000 / KW-year for the other 4/5 of the year, then after 1 year solar has $10000 and Nuclear has $2800. Solar pays for itself after 2.5 years whereas Nuclear takes ~3.6 years.

That said, I pulled those numbers out of my ass and they almost certainly have little bearing on reality. I don't know how this actually competes with nuclear, economics-wise. These people are betting on it.

Re:$1.37B is not the cost

[DerekLyons]

Factually correct

Yes, and everything else is handwaving and smokescreens. Period.
 

I don't know how this actually competes with nuclear, economics-wise. These people are betting on it.

No. They aren't competing with nuclear as they're a peaking or load following plant, not baseload. They're betting the increased price they can demand at peak will be sufficient to offset their high cost/kW.

Biggest?

[kevmeister]

An even bigger solar project based on more traditional photovoltaics is in the works for the eastern edge of Alameda County, California. An article in today's Contra Costa Times states "At 400 megawatts, the Mountain House solar complex could produce more electricity than the 370-megawatt plant that Oakland-based BrightSource Energy aims to construct in the Mojave Desert near the Ivanpah settlement."

Can't Google fund nuclear fusion instead?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

How come CERN seems to have money coming out their asses, to bang Large Hadrons together? Now, if they could just bang two Hydrogen atoms together, producing a butt-load of heat . . . now then we're talking!

Re:Can't Google fund nuclear fusion instead?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure they can! But then ITER is already funded OK-ish. They could get more funds for material research though. $200m is OK for them.

That's not enough power...

[jeffeb3]

That's not quite the 1.21 GW needed...

Is this cost effective?

[hawguy]

Is a solar plant cost effective yet against traditionally fueled plants?

A new 2GW nuclear plant costs around $10B, this plant is $1.7B for 400MW. Since it's solar, divide rated power by around 3 to account for nighttime, so it's more like a 133MW plant.

So, cost per watt of nuclear is $10B / 2GW = $5/watt versus 1.7B / 133MW = $12.75/watt

Can they sell electricity at a high enough price to recoup their costs? Are operating costs for a solar plant like this much lower than for a nuclear plant? The sheer size of the plant seems like it will take a lot of maintenance. Keeping 173,000 heliostats in operation sounds like a huge undertaking.

Re:Is this cost effective?

[Mr Bubble]

You are not factoring in the money it cost to mine the uranium, transport the uranium, store the nuclear waste and decommission the facility. Not to mention the costs of all the Fukushimas yet to come.

Re:Is this cost effective?

[sdguero]

The answer is obviously no. It is not even close to as cost effective as a nuclear plant. But our energy generation has been increasingly controlled by politics not logic the last 40+ years. We are are the point where cost effectiveness has no bearing. Nowadays its about what makes people feel good and what is flashing across CNN's ticker this week.

If the cost of our society goes up because we are basing major economic decisions on off the cuff emotions it doesn't matter because things are too complex for the average voter to understand the implications. In the big picture, it means less resources for the rest of the world (aka more Americans in poverty, and more starving children in Africa). Right?

Re:Is this cost effective?

[anagama]

In addition, there are ongoing maintenance costs while operating that are probably far lower to take care of a bunch of mirrors than for a nuclear plant requires.

Re:Is this cost effective?

[anagama]

So this ignored technology will never be cost competitive with nuclear? Focusing on construction costs is merely sleight of hand to get people to think other options are too costly -- like advertising a brand new BMW for $10k (fn1).

It is perfectly reasonable to look at the slow motion disaster leaking into the ocean in Japan and think, there should be other options. Projects like this solar plant are going to result in improvements to the technology so that by the time we get to building the 50th, it'll be a rock solid means of energy production.

As for economic decisions, who is going to pay the residents in a 20km radius around Fukushima for their stores, homes, businesses, and farms? Are your economic costs for nuclear power including the costs of something going wrong, of babysitting the spent fuel for a decade or so after the plant shuts down, for the damage caused by mining? Compare that to the worst thing this solar plant could do if it failed in the most spectacularly unimaginable fashion possible -- nuclear is way more expensive than you make it out.

fn1: Includes the body only. Engine, transmission, wheels, electronics, paint, wiring, seats, carpet, head liner, lights, and everything else available as an option at extra cost.

Re:Is this cost effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nuclear is up to 16 cents/kWH as of 2010, up from 8.4 in 2009. Please check your facts and update your "knowledge" before making claims. Solar thermal was 13 the last time I checked, and was dropping. The cost of nuclear has been explaining for a decade straight.

Re:Is this cost effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

The cost per watt is not based on just the initial investment but also has to factor in the operating cost.

I'm gonna hazard a guess that the yearly operating cost of a solar collector is gonna be significantly less than that of a nuclear facility. Not to mention the reduced hazard risks.

over the life of the plant.. I'll bet the solar cost/watt are likely less than the total operating cost of nuclear facility.

You also have to factor in the cost to decommission the nuclear facility at the end of life and the long term storage costs of the nuclear waste.

Re:Is this cost effective?

[sdguero]

The only reason the costs of the plant meltdowns are so high is because the media has made us so paranoid about radiation and the levels considered unsafe are extremely low. I would be perfectly comfortable living 5 KM from that plant, right now. Did you know that smoking a single cigarette provides more than the equivalent radiation of the maximum exposure level allowed for a nuclear worker in 8 hours (100mSv). One cigarette. And that's not counting the stuff that is considered really bad healthwise in cigs. Your post is exactly what I'm talking about though. You regurgitate the fear mongering with a dash of statistics and seemingly scientific insight to make it seem legit. Unfortunately the basis is way over hyped radiation claims.

Nuclear power, sans overbearing regulations, is the only way forward right now without making us far less efficient. Less efficiency means less food for millions of hand to mouth people in shittier places of the world. Advocating "green" energy, organic produce, local farming etc. is advocating less efficient ways of living. By pushing for less efficiency, you are also advocating starvation for billions of people. It's like a holocaust through obscurity.

Re:Is this cost effective?

