Slashdot Mirror
Large Scale 24/7 Solar Power Plant To Be Built in Nevada
RayTomes writes "The Obama administration has provided a loan guarantee of $737 million to construct the first large-scale solar power plant that stores energy and provides electricity 24 hours a day, 7 days a week."
This solar power project, a heliostat rather than a photovoltaic system, with a molten salt system to store power as heat for times when the sun isn't shining, will be constructed in Nevada and, says the article, is expected to create "600 construction jobs and 45 permanent positions."
So is a metal spoon.
It all depends on context.
So when Lake Mead dries up in the next few years and the dam can no longer provide electricity, WHO THE FUCK IS GOING TO BENEFIT FROM THIS when basically most of Southern Nevada that does not have well water has to pack up and get the fuck out.
They should totally name this the HELIOS One.
Yeah, but when metal spoons explodes (like they do all the time)....you can just walk over and pick up the pieces.....right then, no need to evacuate for 500 years.
They are over nine thousand dollars.
1st, the loan is 737m. That's not the total cost.
2nd, you are looking at capital costs. What is going to be the running costs and lifespan of the project? Drop that into a spreadsheet to calculate the IRR and cost per Watt. [and what the heck - one could be generous and throw in some type of carbon credit / R&D thing too.]
And personal photovoltaic setups cost (or at least once did) $10k+ per home, capital costs don't have to be made back in a month you know.
Maybe I'm troll food, but your calculation there is with a payback immediately, i would guess a more reasonable payback would be 15 years, which puts the average annual cost per household at $800 dollars (just a WAG, I understand there's interest involved and such) which is pretty reasonable. This is also the first one, which usually means a substantial premium. So you get the jobs, and the power plant, and if the power plants lifetime is similar to that of a coal plant it would seem to be a really good first step. Better than funding intelligence agencies to build a repository of metaphors for instance.
Ok great, yey another way to blow away a billlion dollars which could have been better spent on the usual "non headline worthy" things such as education, health and policing. When will society learn?
Joseph, Internet marketing
Those two aren't mutually exclusive. In fact they're pretty commonly used together. Summary should read "a solar thermal plant rather than photovoltaic, using a molten salt system to store power as heat for times when the sun isn't shining".
Just market it as a power generator and Archimedes Bug Zapper.
Happy people make bad consumers.
Las Vegas might become environmentally sustainable!
Molten salt has been used before. Spain opened the Andasol Solar Power Station in 2009. The Wikipedia article says it basically doubles the output of the plant, and the thermal reserve can keep it generating electricity for almost 8 hours in total darkness.
More interesting is that it takes twice as much water (per kwh) to run as a normal power plant, and that could end up being a problem in Nevada.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Metal spoons don't create radioactive waste with a half life of centuries.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
$9826 sounds like a lot of money. . . until you realize that the cost is amortized over some period of time. I don't know what the actual life of the facility will be, but I would think 50 years sounds reasonable. So, if we divide by 50 years, that comes to about $200 per house per year.
However, we also have to factor in that on top of construction costs, there are ongoing maintenance an operation costs, so maybe it comes to about $250/house/yr. That still doesn't sound outrageous to me. I think I pay like $400/year for electricity on my 1-bedroom apartment - and I'm not a large electricity consumer. I have a fridge, stove, microwave (and the stove and microwave I only use maybe 2-4 times a week), a computer, a WiFi router, a cell phone I charge at night, a couple ham radio batteries (1500mAh and 1800mAh) I occasionally charge, and lights (most of my lights are efficient CFLs). In the summer, I run a window A/C unit sometimes - but I'm only cooling a small space.
I don't know what their actual maint/ops costs will be, but $10k per household, if the plant lasts 40-50 years, just doesn't sound particularly expensive.
an hydro dam is a dangerous thing: more dangerous than a nuclear plant looking at history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
a coal plant is a dangerous thing but it's a sort of low level constant danger.
http://www.ecomall.com/greenshopping/cleanair.htm
drilling a hole for gas or geothermal is a dangerous thing
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Locals_Block_Work_At_Indonesian_Mud_Volcano_999.html
etc etc
Every energy source has dangers and problems.
So it makes sense to simply pick the ones which kill the fewest people overall.
So the plant is suppose to produce 480,000 MWh per year which works out to an average capacity of 55 MW. So we get 0.8 permanent employees per MW. http://www.tonopahsolar.com/
At slashdot's favorite nuclear power plant Vermont Yankee, there are more that 650 employees for a plant that does not manage to run at 620 MW all that well. Let's give them 80% up time. That is 1.3 employees per MW.
Nuclear power seems less efficient than solar power by this measure. Maybe nuclear power is just a "make work" type jobs program which actually hurts the economy overall.
Of course the second it actually works the greens will be dead set against it. Gotta be some obscure critter living out in that desert ya know,
Because, just like Slashdotters, "The Greens" isn't a homogeneous group of people with identical opinions, nor is "environmentalists".
