Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
A quick google came up with this (PDF warning)
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.
is expected to generate 392 MW of solar power
FTFY
No, it's expected to collect solar power.
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.
> 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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
No, it's going to collect a lot more than 392MW of solar power, if wants to put out 392MW of electrical power.
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.
>>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.
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.
"The world is a construct of forceful imagination. Those who don't know walk around in the reailties of those who do"
and is expected to generate 392 MW
If they increase it by 248MW, it will certainly be enough to power anyone's servers.
Q: What is the difference between the government cutting you a check for $1 and giving you a tax cut of $1?
A: Semantics
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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.
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.
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
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?
Seriously? 100MW worth of orders? Enough panels to produce 80,000 homes? These potatoes, they are quite small.
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.