[Solandri]

In addition, there are ongoing maintenance costs while operating that are probably far lower to take care of a bunch of mirrors than for a nuclear plant requires.

You think the cost of keeping clean 14.5 km^2 of mirrors and keeping their aiming machinery running is cheaper than for running a nuclear power plant that generates 20-30x more energy per year? I see this over and over - people compare a nuclear plant to a solar panel, or a windmill as if they were somehow equivalent. They completely ignore the huge difference in scale between the power generated. When you compare equivalent MW generation, you're talking about hundreds of square km of solar panels/mirrors or wind turbines to compare to a single nuclear reactor much less an entire nuclear plant. Comparing the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant to Roscoe Wind Farm (largest in the U.S.) after accounting for capacity factor results in an equivalent wind farm larger than the state of Delaware. The renewables actually have far higher maintenance costs than nuclear simply because they are (except for hydro and geothermal) so dispersed.

Re:Is this cost effective?

[anagama]

So you want to reduce regulations on nuclear plants? This of course is coupled with the government being the guarantor should something go wrong. Of course, you're a fanboi, so you don't see a danger of any moral hazard (to borrow a phrase of the financial metldown that occurred as a result of a lack of regulation and a lack of consequences for screwing up -- win win unless you're an average Joe).

Re:Is this cost effective?

[hawguy]

I think the capital costs in the Wikipedia article I quoted include fueling costs, but not decommissioning costs.

So far, the cost of a Fukushima style cleanup is not too expensive....There are around 400 nuclear power plants world-wide, so one $10B Fukushima accident per decade only costs a few million dollars per plant per year.

Of course, an accident like the one at the 40 year old Fukushima plant is much less likely to occur in a modern nuclear plant.

I haven't seen any estimates for operating costs for a large-scale solar plant like this -- does anyone know? Is it better or worse than a nuclear (or even coal) plant?

Re:Is this cost effective?

[anagama]

And you are completely ignoring the cost of a meltdown. Just how much would it cost to compensate all the people displaced if Indian Point ( http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/indian_point_nuclear_power_plant_ny/index.html ) contaminated NY City? Until the Nuclear Industry can demonstrate the capability to personally recompense all those it harms in a meltdown situation, they shouldn't be allowed to build them. Seriously, you can't drive a car without insurance -- why should you be able to build a nuclear plant if your company can't handle the consequences?

Re:Is this cost effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you have no idea about the costs but you'd like solar to be competitive.

Re:Is this cost effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

btw, coal is 6.5+ c/KWh and some people interested in high altitude wind energy are talking about 1c/KWh. Google has investment in Makani Power which is interested in altitudes of 600m or so. I think google is playing important role here the effects of which will be visible in future.

Re:Is this cost effective?

[Mr Bubble]

So far, the cost of a Fukushima style cleanup is not too expensive....

So far they haven't cleaned anything up. This is going to cost many billions of dollars, I can assure you. And, what about the cost of permanently relocating everyone within the 30km exclusion zone? This is an intensive farming and fishing area for the whole country - that revenue is lost and food costs will be much higher. This is a big deal and, since it is nuclear, the effects will be the same for decades.

Of course, an accident like the one at the 40 year old Fukushima plant is much less likely to occur in a modern nuclear plant.

Yeah, see the thing is, there aren't a lot of modern nuclear plants - cause they cost so much to build and cause they are uninsurable and people, rightly in my opinion, don't want to live near then.

Re:Is this cost effective?

[he-sk]

Organic farming can feed the population of the world and more with no land increase. It turns out that undeveloped countries benefit stronger from organic farming methods than developed countries. Source: http://www.seedquest.com/News/releases/2007/july/19783.htm

Given the hyperbole in your second paragraph and your disdain for "politics" (read: the very real concerns of a lot of people) I find your arguments not very convincing.

Re:Is this cost effective?

[hawguy]

So far they haven't cleaned anything up. This is going to cost many billions of dollars, I can assure you

The last cleanup cost I saw quoted was $10B, how does that compare to the overall Tsunami costs where millions of people were displaced, with some entire villages erased. There are other non-cleanup costs like loss of electrical sales, but those costs would have applied whether it was a nuclear plant, coal plant or solar plant that was overwelmed by an earthquake + tsunami.

And, what about the cost of permanently relocating everyone within the 30km exclusion zone?

I hadn't heard anything about a permanent 30km exclusion zone, I thought the mandatory exclusion zone was 20km, and I hadn't heard that any exclusion zone was permanent... even Chernobyl has only a 30km exclusion zone and the fallout from that was much worse.

Yeah, see the thing is, there aren't a lot of modern nuclear plants - cause they cost so much to build and cause they are uninsurable and people, rightly in my opinion, don't want to live near then.

You're right that modern plants are exceptionally difficult to build, and while you see that as a good thing, I see it as a large part of the problem - old plants can't easily be decommissioned because no new plants can be built in their place.

Since you see the death of nuclear as a good thing, what is your solution to provide base load 24x7 electrical power for a nation that's increasing looking toward electricity as a way to wean itself from fossil fuels?

Re:Is this cost effective?

[bstender]

Economics are the logic that wins the day in the USA. Half a trillion of public subsidy over 60 years and nuclear is still not economically viable. If nuclear could show the stats we'd be 99% nuclear by now, hell, if baby seal tears could show half the numbers that coal can, we'd be raising them like chickens.

Nuclear energy is far from cost-effective, it survives bc it has a lot of capital momentum and bc it caters to a very emotional fantasies like "cornucopianism" and "technophilia" when the unparalleled expansion we've enjoyed these last 100 yrs is due to the sheer dirty and deadly _economics_ of the fossil fuels.

Re:Is this cost effective?

[Solandri]

Ah yes, the "we have to think in terms of the worst case" argument. Are you aware the worst power generation accident in history was a hydroelectric dam failure? More people died from that than in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. So by your reasoning, clearly with such a horrific worst case, we should immediately start dismantling all our hydroelectric plants because they're simply too dangerous to risk using, right?