You can be an "environmentalist" and only care about the aesthetic appearance of countryside during your own lifetime (therefore opposed to onshore wind turbines).
Or you can be an "environmentalist" and only care about CO2 emissions and their long term effect (probably in favour of onshore wind turbines)
Or any of hundreds of differing viewpoints.
I 'm not certain about the numbers involved, but I'm happy to see the government doing what I believe it should: promoting things that are good for us that we wouldn't otherwise get. By that I mean buffering the long-term payoff on things that cost too much for the market to provide now.
Yes, but what has that to do with solar energy?
No, you can use air or some sort of wiper mechanism. Lots of ways to deal with this problem if getting water is that hard.
A lot of it is probably insurance. Nobody really wants to be liable for the costs of a solar spill.
And then there's the extra construction cost, due to the workers all having to wear SPF 5000 sunscreen. Extra security, because of all the monotheists who will be protesting the false god Apollo. Fuel costs. MirrorUniverseWalls. You can't imagine all the expensive problems involved in a project like this.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Reading the original post again, I must correct myself. Fission power has been shown to be safe, but fusion is radically dangerous. For example, someone has let fusion fuel pile up in the center of the Solar System, resulting in uncontrolled fusion! It is likely that we won't be able to live there for billions if not trillions of years.
The average coal plant in the US that has been retired has been at 49 years, a LOT more than 20! Heck none of the coal plants with modern emissions control systems has been retired due to the operators wishing to recoup those investments.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The earth is a dangerous thing, and must be destroyed before it destroys us
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Exactly. Reactor size is important. A relatively small reactor, like the one recently hit by a Tsunami, may cause problems to a few tens, maybe hundreds, of square kilometres, if it explodes. A reactor the size of the Sun, however, will cause devastation in a sphere several AUs in diameter. Even in normal operation, it is likely to leak dangerous radiation over almost half of the planet, causing skin cancer. The Sun is therefore obviously too dangerous to use for power generation, and should be decommissioned as soon as possible.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yeah, but when metal spoons explodes (like they do all the time)....you can just walk over and pick up the pieces.....right then, no need to evacuate for 500 years.
And when this explodes, we'll have to clean up salt, glass, and water. I highly doubt that any of those things will force a 500 year evac.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
These "Greens" are not one big group sharing a hive brain. There are lots of viewpoints. Personally I would love to see something like this take off. We have lots of deserts that are pretty much unlivable and would be finally put to good use. At the same time I think we should prevent any new coal plants from being built. Nuclear might have a little issue every couple decades, but coal kills people and destroys air quality all the time. Then for extra fun every couple decades it destroys large area when a slurry ponds break.
We have a 10MW and a 15MW commercial heliostat in Spain ... since years.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
No nuclear plant has yet caused a 500 year evacuation.
And should a nuclear disaster happen yesterday, there won't be a 500-year evacuation caused by that particular nuclear disaster for about... oh... say, another 500 years.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
We aren't spending that money, just co-signing the loan. If you want a good ration of money spent to people getting paychecks we should just put everyone on welfare.
How do you plan on reducing the cost of mirrors? Because those are the only panels in a molten-salt plant like this.
Then can we please finish iterating through all possible forms of government so that the tribulation can start?
Don't let the NCR take hold it
-- if you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine
The average output is 55 MW so that comes to $13/Watt. Estimates for the cost of new Turkey Point nuclear power from a couple years ago were about $8/Watt and assuming about 80% up time that comes to $10/Watt average capacity. With typical nuclear power cost overruns, we'd get about $20/Watt. Given that nuclear power is on a negative learning curve http://climateprogress.org/2011/04/06/does-nuclear-power-have-a-negative-learning-curve/ it seems as though the cost of the solar plant is pretty good.
Fusion in a star like Sol is hardly uncontrolled. The weight of the fuel balances out the pressure that the fusion creates, just as the engineer intended.
Exactly - everything has a cost associated with it. Why do I not like nuclear? A few reasons. First, it still relies on mining and shipping of feedstock. Second, there is a long term cost associated with storing its waste products. Third, the US has made it abundantly clear that this is not a global solution - we will actively block many nations from obtaining this source of power. Fourth, the last numbers I heard were if all the power generated across the globe was replaced by nuclear power, we could mine enough to last the world about 3 years (I do need to redo the research, as I don't recall the original sources - and I know many will not take what I learned in a college course as a reliable source). I often wonder what our wind and solar technology would be like in the US if they didn't pull the Production Tax Credit every few years (which causes the industry to collapse after a period of strong growth), and wonder if other energy production systems lost their government backing what would have happened to their viability in terms of cost....
When I read posts like this, I frequently wonder if they mean to troll or are just so stupid they honestly just don't realize they are being stupid.
You're right - we should decommission the sun before a Tsunami or Earthquake on the planet Earth damages it and causes a risk of explosion....
