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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."
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Probably would not harm them as much as wind power does, depending upon who you ask.
How does it feel to be a liar with pants constantly on fire?
$168 million sounds like a serious investment, until you consider that this thing is projected to cost $1.37 *billion*.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
That's 14.57 square kilometers, the size of a small to medium-sized town, maybe 20000 to 50000 inhabitants.
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.
Contingency plan: It's a desert.
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.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
A quick google came up with this (PDF warning)
is expected to generate 392 MW of solar power
FTFY
what would happen
Fwoosh.
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.
I thought they got bought, or something...
I thought they figured out it was due to the sudden pressure drop exploding their lungs? Did I hear incorrectly?
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.
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.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
I'm guessing bats are going to be safe from the perils of solar energy. Thats just my own speculation.
The Mojave doesn't have much wind.
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.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
> 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.
Significant relative to birds dying of smog from coal plants?
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.
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Insects are attracted by light. Birds like insects. But then again, the insects would probably not hang around for to long..
- "If one man can create that much hate, you can only imagine how much love we as a togetherness can create."
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
Keep passing the open windows...
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%
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.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Would an accident to this power plant cause gigantic amounts of radiation?
- "If one man can create that much hate, you can only imagine how much love we as a togetherness can create."
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.
Paranoids to the right...
Fanboy's to the left...
NEXT!
Guess I should have clicked on their links before replying to yours.
Oh well.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
How evil of them..
- "If one man can create that much hate, you can only imagine how much love we as a togetherness can create."
big oil tankers and container ships are way worse at polluting than all the cars on the planet.
> 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?
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
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.
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?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
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.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I suspect their height might be partially to avoid this too.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
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.
Paranoia is a Survival Trait!
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.
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.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
No, I didn't say that birds are like insects. I said that birds like insects.
- "If one man can create that much hate, you can only imagine how much love we as a togetherness can create."
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.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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.
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."
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
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!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
That's not quite the 1.21 GW needed...
Eh, scratch that. Only the centre tower is all that tall.
Hi Apk. Imagine seeing you here.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
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.
>>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
-=JML=-
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.
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You could probably cut that number down with those silhouettes that they use to keep birds from flying into windows.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I wonder what would happen to the birds who fly into the beam near the focal point.
Are there many birds in Mojave?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
and is expected to generate 392 MW
If they increase it by 248MW, it will certainly be enough to power anyone's servers.
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.
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the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
My guess is a video will be made and posted on youtube.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
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. ;-)
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.
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
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.
How many birds die from flying into windows? Should we ban glass windows.
yea, all those crops growing out in the desert.
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.
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.
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.
"Diplomacy is something you do until you find a rock." --Richard Pound
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?
..my sister, who got the Donnie Darko numbers tattooed on her arm so she looks like shes making fun of Holocaust victims
Because the parts for your gas/diesel car teleported itself to the final assembly point once it was manufactured.
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.
The pains that people will take to bash Google have really risen to remarkable heights.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
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:
... 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
..my sister, who got the Donnie Darko numbers tattooed on her arm so she looks like shes making fun of Holocaust victims
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?
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
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?).
..my sister, who got the Donnie Darko numbers tattooed on her arm so she looks like shes making fun of Holocaust victims
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.
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.
How does it feel to be a liar with pants constantly on fire?
I don't think bats will have much problem with the focal point of a solar tower.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
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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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Far more birds are killed per windmill then per cat.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Uh, if we had as many windmills as cats, I'd think we'd figure out a solution...
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.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
google? Shouldn't it be Poseidon Energy?
"we are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
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.
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"fwoosh" i would suspect.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
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.
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).
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
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.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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.
How does it feel to be a liar with pants constantly on fire?
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.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
...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!
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
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.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
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.
-WolvesOfTheNight
Oh noooooooo! I'm being haunted by the ghost of a grade school bully.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
And only 392 MW?
Gee, they should build some nukes there, and use the space more efficiently.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
If we look at the basic pattern behind your arguments, we find the following:
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.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
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.
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.
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? 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.
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.
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).
I laughed.
I guess I'm dumber now.
will still find some reason to try to stop it...
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.
of them.?
look sig is kool
If there are, keep an eye out for Google's new venture: Mojave Fried Chicken.
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.
Then they settle at night in a warm place, like a solar tower,.. and at sunrise quickly warm up to a comfy 1000 degrees
The story of the single cat was probably this one. It is based on truth anyway. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephens_Island_Wren
I think they might get angry. Google should be afraid, very afraid.
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".
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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.
You're arguing for cat based power? That's just crazy! Madness! Like you can convince a cat to do anything...
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.
There is no focal point. The walls of the tower are covered in water pipes that go to a steam drum.
Far more birds are killed per windmill then per cat.
Yes, but there are valid reasons to own a windmill.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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?
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
mod GP idiotic
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
What's your source for there not being enough land for windmills? Other people disagree.