Nothing is perfectly safe. But to properly account for risk, you have to multiply the severity of a possible accident with how likely it is to happen When you do that, MWh per MWh, the long-term track record of nuclear power establishes it as the safest power generation technology man has ever invented. Safer than wind, solar, hydro, and a helluva lot safer than oil, gas, or coal. Commercial wind power, despite its minuscule contribution to the power grid, has already killed more people in the U.S. than commercial nuclear power. To raise nuclear's deaths/TWh figure above wind over the last 25 years would require the Fukushima accident to kill something like 10,000 people (more than twice as many as Chernobyl). Wind's fatality figures are only low because it generates so little of the world's power. To make nuclear worse than coal would require it to kill several tens of millions.

Re:Is this cost effective?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you know that smoking a single cigarette provides more than the equivalent radiation of the maximum exposure level allowed for a nuclear worker in 8 hours (100mSv). One cigarette.

Yet another lying nuclear shill. At this rate, you would get a lethal dose of 4000 mSv (i.e. 4 Sievert) from one pack of cigarettes. Bullshit.

Re:Is this cost effective?

[Strider-]

You think the cost of keeping clean 14.5 km^2 of mirrors and keeping their aiming machinery running is cheaper than for running a nuclear power plant that generates 20-30x more energy per year?

You're forgetting that washing mirrors, especially ones that are low to the ground like this, is unskilled labour and therefore cheap. It doesn't take a university education to sling a bucket and a squeegee. Hell, just go and grab a bunch of the people that are hanging out at interesections harrasing motorists to wash ther windows.

Maintaining a nuclear plant, on the other hand, takes an incredible amount of education and training. Nuclear technicians do not come cheap. Pulling numbers out of my ass, I would wager you could probably hire 5 to 10 mirror washers for every nuclear tech.

Re:Is this cost effective?

[edxwelch]

The Union of Concerned Scientists did a detailed report of US subsidies to the nuclear power industry:
http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_power/nuclear_power_and_global_warming/nuclear-power-subsidies-report.html
They concluded that "Government subsidies to the nuclear power industry over the past fifty years have been so large in proportion to the value of the energy produced that in some cases it would have cost taxpayers less to simply buy kilowatts on the open market and give them away"

Good for air conditioning load

[Animats]

The whole plant (3 units) is expected to generate about 1.2GW at peak. That's about one modern nuclear unit.

Over a full day, a solar plant generates maybe 1/3 of its peak power. That's OK, though. For areas where air conditioning is the peak load, a solar plant produces max power just when it's needed. A reasonable near-term goal would be to get Southern California's entire air conditioning load (10 to 15 GW) onto solar power.

This is solar's big advantage over wind power. Wind power is highly variable, and not in a useful way. Peak demand and peak wind output are unconnected. Averaging wind over a large area doesn't help much. Look at the current wind power output on the PJM dashboard. See it varying over a 4:1 range in 24 hours. Then look at the PJM renewables map, showing all wind installations in the PJM area, which stretches from Illinois to the Atlantic Ocean, and Pennsylvania down to Virginia.

Re:Good for air conditioning load

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly and a good point. Solar is great to augment peak-power usage for areas where peak power is used for air conditioning.

Unfortunately, this is limited to sunny areas (deserts) and not much use for areas with high population densities or areas further north..

But yes, solar can be a solution for energy problems of Nevada, or Arizona or even peak-power of California. As for national levels, it should work in Saudi Arabia and rest of middle east and most of Africa or Australia. Not much use in Japan, China or India or most of Europe.

ROI?

[theJML]

Anyone know what the Return on Investment is for this? I mean, Beside the intangible "We're saving the earth" publicity... Sure they can sell some of it back to power companies, and perhaps gain some carbon credits... but I'm sure they'll also use it as power for a server farm. I have to believe there's some amount of time this pays for itself with any of those options, but the article is a bit light on those details.

Re:ROI?

[femtoguy]

Well, it depends on the ratio of the growth of costs of other electricity generation methods. The cost of generation for this installation is fixed over the lifetime of the plant, so its long-term cost is basically the cost of return on a conservative bond. Cost of a coal/oil/coal/nuclear powerplant depends on the future cost of fuel, the future cost of environmental remediation/wast disposal. So if oil keep going up in cost, this plant just gets cheaper and cheaper (relatively), but if it drops back down, then it gets more expensive. In google's mind, they seem to want to fix the price of electricity so that it is predictable, even if that makes the cost higher. This is a classic hedge-type bet that they think energy costs will rise faster than inflation, which is a least a reasonable guess, even if it not certain.

Re:ROI?

[Neil Boekend]

but I'm sure they'll also use it as power for a server farm.

I am quite sure they wouldn't. This is a plant without energy storage. It would suck to have your servers die on you each night...

How about a big PUD?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand why it has to be in a desert. All those mirrors could be on houses and other buildings in a Planned Unit Development built around the tower --- an industrial park or even a residential neighborhood. Some could be on stalks in between buildings.

Re:How about a big PUD?

[JSBiff]

Main reason to put it in a desert is few cloudy days - put something like this in Ohio or Washington, state, or most of the states, really, and you'll never get your money back, because it'll be cloudy 1/3 of the year or more.

These power plants make some sense in parts of California, maybe Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, etc. where it's sunny maybe 320 days a year or something along those lines.

As for putting these in a housing development, that just sounds like an accident waiting to happen, but I dunno. I remember hearing about a fire at one of these concentrated solar power plants. I dunno if this new plant uses the same design, but the plant that had the fire, was using the Sun to heat up some type of oil to like 500 or 600 degrees. Some of the hot oil got out of the system, and once it reached air, ignited and burned.

Re:How about a big PUD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the cost of construction is dramatically higher when you have to risk life and limb to get to the things on top of people's houses? That is not the only risk - if the mirrors focus in the wrong spot now, a few birds get toasted. That could be people getting toasted or fires started in a residential area. It's not like the US lacks for un-used land area and medium-distance transmission losses aren't that much. I guess you could do farming on top of people's houses too, the question is why you'd want to when there are better ways of doing it.