Moreover, even if one could justify putting the sun there, putting it there without appropriate shielding clearly isn't responsible. The sun emits so much light that you can go blind if you look directly into it. Certainly the earth should be protected from the sun by some sort of shield which blocks the light of the sun, or at least dims it enough that you can look into it without danger.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
This will use a combined solar thermal collector/salt storage, powering a thermal engine. Not a problem. However, what that does is use the solar thermal to heat the storage and then power it all nightlong. So, for example, if you want a 100 MW output 24x7, you will need 300-400 MW tower (a lot more money). Not an issue. BUT, the storage is what is important. It would be better for the companies going into this, to split out the storage portion and make it distributed. In particular, America has a large number of OLD coal-based power plants that are going to go away over the next 20-30 years. Many of these are currently inside of cities. They are typically 50-100 MW in size (which was large monsters in the day). They have power lines that emanate from them. They also have cooling plants (typically, water), combined with steam engines/generators. But all that is really needed to be changed is that piping re-upped, and the coal boiler dropped. Instead, put in a high temp salt storage system, and use electricity to bring the temp up. With this approach, you can have a large CHEAP battery. The argument against it will be the inefficiency of it. There will be a loss of energy of roughly 50%. However, current tech with CASE, Hydro, batteries, etc. all have losses of 20-40% or so, but have many drawbacks. Hydro and Case can only be used in certain areas and are expensive. Batteries are VERY expensive to install, though they have the advantage of going anywhere.
In the end, the question should not be how efficient it is, but how economical it is. A thermal storage that has little costs to set-up, but will last for 20-30 years (within 10-15 years, ultra-caps will become the dominant form of new storage, and would then replace this). That approach extends this equipment for very little costs. More importantly, it would enable ALL FORMS of Alternative Energy to provide power as they can, since the salt storage would act as a buffer for demand systems. Right now, America loses something like 12 GW yearly because they have to feather wind generators at night. Likewise, we have gas turbine generator that are built to handle the demand, esp. when AE falls. With a thermal storage, it provide our demand system, while allowing AE to run at full power.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What again powers the sun?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I skimmed the article pretty carefully. Where do you get nuclear from it? This looks like the perfect alternative to nuclear.
Nuclear reactors don't make radioactive waste. The depleted fuel was radioactive prior to use in the reactor, otherwise they wouldn't be using it as fuel. The main difference is that unlike the radioactive waste from a coal plant, the nuclear plant's waste is bundle up for disposal rather than being spread all over the planet.
Yeah, it's a common scam: The electric current they send you through one wire, they get back through the other. Therefore they don't need to produce new current, they just sell the same current over and over again. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
You're an idiot if you believe that.
I would probably be classed as a green, in that I would rather we didn't f*** up the environment whilst using industrialised processes. I certainly like the price of the fuel for green energy - after all we spend millions of $ per year on the sun. Oh no - that's right it's free.
But I'm also a realist. I like my car, but I would prefer an electric one, especially if the power used was produced with green energy.
I like having the conveniences of cities, although I prefer a smaller town to a larger one.
I certainly don't oppose factories, the stuff I like to have around me is often produced in one.
I'm not opposed to big businesses, but I am opposed to big businesses who think that because they are big, they can pollute the environment without consequence - because it's "all about the jobs". Never mind the fact that it will pollute the river the factory uses, so no one can use the water for anything else.
Absolutelly. They would lose less money to pay 50 guys walking in circles or just standing there. The greens have absolutely no common sense.
Loan guarantee, not subsidy. It can create those jobs for 0$ in government money spend, or it can waste the full amount in government money or anything in between (if the company goes bankrupt but government wants to see it finished rather than just paying of the debt and forgetting about it, it could chose to pay for the cost overruns to finish it to recoup some losses).
after all we spend millions of $ per year on the sun. Oh no - that's right it's free.
Efficiently harvesting energy from the sun does cost millions of $ per year.
But it could hurt anyway, the article says they store the energy where the sun doesn't shine.
Of course the second it actually works the greens will be dead set against it. Gotta be some obscure critter living out in that desert ya know,
Although I like your sense of humor, and I partially agree with you, I would like to ask you to differentiate between green entrepreneurs (people like the guys who want to build this solar plant, who aren't about maximizing profit, but are still practical and realistic) and the nature freaks who are just unreasonable.
Oh yeah - that's right because the money always "trickles down". Right?
Dude, this is Nevada we are talking about. Even I know that the people living there use air conditioning at the time of peak solar, so a solar power plant is essentialy a good idea there.
Power generation for the night hours is an additional bonus, low power production meets low power demand.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Because all of national endeavors must make sense financially, yes? If so, so long space program...
Sometimes we have to do things for reasons other than making the almighty dollar.
Solar requires water to keep the mirrors clean, something not exactly abundant in the desert.
if they built it in Arizona, Sheriff JOe could have inmates wipe the mirrors for $.03 a day... just sayin....
