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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."
$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.
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 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.
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!
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.
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
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"
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.
"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
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.
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
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.