Re:How about a big PUD?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are cities in in parts of California, maybe Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, etc. They have few cloudy days just like the areas they are in

Re:How about a big PUD?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are cities in California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, etc. that get just as much sun as the areas they're in

Re:How about a big PUD?

[JSBiff]

Those cities are in deserts. Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, etc are all basically in the middle of a desert.

But, I got to thinking about this, and really the main reason to not build them in cities is that, putting refelectors on houses would most likely never give you the correct geometry that you want - they need to have a very high percentage of the land area covered with reflectors. I can't see any possible way of accomplishing the correct geometry with houses and streets everywhere.

Further, why *would* you put a large, industrial facility of *any type* on top of a housing development? You wouldn't build a steel mill right in the middle of a housing development, why would you build a solar tower there? It just makes no sense to me.

Putting it in the desert makes 100% sense.

fuck off freddie freeloader!

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, you must be one of those "corporations are just like people -- except they don't pay taxes" people

Re:fuck off freddie freeloader!

[smelch]

No, I'm not. I just don't think an action independent of determination a companies total tax liability (or certainly not enough to offset 100% of the investment) counts as us paying for it simply because we didn't tax them so much they couldn't or wouldn't perform the action. Use your logic skills man.

can /. properly render my HTML-fu ?!

[Thud457]

But birds are like insects. To whit,

• some birds, like some insects, fly
• some birds, like some insects, eat bugs
• they both lay eggs
• they both flip out for no reason and kill people

Re:can /. properly render my HTML-fu ?!

[slackzilly]

Dogs, like sharks, can swim. Dogs, like sharks, eat meat. Dogs, like some sharks, give birth to live babies. They both flip out for no reason and kill people. Especially the ninja shark.

Re:2.7% Efficiency? (Probably more like 10.7%)

[RockClimbingFool]

I guess I was thinking that the 392 MW was peak power output, but that may not be the case.

A good simplification would be assuming the amount of daylight is 12 hours. Assume a linear ramp up to to full power over 6 hours, then a linear ramp down to 0 over the next 6 hours.

That would give a total power available of (0.5 * 14568 GW * 0.5 day) / (1 day) = 3642 GW of power averaged over the course of the day.

So if we assume they are providing 392 GW of power, all day, then 392 GW / 3642 GW = 10.7% Efficiency

That is a much better number.

foolish and illogical concern for birds

[rubycodez]

the truth is that *half* of all birds die each year. They will do this with or without wind or solar power. get it through your head, bird deaths by technology are always negligible, because nature is very cruel. anyone who frets over birds is a fool to whom prosperity has given too much time to waste on frivolity.

Re:foolish and illogical concern for birds

[geekoid]

you're logic is broken.

So if half of birds die, it's ok to kill the other half? wtf?

Re:foolish and illogical concern for birds

[Anonymous Coward]

the truth is that *half* of all birds die each year.

[citation needed]

Re:foolish and illogical concern for birds

[rubycodez]

no citation needed, well known fact in field biology easily verifiable.

Re:foolish and illogical concern for birds

[rubycodez]

logic is fine, since over a billion birds die, one billion + a few dozen or hundred due to some wind farm or whatnot is of no import

Re:foolish and illogical concern for birds

[VisceralLogic]

you're logic is broken.

So if half of birds die, it's ok to kill the other half? wtf?

Nah, I think he's saying if 50% of birds die every year from natural causes, we probably don't need to get to worried about an additional 0.00005%.

Note: 0.00005% figure was made up. The order of magnitude may not even be correct.

Re:foolish and illogical concern for birds

[Anonymous Coward]

Your reading skills are broken. He said "bird deaths by technology are always negligible". "Negligible" != "other half".

Re:foolish and illogical concern for birds

[Anonymous Coward]

His logic is broken in more ways than that. Saying that "half of all birds die each year" is absurd. In human terms, that would mean that 3 billion people die each year. We'd all have plenty of lebensraum real soon if that were true.

Re:foolish and illogical concern for birds

[rubycodez]

There is no broken logic at all, let me give you a little hint. When several "large"groups of dead birds were reported in the news recently, respected biologists pointed out that mass bird deaths are quite common, and noted an interesting fact of just how high bird mortality is in this world. There is a reason birds have so many young. Now go educate yourself, and quit being a dolt and ignoramus who relies on what he believes to be true rather than what provably true, while I repeat the absolute truth that half of all birds on planet Earth die each year.

Anything to bash Google

[symbolset]

The pains that people will take to bash Google have really risen to remarkable heights.

Re:Anything to bash Google

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

> The pains that people will take to bash Google have really risen to remarkable heights.

Not at all. Even in the extreme case of an entirely taxpayer-subsidized construction, there would be nothing wrong with Google deciding to build the facility: the choice would be consistent both with Google's obligations to its shareholders and with the more modern view that its obligations are to a broader constituency.

I suspect we are paying for a portion of the site, but do not know how much. That is an expense chosen by our elected representatives, theoretically as a combination of a normative choice and an economic belief that positive externalities of the incentivized activity [i.e., building the plant] are beneficial enough to society that subsidy by the taxpayer is appropriate.

Google is building it, but they are almost certainly not just investing in it--they are investing also in the tax breaks. (One could also argue the tax breaks alter the return on investment, but it is a semantic distinction from their point of view.) The tax breaks cost taxpayers money, so we are also investing in it.

Nothing in that bashes Google. If anything, Google by building the facility does what it's supposed to be doing. If the judgment about externalities is grossly wrong (notably if politics caused a massive evaluative failure during legislation), Congress may be at fault, but that wouldn't mean Google is.

Only $168M?

[PhunkySchtuff]

Now, to you and I, $168M is an unimaginable amount of money.
To some people, $168M is their personal fortune.
To a company like Google, $168M is a single line item on their annual report.
To a first-world government, $168M is a rounding error.