Do you really want more detail? Look at the plan of development. It was too much detail for me to handle. http://www.tonopahsolar.com/pdfs/Tonopah_Crescent_Dunes_POD_2009_11_23.pdf
[...]technology is mature for both (PV solar is semiconductor, and if semiconductor industry is not mature, I don't know what is).[...]
Semiconductor industry may be mature, but PV-tech has a long way to go before it becomes as efficient as simple turbines. And I'm talking about 'in the wild' efficiency, where many frequencies are encountered and the light is often diffused, not a laboratory setting, where the light is single-frequency, direct illumination.
[...]But I was always against building nuclear power plants in deserts, like Saudi Arabia or Nevada. These places receive lots of sun, every day. Use that energy. Solar-thermal solutions are 100% efficient at converting energy into heat. 25-35% final efficiency is very reachable and it is base load capable. Something that we can't say for PV solar.
Now that's true, like I said, PV has ways to go before it can compete with more 'traditional' power generation methods.
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
Education needs power to keep the school's lights on and run information technology. Hospitals need power to run the machines that keep people alive. Policing needs power to run cop cars.
Granted - in Nevada they will need to ship lots of water out to the plant to keep the mirrors clean. But its still cheaper than coal or oil. But it won't be subject in any meaningful way to the whims of the coal or oil markets.
You Have to blame the Japanese government and power plant management for not replacing the Fukushima power reactors. We simply can not expect solar and wind to fill our power needs.
Even if we do all that is possible to conserve power. and switch to electric power cars. we will need to at least double the electric power plants to keep everything running. The last thing we want is more coal and gas plants. This defeats many of the advantages of getting off the petroleum in our cars.
Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium
Heliostat efficiency is strongly affected by clouds so this type of plant is much much better in the desert. Not to worry about storage for solar PV though. Electrification of transportation produces a lot of cast off but still useful batteries. About half a day of our electric energy consumption can be stored in old batteries once transportation is converted.
(slightly) more realistically, the heliostats could be aimed at overhead flying objects to destroy them. (at least during the day)
I am too, I would hope they are using wastewater if at all possible. Using a closed loop ammonia cooling system, that you "charge" with cold at night would also be neat. Not practical though.
What's the danger of solar power tower?
Because they are scared of what might happen if they try to turn them off.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Where do you get nuclear from it?
From the sun. WOOOOOOSHHH...
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
My plutonium spoons certainly do. They also keep food warm, they glow in the dark, and you can't put too many of them in the same drawer. They are superior to all other types of spoon.
I remember reading about plants like this on Slashdot a while ago. A lot of people said that was a good idea, and we should start building them!
Well now that we're actually doing it, suddenly it's a bad idea. Why is that?
"The initial cost is much higher than a fossil fuel plant."
So? I know in todays political environment, this will come a a shocker, gut I ton' mind paying an extra half cent a KW to get non CO2 emitting and non-wind power
And this isn't untried technology, I'm not sure why to think that.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You seem to have thought this out a lot though your point 4 I'd challenge.
Professors can be wrong sometimes or simply misleading.
16% of the worlds energy already comes from nuclear.
There is apparently a 230-year estimate supply extractable at today's consumption rate with current technologyat current market prices at current rates of use.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last
36.8 years if tomorrow every single plant was replaced with nuclear if you don't use breeder reactors.
With breeder reactors you could multiply that by something like 50-100
Long enough that it's not a significant worry.
Current market prices is also important: if you increase the price, say double it, then that dramatically increases while not significantly increasing the price of running a nuclear plant as the fuel is very cheap compared to building the reactor.
Now there's claims that it is possible to extract uranium from seawater for about 5 or 6 times the current market price which effectively sets an upper limit on the price of uranium and would supply it forever but I'll wait till I see any kind of large scale operation.
point 2 is valid though it's also true of most industry, hazardous waste can be a serious long term issue even if it's not radioactive, it just doesn't get the same media attention.
point 3 is the most significant one for much of the human race and extremely valid.
A minimum standard for government spending is always that it makes financial sense.
That said, the accounting can take place over very long time scales and include all sorts of things that are hard to put a price on (like enjoyment or biodiversity or whatever).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Because all of national endeavors must make sense financially, yes? If so, so long space program...
I call your bluff. Sure, get rid of the space program as well as anything else that doesn't make sense fiscally.
What's the danger of solar power tower?
The can, on occasion, turn into Eye of Sauron towers, and fry nearby hobbits.
Dude, this is Nevada we are talking about.
So would you rather be paying for solar $7 per watt or $1 per watt (which is what solar cells are expected to hit in a few years)? You can use scrap paper for calculations, if you're having trouble figuring this out.
That it's a potentially less-efficient mode of generating power. It's like an RTS, if you invest in the wrong tech trees early on, you'll lose, even though it doesn't actually kill you directly. It may be cheaper/just as safe to do something else entirely. This makes technologies pursued simply due to buzzwords like "renewable" inherently dangerous. Plus, renewable is a misleading term, since you still have maintenance costs. Just because those costs aren't defined under the heading "fuel" doesn't mean they don't exist, or that they're necessarily lower than maintenance costs for other systems. That's the danger of a solar power tower.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
If the money had stayed in the private sector, it would have mostly created jobs in China or another cheap country. Granted, given that jobs are cheaper over there, it would probably have been more jobs.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
You don't happen to think that the "greens" don't have a point? Most of the US is set up under an adversarial system, if there isn't somebody on both sides then things tend to get pushed to the extremes. Not having somebody point out the potential flaws makes it damn near impossible to mitigate them.
But then again, it's not like formerly green energies have been discovered to have some pretty obnoxious side effects. Oh, wait, you say that hydroelectric dams have contributed significantly to severely damaging fisheries?
get back to me in 50 years after a lot have been built.
I'm sure something will have happened by then, one will have fallen over and crushed a school or something.
They seem fairly safe if a bit on the expensive and land hungry side.
$1/watt is a sensible target price for PV panels. Installed systems, with mounting hardware, inverters, etc. will obviously cost more. Also, this system generates power throughout a larger fraction of the day, and a bunch of mirrors pointed at a big concrete tower probably have a useful service life many times as long as PV panels -- replace the turbines and possibly some tanks and pipes every now and then, and it's hard to see why this system couldn't last practically forever.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
Except the space program does make sense. The dollar generated from spin off tech has been massive.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It should be stated that 36.8 years is only using currently open and operating mines. Estimated uranium and thorium reserves are 3+ orders of magnitude higher. Breeder reactors put it into the 250,000+ year range, AKA the "We are likely to have moved off the planet or killed everyone on it already" time-scale. Some estimates have it in the millions of years.
Even if this plant isn't the most efficient way to generate kilowatt hours or jobs, many pragmatic questions can be answered. By test-driving these new technologies on a large enough scale, we are investing in research and educating a new workforce that will help generate more efficient solar power plants in the future.
Got it - thanks. :)
Recently their up time has been poor and of course you need to count what they did prior to 2003. 80% seems reasonable.
now now, renewable is a fair term: you can recycle the old broken components from a plant but you can't get coal back from fly ash.
If they called it "free energy" but renewable is fair.
Also I take it you never played hearts of iron: it had a realistic tech tree, much like in real life trying to extend one area of research far ahead of everything else is insanely expensive while a low bushy tech tree can be cheaper and leave you better off.
I would venture to say that Hoover Dam cost a hell of a lot more per home when it was built. That one turned out to be a pretty good investment, though.
(btw, my power bill in the summer in Vegas is about $300.)
First, the $737M loan is not from the government, it's from private investors. The Feds are just insuring the debt. They will only pay out if the project fails.
Second, yes, $737M/75,000 houses is $9826. Assuming the facility lasts for 15 years (which seems exceptionally short), it would take $54 per month per household to pay off the principal. No feedstock to purchase, but the article mentions 60 jobs and likely some materials for maintenance. so if you figure it has a $5M-10M annual opperating budget (assuming staffing costs average 40-80k per head and having money for maintenance) you'd have to add on another $5-11 to the customers' monthly bill.
So yeah, $737M sounds like a lot, but it means the median power bill can be right around $100/month for 75k consumers, and it'll be turning a nice profit.
My local power is primarily coal with a smidge of wind, and I pay roughly $100 per MWh (last bill was ~$65 for ~700KWh). So this really doesn't seem to out of the realm of possible. Especially if they keep opperating costs low.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Actually $7 per watt is a really good deal. The main question is going to be what the operating costs are. Given that solar facilities only have maintenance costs after construction rather than requiring truck loads of fuel. Solar, like nuclear, is very costly up front and quite cheap as an ongoing energy producer.
Almost a billion for a 110MW plant, that won't provide power if there's cloud cover.
You get an almost gigawatt state of the art, passive safe with all bells and whistles nuclear reactor for that money.
And almost EVERYONE HERE, applauding like a bunch of Stockholm-afflicted fools. Ayn Rand's exasperatingly long novel was never as current, I gotta say.
Send your spendthrift head of state this
Except that it needs 17,000 mirrors for ~75 MW of power.
Each of the fukishma reactors is several thousand MW's each.
when we get to 1000 MW solar salt reactors we might stand a chance. the problem then becomes land area. Those mirrors take up an awful lot of it.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
No you're doing the multiplying thing, that was already including mines which aren't currently being used.
It did ignore thorium.
that was however assuming no breeders and assuming no increase in the price of uranium.
There's enough uranium that unless we're very stupid about how we use it we could supply all our power needs for thousands of years but I'd be very dubious about your claim of 250K.
That assumes perfect use of fuel, no increase in demand and perfect extraction of fuel.