I am amazed that this is the world's largest solar tower plant and it only cost less than $200M. If these things are so cheap (ever priced up a coal-fired power station recently?) why aren't they being put up all over the place?

Re:Only $168M?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you have the rounding error.
Google invests 168 Million..total cost of plant is 2 Billion

Re:Only $168M?

[ELitwin]

Now, to you and I, $168M is an unimaginable amount of money.

"I don't know, I can imagine quite a bit."

Re:Only $168M?

[benjamindees]

If these things are so cheap (ever priced up a coal-fired power station recently?) why aren't they being put up all over the place?

Banks don't have enough money to buy up and monopolize all of the inexpensive commodities required. Once they do, they will be put up, but by then they will no longer be cheap.

Selective killing

[mangu]

The question to ask is whether this would impact birds more or less than ecosystem-wide acid rain from a coal plant?

What if it kills one species at a significantly higher rate than others? "Oh, don't worry, it only kills dodos and giant moas!".

I have seen articles mentioning a sudden decrease in insectivorous bat populations that seems to be caused by wind farms. (I know, TFA is about solar, not wind power, but it's all related to "alternative" energy).

For some reason, a few bat species are much more sensitive to wind turbines than other flying animals, and those species are important economically because they eat insects that attack crops. This means higher costs and more pesticide use in agriculture. This is just my guess, but bats hunt insects by echolocation, perhaps they are attracted to the swishing sound the blades make.

We should always be careful for the unintended consequences of any new technology. It's not because it's "green" that we should adopt in without detailed studies and careful analysis.

Re:Selective killing

[subreality]

I understand your point, but "selective killing" is also known as "natural selection". As long as you don't deploy too much too quickly, they'll adapt. It makes sense to keep an eye out for some species that is unusually vulnerable and needs our active protection, but unless there's an actual credible threat, we ought not to hold up this technology dreaming up "what ifs" when the ones we're using now *are* doing massive damage.

Meanwhile, in a nearby Vault

[Anonymous Coward]

A Pip-boy is destined for use by the lone wanderer when he encounters the NRC at this facility centuries later.

/. has never been adverse to self-promotion

[Thud457]

Also, as someone who works for Abengoa and is in regular contact with APS, it would have been freaking awesome for the Slashsdot news article to have mentioned either one of those companies. But no, let's just blather on about the investment company, who gives a rat's ass about the folks doing the actual work? Jackass writer.

Gee mister AC, you seem perfectly capable of typing. I hope that link isn't too meta for anybody out there...

Too little. Too late.

[gestalt_n_pepper]

Liquid hydrocarbon depletion will outrun all our attempts to replace the 160 exajoules that oil adds to the world's energy supply each year.

At least they're trying though. That's more than I can say for the USA federal government.

Re:Too little. Too late.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, pretty much. Oil is basically natures solar battery bank of energy. Once depleted, it will take millions of years to recharge them. The party's over. Get used to living off the trickle-charge.

Re:Too little. Too late.

[Anonymous Coward]

For those like me who wondered how large the impact actually is (taking the 160 exajoules/y for granted without verifying):

(160 * 10^18 J) / (365 * 24 * 60 * 60 s) = 5073566717402 W = 5073566 MW.

I.e. it's ca. 13000 times the output of this power plant.

Re:Too little. Too late.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not the USA federal government's job to manage energy production, in fact it is prohibited to do so by law. Not that the law stops it.

Re:Too little. Too late.

[kaapstorm]

After a quick jump over to WolframAlpha, and it turns 160 EJ = 44.44 billion MWh = 5.07 million MW years.

Assuming they are all on TV (where, according to a-ha, the sun always shines :-) ), we would need 12,931 more of these power stations to produce 160 EJ per year. I'm guessing you'd need to multiply by 3 or 4 for 6 to 8 hours of full-capacity production a day.

(We'd still need to come up with a plan wrt oil by-products like plastic, but iirc you can make it (more expensively) using bacteria.)

wait...

[ACE209]

google? Shouldn't it be Poseidon Energy?

Time

[geekoid]

time. you are missing time. as is a lot of other people, it seems.

It's about 5 dollars if you goal is to may back after the first 392MW.
However if you don't mind taking more then an hour to pay back the debt, the cost you need to sell energy at drops dramatically.

Re:Time

[Americium]

That's not the point, coal is about $1/watt to build out a plant. The running costs are much much lower obviously, it's cents per kwh to the consumer.

Re:Time

[tmosley]

Watt is power, watt*hr is energy. Knowing the difference might just make you not look like an idiot in an internet discussion.

Scale....

[tacokill]

This is the first major project that I have seen that comes anywhere close to reaching scale.

A standard, normally sized natural gas combined cycle power plant is anywhere from 600MW on up to 1200MW and maybe even higher. For comparison, the nuke plant in Japan is 4900MW but there are several large super-critical coal plants in the US that are north of 1800MW. No matter what technology is used (nuke, coal, nat gas) it is safe to say a modern, operating power plant STARTS at around 600 MW or so (with maybe a couple of exceptions around the US)

My point in bringing this up is that this is the first "green" project I have seen that has any sense of scale. 396MW is nothing to sneeze at. It is a substantial amount of power but more still needs to be done.

So many of my green friends misunderstand or totally ignore the scale problem. They seem to think we can just put up mirrors and wind farms and all will be right in the world. They never stop to think about how much energy we actually need and compare it to how much energy can be captured by the green efforts. Unfortunately, there is a HUGE gap between those two numbers and no amount of "good faith" will close that gap. It's a physics problem that we haven't solved yet....but this plant is a step in the right direction.

Re:Scale....

[Anonymous Coward]

"So many of my green friends misunderstand or totally ignore the scale problem."

Yes.