Definitely an issue for Nevada, however, air cooling and hybrid cooling systems that reduce water consumption by 50% to 85% have already been studied. Either option would bring water consumption inline or lower than coal fired plants and possibly even in the range of gas fired plants.
http://www.quora.com/Solar-Towers/How-much-water-for-evaporative-cooling-do-solar-thermal-power-generators-need-per-watt-hour-generated
I guess we'll have to wait for the design details before we know if they go for the low capital cost water cooling option or the low water consumption air or hybrid cooling option.
3 - Proliferation - Ya, we're clearly stopping openly-hostile, fundamentalist Iran from building nuclear power plants. That's totally happening. If you call Stuxnet on this, you're crazier than Ahmadinejad.
Not entirely true. We don't have a problem with them having nuclear plants. We have a problem with them refining nuclear fuel. There is a huge difference. The US, Russia, and France, have all offered extremely cost effective fuel delivery and disposal solutions to Iran. They don't want it because it means they can't refine nuclear weapon grade fuels.
Nuclear power isn't a problem. Nuclear fuel is. It just so happens, the details of Iran's fuel refine is also the best path for nuclear weapons grade fuel. This is why everyone is sure, contrary to Iran's objections, they absolutely intend to develop nuclear weapons....if they are not already doing so.
That gives us only 20 years more to hold out until we solve the fusion break-even problem.
The problem with fusion, we are hundreds of years from having a viable solution, short of many, massive breakthroughs. Breakeven is one of five or six required breakthroughs of even technological significance. It is pure fantasy to say we are anywhere near twenty years from fusion power. And likely, its fantasy to say we are twenty years from breakeven.
If we have fusion power in less than two hundred years, several technological miracles have occurred. That's reality. Anyone who says otherwise is looking for a grant or hoping to sell you a bridge.
5 - Solar and wind production in the US - At the APPA conference in Nashville this spring, one of the foremost investors in "renewable" energy in the country outright stated that they would have put absolutely nothing into solar/wind/geothermal if they didn't receive federal grants for it. It'd've simply've been a waste of time and money. Federal support is the only reason we have anything like this project.
That's not surprising at all considering the US tax payers have been paying for infrastructure support and maintenance and have received little to none of what has already been paid for. The seem companies are now waiting in line for a second handout, in the neighborhood of a hundreds of billions of dollars, to fix everything they've already been paid for.
There are literally cities in the US who have less power quality than many second world countries. Power reliability and general availability has been on a steady decline since the early 80's with *every* indication things will continue to decline. The power companies are literally, at tax payer and utility payer expense, paid to destroy power infrastructure while concurrently paid to do the exact opposite.
If the government does not hold these companies accountable, literally, in the next forty to sixty years, the US will become a second world country. Or more likely, the US tax payer will be charged a second time to bail out these companies, for perform the work we've all already paid for.
No, no, no...
Money creates jobs, somehow. If we just pour enough of it to business, the business will eventually hire everybody. Forget all that pesky demand stuff, the ideology of greed and oppression presented as economic theory bypasses all the middlemen and makes it simple.
Magic hand, baby, magic hand.
Apologies: too much of a generalization, I was somewhat tarring all the greens with the same brush as the hardline green parties and organizations like greenpeace.
I don't really get that kind of measurement. 100MW a 5 cents a KW is 250K dollars and hour. So it pays for itself in 3000 hours.
", there's no way the power plant will be as valuable as the money being laid out for it and I don't see the power producer paying off the loan."
Why not? it's over 20 years, so it's not a lot of money. It certainly isn't a gimmick.
No, this is a great investment. For clarification, it's not a fiscal investment, an infrastructure investment. And infrastructure is an on going rising cost. always has been, Always will be.
"Who knows.."
well, the government knows, and if you bothered you could find out. But that would mean dealing in facts that might challenge your preconceived notions.
I'm sure you can't handle that,
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There's a huge field of reflectors surrounding such a tower. The only way it would fall over and crush a school would be if the school were for some strange reason built in the field of reflectors.
peak solar=low demand? what?
you may have heard of these new fangaled things called air conditioners. popular in the south, heavily used around peak solar, guzzle power like a frat boy guzzles beer.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Our taxes aren't paying for this. It is a group of private investors and private developers working out a loan. The feds have an interest in seeing it go through, so the insure the loan, so that if the private developers bail, the private investors don't get completely hosed. It's quite common and it costs us taxpayers nothing.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
First, RTFA, this power plant is not photovoltaic but solar thermal. There are no solar cells there.
Second, things won't get cheaper by magic, they get cheaper by the economy of scale, but that only after development costs are amortized. If there is no investment in any technology while it is expensive, it won't ever get cheaper.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
In Vermont, where rooftop solar is the appropriate technology, there are no permanent employees per MW. It is only in the desert where people have forgotten to build roofs that we have to resort to heliostats ;-)
Somebody posted a link to the plans in a comment below....
http://www.tonopahsolar.com/pdfs/Tonopah_Crescent_Dunes_POD_2009_11_23.pdf
They will be utilizing a hybrid cooling system so the water consumption and usage will be in the range of a gas fired plant.
It will be a 110 Megawatt facility and the plans expect total water consumption of 600 Acre Feet per year. Assuming only an 80% utilization rate that would be around 253 gallons / MWh as compared to around 500 gallons / MWh for coal and nuclear and 200 gallons / MWh for gas.
Wipers would scratch the mirrored surface making it less efficient
"The Obama administration has provided a loan guarantee..." So if it fails, is Obama going to personally take the financial hit?
I see some people have problems recognizing a joke.
Try reading the sentence I ended on.
The details are just justification. it boils down to factories and cities: bad, little cottages in the mountains:good.
In all fairness, if you've ever spent time in factories/cities and little cottages in the mountains, you'd know that's a pretty accurate assessment. :)
Please don't read my sig.
Exactly. Reactor size is important.
It's not the size of your reactor that matters, it's how you use it.
There's no reason why you couldn't install multiple power generation systems in such a plant. You can run a gas turbine engine on just about any heat source, it doesn't have to be combustible fuel. Solar powered gas turbines have been tested and run at comparable thermal efficiency to steam turbines, with no water requirement. For daytime use, run the gas turbine, and deflect some of the energy to heat up your molten sodium tank. During the night, use the energy stored in the sodium tank with a separate steam turbine. You could even run both turbines into a single generator to defer much of the cost.
It will make the spotted horny lizard go extinct.
Depends.
If you're talking about energy efficiency then no.
-You use a lot less energy living in a tower block with apartments on all sides such that waste heat from one cuts down on the heating bills of the others etc.
-Transporting people a few miles on mas transport is a lot more efficient than getting too and from a little farmstead.
-Distributing food and other essentials also takes energy and is far more efficient in a nice dense city.
if what you want isn't to be environmentally friendly but rather to feel like you're getting "back to nature" or some such then little cottages in the mountains win hands down.
Yes, that's why it's been safely operated on every major long term deployment warship, aircraft carrier, and submarine the US operates. Because it's SO dangerous. You're probably right, coward, we should switch them all back to oil based fuels, and let them pull an exxon Valdez behind them instead.
Listen folks. Make up your minds. Every single source of fuel has a major environmental impact. Choose one, then please, STFU about it! Enough solar panels to power the world is going to completely cover (and kill) resources. Hydro-electric screws with fish and their breeding habits. Nuclear has waste that needs stored somwhere safe after use. Fossil fuels pollute the environment and are running short.
Your miracle fuel isn't coming. Wake the hell up already. It "may" come. But actually planning on it coming is not only foolish, it's the most dangerous thing to count on of all the options.
So, as I said, make a choice, or make several. I don't care, but please. PLEASE. STFU.
I8-D
My plutonium spoons certainly do. They also keep food warm, they glow in the dark, and you can't put too many of them in the same drawer. They are superior to all other types of spoon.
Ignoring the obvious radiation points, plutonium is also chemically poisonous.
Well I don't think this is going to be the solution, but I'm glad government money is getting spent on positive science instead of just blowing things up. Now give me high speed rail and we'll be getting somewhere (pun not intended).
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Yeah, but when metal spoons explodes (like they do all the time)....you can just walk over and pick up the pieces.....right then, no need to evacuate for 500 years.
You'd think so, but the real reason Area 51 was classified didn't have anything to do with the misinformation posted today. What really happened is that they decided to see the full extent of what Chuck Norris could do with a spoon (because the knife or fork were too unsporting). Let's just say it'll be quite a while before they can pick up the pieces and open that museum.
cmon... jetpacks, duke nukem, flying cars, linux on the desktop... you are leaving out way too many future promises
It also makes the occasional strawman go up into flames.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
This isn't a contract. It is a loan guarantee. The government is taking on the risk for financing the plant. We only pay if the entire thing fails. The goal is to help fund the technology the first time around so that we get that vital success story. Getting large projects like these privately funded is not reasonable. People typically want to invest in something that is proven to work. Once we have one working, the risk associated with creating similar plants goes down and it becomes easier to find funding for more of them privately. This isn't about creating jobs as much as it is about funding innovation. That innovation will hopefully lead to whole new markets and of course new jobs.
Insightful, and the point can be taken further.
Lack of energy has risks. Electricity is not just a luxury, it provides safety and supports health. Dwelling heat can be the difference between life and death in many climates. Energy-intensive industrial societies have longer life expectancies than low-tech ones.
Probably even earlier. peak power is the most expensive power and peak power correlates nicely with peak solar at that place.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
You forgot that the evil green conspiracy hates YOU. Personally. They are out to get you, drive you out of your SUV, out of your flat and force you to live in a cave. Did I miss anything?
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Water and sand will also scratch the mirror. Silica is damn abrasive.
Apologies for the flame above. Should have read the whole subthread before unleashing my wrath.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Contrary to popular assumptions, this is actually the stance of a pretty wide segment of the environmental movement - in particular amongst those who have their eyes firmly on resource depletion problem. See the forums at theoildrum.com for example. Urbanization is indeed energy efficient - if you do it right.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
who said anything about caves?