I would say the lack of appreciation of scale is the #1 problem with consideration of alternative energy sources: most people have NO idea of the amount of power and fuel they use right now, either directly or indirectly (i.e. through industry and the products they use). As a result, they have no CLUE what it would *really* take to replace a significant amount of conventional power generation with renewable power sources. That is not to suggest that such efforts at replacement are futile -- we should be moving to renewable energy sources -- but most people have no idea what's involved. I did a calculation once where all vegetable oil production in the world (canola oil, peanut oil, coconut oil, linseed oil, everything!) was diverted to biofuels. It was a grand total of less than 10% of our current daily consumption of crude oil. And obviously we can't divert 100% of our global vegetable oil production, or double it (half for fuel and half for food) without serious repercussions for food supplies and/or land use.

People don't understand what it is going to take to make a substantial difference, and as you say, all the good faith in the world won't change the physics of the situation. You are right that it is nice to see a project in the hundreds of MW range, however, you should keep in mind that hydroelectric power at that scale and much grander has been underway for many years around the world and is renewable. Unfortunately we're pretty much tapped out in many places.

Re:Scale....

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC according to "The Solar Trillions", in 2008 total energy consumption was 18TW and in 2050 the requirement would be something like 50TW. For all the effort that one can think of to meet requirements, it would still leave about 16TW gap. The book argues that solar is the only segment which if worked upon can ensure that this gap is bridged.

Re:Scale....

[NoSig]

Cover the US in mirrors and you'd have the whole Earth powered a few times over. There is no physics problem. The only thing that matters is the externality-adjusted cost of electricity and how you compensate for swings in power generation on cloudy days. It's good for running ACs, heat in winter not so much.

Re:Scale....

[SmilingBoy]

No, I don't think the issue how much energy can be captured - we would eventually get there. More important is the question where the energy is supposed to come from on a winter evening when there is little wind? Storage is the main longterm issue.

Re:Scale....

[Intrepid imaginaut]

They never stop to think about how much energy we actually need and compare it to how much energy can be captured by the green efforts. Unfortunately, there is a HUGE gap between those two numbers and no amount of "good faith" will close that gap.

Covering 2% of the uninhabited portions of the Sahara with PV cells would supply all of the planet's power requirements.

Re:Scale....

[hawguy]

They never stop to think about how much energy we actually need and compare it to how much energy can be captured by the green efforts. Unfortunately, there is a HUGE gap between those two numbers and no amount of "good faith" will close that gap.

Covering 2% of the uninhabited portions of the Sahara with PV cells would supply all of the planet's power requirements.

There's just the tiny problem of getting the power from where people don't live to where they do live. But hey, it's just wires, right? How hard could it be to build an 8000 mile transatlantic 1000GW power cable?

Re:Scale....

[QuantumRiff]

its expensive, but there will be no fuel costs.. A natural gas plant might cost "only" $400 million, but you have to pay for 30 years or more of gas... This they just gotta have some maintenance here and there.

Re:Scale....

[nappingcracker]

Any good ideas about how much the gap could be closed if energy consumption was reduced through efficiency, policy, and awareness?

Re:Scale....

[Neil Boekend]

Some high-energy consumers (aluminium plants and high energy test labs) may move there. Combined with a high power cable this may lower the consumption of oil enough to build a fusion plant in the centre of Europe before oil runs out.
Now I do not think PV is the way to go: these solar towers are better in a large scale (less pure silicon required) but the location seems feasible.

Re:Scale....

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Oh sarcasm, that's much better than trying to see the point I was making. Which is that there is no shortage of energy. As for wiring, look up HVDC and DESERTEC.

Re:Scale....

[tacokill]

Great point about Hydro. You are correct that I overlooked that in my posting and should have mentioned it. Same for geothermal.

Glad to hear I am not the only one who recognizes this hole in the discussion....

Re:Scale....

[hawguy]

Oh sarcasm, that's much better than trying to see the point I was making. Which is that there is no shortage of energy. As for wiring, look up HVDC and DESERTEC.

You missed the point I was making, while there may be plenty of energy, the areas that have an abundance of solar and wind are not the areas where there are an abundance of people to use it. Worse, solar is only available during part of the day on sunny days - not on rainy days or during sandstorms.

To use your example of generating power in the Sahara for the world, if you want to ship that power to the USA, you need 1000GW of transmission lines for about 8000 miles. The largest HVDC link is around 8GW, the longest is around 1600 miles.

You throw out solar in the Sahara as an answer while ignoring the real engineering difficulties (not to mention cost) of building power transmission lines 125 times larger and 5 times longer than the biggest ones in existence.

The same problem exists (in a smaller scale) with domestic power production in USA deserts - getting the power from the desert to where it's needed.

And of course, the issue of storing solar energy during the day to provide power at night (or rainy days) is sitll far from solved for large-scale needs.

Progressive Income Tax Does Not Change It

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

Progressive income tax doesn't change the equation. That's because the question is whether to give you a check for $1 or a tax cut of $1. Either one costs the government exactly the same amount of money: $1.

Progressive income comes into it only on the other end: where does that $1 come from? It comes from a somewhat progressive income tax and a few assorted other taxes. That is a very important choice, but it does not change how much the $1 costs, which is why $1 in a check vs. a tax cut is a semantic distinction.

That semantic distinction is largely used to hoodwink most of America. Government spending is politically much easier to do in tax policy than it is to do in spending. A tax break is a much easier sell than a government subsidy of private industry.

Now you would be right, and there would be a difference, if the government were deciding between giving you a check for $1 and a tax cut for a progressively-determined amount, i.e. if it we were talking about $1 and another number.

But the only time we really do that is in tax deductions for individuals, [rather than tax credits], which are actually *anti*-progressive: if I am taxed at a higher rate than you, a $1 deduction for me is worth more than a $1 deduction for you, because I save my higher amount. That does not apply to corporations because their tax burden is constant for corporations of any notable size.

Note that there is also a MAJOR tax subsidy we give to google that we make available to all corporations: depreciation. We generally allow depreciation for tax purposes to exceed market and economic depreciation, so Google will get a nice bonus from that (the value of their new plant plus the value of tax benefits they receive will exceed the actual economic value of their new plant).

Re:Progressive Income Tax Does Not Change It

[catchblue22]

You haven't addressed my assertion that the highly progressive income tax system of the 1950's greatly strengthened the American middle class.

Re:Progressive Income Tax Does Not Change It

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

> You haven't addressed my assertion that the highly progressive income tax system of the 1950's greatly strengthened the American middle class.

I didn't see the assertion as relevant to the underlying point once we see that the progressive income tax structure does not result in $1/$1 inequality.

That being said, a highly progressive system may make sense. The big problem is the gini coeffficient, the increasing divide between rich and everyone else. Our economic system has only minimal rules in effect to counter that, and those rules usually mostly hit hard-working professionals who aren't rich enough to get into good tax evasion, often in unfair ways. I do think a 92% tax is ridiculously high on its face, but I am used to modern tax rates. I could see a 80% tax or so, but would want constraints on it. For example, perhaps it does not apply to the first five million dollars of income in a person's life, and perhaps there are good charitable donation laws to encourage personal philanthropy.

Politically, our culture is hesitant about very redistributive solutions because they seem contrary to the ideal of income being something we earn. But there are some contexts where it is well accepted: colleges are the big one. That being said, as more belongs to the richest families and less belongs to everyone else, redistributive solutions take on a lot of political impetus and importance. The normative problem I have with that is that you have a *lot* of hard workers who are not among the richest families who get hit hard for making enough to be lumped in with the richest people.

As to the fifties, a lot of things strengthened the middle class--perhaps the progressive system helped. (Theoretically any progressive income tax that favors the middle class does, I suppose.) You also had almost every other world economy ravaged by war--Great Britain had spent the accumulated wealth of its empire, Russia had literally had to disassemble its factories and move them on train lines and tied production to food supply. We also had in some ways a better-educated populace than we do today--certainly I think the median was better, looking at literature, history, and English. [Although I don't have a good study to cite for that.]

Southern CA Air Conditioning power demand

[billstewart]

A large part of the power demand in southern California is for air conditioning, so a power system that produces its power in the daytime works just fine for most of the demand. (Also, the local climate tends to be hot days but much cooler at night, unlike say the humid Southeast where it stays hot at night.)

Sure, solar sounds great...

[Radical Moderate]

...until the sun goes critical! Then what, send helicopters full of water to put it out? Good luck with that. Keep your giant gaseous ball of fire away from my backyard!

Not Evil? or Solar Death Ray? Hmmm!

[billstewart]

Today's episode opens with Larry Page and his white cat pondering the applications for a solar death ray...

> The pains that people will take to bash Google have really risen to remarkable heights.

450 feet isn't all that remarkable.

Money Hole

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't we just dig a whole big enough for the billions ?

To make you feel good we can call it "Green eMoney Hole"

To make you feel better we can call it "Polar Bear Baby Seal Green eMoney Hole"

To make you feel even better "Oprahz OWN Polar Bear Beeber Little Puppy Green eMoney Hole"

If only there was some informed debate we can learn from?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnX-D4kkPOQ

In The Know: Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?

Why not Bussard's fusion reactor?

[syukton]

Why they threw $168 million at this and not Robert Bussard's Polywell fusion reactor is beyond me. They even had Dr. Bussard come and talk about his project at one of their Google TechTalks back in 2006... but no, Google isn't interested in clean and virtually limitless power. Participating in a gigantic construction project in the middle of nowhere is more their speed.

Bussard believed that $200 million was what would take to get a full-scale test reactor built that would prove out the net-gain fusion capabilities of his design. He'd been working on the project with limited funding by the US Navy to stay off the radar of the DOE. All fusion research in this country is dominated by the DOE and their as-yet unproven approaches and they tend to restrict federal funding from going to a new approach. Once the information embargo was lifted, Bussard was invited to speak at a Google TechTalk and show everyone what he'd been working on for the prior 11 years during which he'd not published a damn thing.

It's been five years. Five years since that talk and to the best of my knowledge there has been no significant financial contribution into this radical piece of technology that would completely revolutionize domestic energy production; nothing outside of a few million here and there from the US Navy.

I have to say that I'm disappointed.

Re:Why not Bussard's fusion reactor?

[haruchai]

They also had Eric Lerner of Focus Fusion give a talk not long after Bussard. Not sure if they invested in that either. While I would love to see more investment in fusion, it's hardly a sure thing. I consider this Ivanpah solar project to be overpriced ( note that the total cost has NOT been revealed, only the gov't loan guarantee and various other financing ) especially since it doesn't have any energy storage backing it but it least we know it will produce power. Right now, funds thrown into fusion is all research money.

Re:Why not Bussard's fusion reactor?

[subreality]

Fusion's had a lot of investment and unbelievable numbers of failed designs. I can understand pursuing a known working technology that's deep into development instead of one that's still in the research stage.

That said, the Polywell's delightfully simple, and at a first pass, plausibly workable. The simplicity is the real reason it's really appealing - the investment required to give it a good shake is minimal, and it has relatively few ways to go wrong. Thanks for the link - I'm definitely going to be following this one.

Re:Why not Bussard's fusion reactor?

[opinionbot]

Calling the designs "failed" is a bit harsh considering the enormous progress that has been made since the '50s. Currently operating tokamaks and stellarators were never meant to produce significant fusion power (otherwise they'd run with D-T, rather than D-D). They are purely research devices intended to understand the physics of magnetic confinement: it was found that as soon as plasmas became hot enough for significant fusion (~10 keV, 100 million degrees C) then a whole new range of energy loss mechanisms appeared. Understanding these and optimising the designs to the point where a large scale reactor (ITER) can be built has taken a huge effort. The measure of reactor performance, the achieved triple product (density)*(temperature)*(confinement time) in tokamaks has doubled around every 12-14 months historically, hardly slow progress. Whilst Polywells are an intriguing design, they are far from being proven: from the wikipedia article "Bussard had reported a fusion rate of 109 per second running D-D fusion reactions at only 12.5 kV (based on detecting a total of nine neutrons in five tests...". I submit that 9 neutrons in 5 tests is hardly strong evidence to base a large scale reactor on. There will be many problems to overcome in turning this into an actual reactor. Off the top of my head:

1. Scaling up will almost certainly lead to additional loss mechanisms. Hotter plasmas have more free energy, and tend to have more violent instabilities which need to be controlled. Extrapolating too far from existing machines is a dangerous game, as ITER is finding in some ways.
2. Bussard seems to claim that the thermalising Coulomb collision rate is small, and so Bremsstrahlung losses will be small. If you want high fusion rates then high density is needed, at which point I'm not sure I believe this one
3. Neutron shielding the magnets and electrodes. If you have a power plant producing lots of neutrons then these do terrible things to conductors (turn them into insulators, structurally weaken, expand) and to superconductors (stop superconducting). In ITER and any tokamak power plant, all the magnets have to be behind lots of shielding blankets. How this could be done for electrodes I'm not sure. Not saying it's impossible, just that it needs to be shown.

In short, yes Polywells are an interesting design along with many other alternative fusion reactor designs (stellarators being most advanced, but also spheromaks, gas dynamic traps etc.). They're worth investigating, but as yet the only devices which have demonstrated long operation (minutes to hours in Tore-Supra) at fusion-relevant temperatures (10s of keV) and significant fusion power output are tokamaks. Hence why this remains the main direction of research.

Re:Why not Bussard's fusion reactor?

[subreality]

Well, I had two points: the first paragraph is pretty much what you are saying: without specifics, that once you try to scale things up from the initial experiment stage you start encountering new factors that screw it all up. I agree, and that's why I don't fault google for backing solar - it's a pretty safe bet, even though the potential payoff is a lot smaller than fusion.

My second point was that the Polywell looks workable at a much smaller scale than magnetic containment designs. That doesn't mean it's necessarily more likely to succeed, but that the cost to try is much lower - ITER is in the $5B range, whereas it'd only take $5M to push Polywell through it's next round or two of development, and if those go well another $50M would take them a long way toward having a workable machine. Flipside a $5M/2y fizzle hurts a lot less than a $5B/30y fizzle.

I'm also just tickled by the idea of a Farnsworth fusor evolving into a viable energy source. :)

3600 acres?

[he-sk]

And only 392 MW?

Gee, they should build some nukes there, and use the space more efficiently.

Y r u so stupid?

[Anonymous Coward]

Y R U so stupid??

It doesn't matter does it?

[dbIII]

The same thing as flying directly in front of a fast moving car only a few hundred million times less likely.
I've got nothing personally against you - but why are you pretending that you do not have enough common sense to survive to the point where you would be capable of typing so a thing as the post above? Is it a failed joke out of context or do you have some luddite agenda?
To the other idiot poster the same sort of thing applies to windmills.

Bats?

[colonel spalding]

Bats? We are talking solar are we not? Don't bats fly when the sun is down? There might be certain losses, but not catastrophic. If you balance it out I would guess bird loss from oil spills, all sorts of carbon, coal pollution, global warming have a much more severe effect. I'd choose solar any day, even a cloudy one.

Envirowackos

[rally2xs]

will still find some reason to try to stop it...

Bats safe from solar

[Roger W Moore]

Bats have it worse than birds, for some reason that's still not understood.

Perhaps for wind power but, given that they are generally nocturnal, I doubt a solar plant will be much of a worry to them.

That's a bit cocky

[bstender]

of them.?

Your guess is wrong. Sorry.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your guess is wrong. Sorry.

1.2GW is nearly two modern nuke plants

[Anonymous Coward]

1.2GW is nearly two modern nuke plants since nuclear isn't available 100% (about 65% in reality) and the demand for AC doesn't occur during the night therefore the production at night is wasted for this purpose and is sold at a loss to get at least some money back.

Encouraging

[Anonymous Coward]

I consider that 8% encouraging, not discouraging, considering that solar power technology has been the slowest to advance and mature. And considering that solar power is truly clean power -- which is the long-term goal and holy grail of energy (you don't envision us STILL polluting the planet in the year 2200, do you?) -- I am quite pleased that solar power is finally moving out of the "they laugh at you" phase and into the "they fight you" phase. Yes, it's got a long way to go before it can replace unclean energy, but again, we should be celebrating this milestone rather than spitting on it.

Cat Power!

[DarthVain]

You're arguing for cat based power? That's just crazy! Madness! Like you can convince a cat to do anything...

Fallout 3

[DarthVain]

If Fallout 3 has taught me anything, its that building that sort of thing in the Mojave desert is really just making experimental weapons. Also it will be an excellent base after the fall of man.

Uses too much water

[Anonymous Coward]

PV is much more promising than the boiling towers, specifically because the amount of water used by the latter is too high. Keep in mind that whatever water this thing will use is water L.A. will not get.

Shouldn't have trolled apk as you did 1st, skid

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, did you not do that, here, first: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2080454&cid=35795872 Skidborg? You're caught red-handed with your own off topic trolling stupidity as the proof no less, right there in that url above, Skidborg. Seems the big troller skidborg can't take what he dishes out and cries like the trolling wuss he really is.

Re:Shouldn't have trolled apk as you did 1st, skid

[Skidborg]

Stalking me all over Slashdot to link to a post that everyone is going to find merely funny rather than offensive doesn't seem like it is going to help you cause much. You do realize that posting it will only raise the exposure to that entire line of posts, including your own? Do you really want people reading what you wrote there?

U shouldn't have trolled apk 1st Skidborg

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, did you not do that to apk, here, 1st: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2080454&cid=35795872 Skidborg? You're caught red-handed with your own off topic trolling stupidity as the proof no less, right there in that url above, Skidborg. Seems the big troller skidborg can't take what he dishes out and cries like the trolling wuss he really is when its directed back at he in a re-trolling.

LOL U GOT "P L A Y E D" (you played yourself)

[Anonymous Coward]

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2082940&cid=35823526 says it all for the rest of us that have to put up with trolls that bother others here on slashdot and the rest of the planets web forums.

This plant is called HELIOS One

[Anonymous Coward]

and it's located just west of a nice place called Hidden Valley