I've just been deeply disappointed by the hardline greens and organizations like greenpeace who pretty much just hate technology.
They even object to golden rice because it's a gateway crop- none of the other normal objections to GM apply but it's just too good and might make people too accepting of GM crops.
They hate fusion in advance because atoms.
there's the sane "lets not fuck up the planet too much to live on" greens and then there's the "fuck blind children" organizations like greenpeace and some green parties.
You would be surprised. Getting water into a desert area may well be very costly. In many ways, water as a natural resource is no different than oil. The biggest difference is that it is almost everywhere. The problem is, for solar, one of the places that actually doesn't have much of it (ie. the desert) is where it is needed.
The best way to get the water is to get it from the closest sources, but in the West, there is a significant issue with there being enough fresh water for everyone. Rivers are being depleted and diverted to large population areas like LA. The rest is for farming and the people who live in the area.
One of the things you learn in middle school is about water budgets. Usually, it sounds like a joke, since water is everywhere, until you realize that some places actually do have to care about how much water goes into the soil and how much comes out on a seasonal basis.
In short, oil and coal may well end up being cheaper to the average consumer than solar power. Oil and Coal require mining/drilling, refining, and transport, but those infrastructures have already been built long ago. Solar power is much like getting a drink from the ocean. Sure, there's all that water just sitting there, billions and trillions of gallons of it, but you can't drink any of it without costly desalinization.
As I said down below, I didn't read the whole subthread and didn't see your later post when I wrote this. I can totally agree that some particular green organizations are pretty far in the nutcase territory. Just got riled up on the generalization, but that's out of the way anyway. The sheer amount of strawmen getting burned when it comes to environmental issues on /. has me on a hair trigger some days.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
It's an even worse scam than that. It's AC, so they send the electricity out and suck it back in before it even gets to the consumer. The consumer only thinks they're getting power. All electrical appliances are just the placebo effect.
Support SETI@home
Cut President O'bama some slack. If you were Leader of the Free World and (apparently) a HUGE Fallout fan, you're saying you wouldn't hedge America's post-apocalyptic energy bets in style? After all, 'War...war never changes.'
It is unclear to me from the article and the summary whether this is peak or average power? Does anyone have a quote on this?
Whether it is average or not, I have always been interested in what this type of technology can actually achieve. It is definitely an interesting project and I will be watching for the final verdict on it.
holy crap ...http://games.slashdot.org/story/11/05/24/1716225/Duke-Nukem-Forever-Goes-Gold
for 5, the same would have been said about coal in England when all of the fuel was wood. or petroleum in the US when the only energy source was Whale oil. The idea is to ease the transition to the new source of energy.
The idea is to think about the future of energy production, not just the now.
There is also the question, do you want the energy silicone valley in the US or in China? Right now, it looks like it will be in China.
$700/55 comes to $12.7/W which is the same as $12700/kW. Not a lot more expensive. But then the plant in Finland isn't finished yet so there will be more cost overruns. And, the 55 MW is a 100% number while the nuclear plant will need to stop to refuel. So the solar power plant is cheaper using your numbers.
That's okay, we didn't need Nevada anyway. Or Utah.
Hmmm, I doubt that. The Congressional appropriation for the entire Boulder Canyon project, including the Hoover AND Imperial dams, AND the All-American canal, was $165,000,000 in 1928. That's about 2.1 billion in modern dollars. BUT the Hoover Dam generated 1345 MW once brought fully on-line (with later updates its over 2000, but those costs are not included in the original appropriation.) So it's 2.1G$/1345 vs. 737M$/110, or $1.56/Watt vs. $6.70/Watt. That means that the Hoover Dam project, even disregarding the flood control and irrigation works associated with it, was far cheaper per watt of generating capacity. Given that the average home back then consumed considerably less electricity, I'd guess it was an entire order of magnitude less expensive "per home."
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
I was moderating the last time this came up so I didn't post anything. But anonymous whiners who are complaining because I am more knowledgeable than them on energy issues so that I disturb their nuclear wet dreams really need to stfu. This whiner hasn't even rtfa. This whiner hasn't even read the headline. What part of 24/7 does the whiner not understand?
The Chinese[1] could easily block off the Sun. Then where would you be?
[1] Mr. Burns would also have been a acceptable boogerman.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Literally, you are an idiot.
Umm, no.
Actually, 100 MW @ 5 cents per kW-hour is 5K dollars per hour. So it pays for itself in 60,000 hours.
Assuming no other costs involved of course.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
We could also "create '600 construction jobs and 45 permanent positions" by paying people to dig holes and fill them back up. It really bugs me how the number of jobs required to build and staff the thing is touted as an advantage. If it only took 300 jobs to build and 20 to staff then that would be demonstrably superior from the perspective of being an efficient mechanism for generating electricity, only that's not why we're building it. We're building it in order to create 600 construction jobs and 45 permanent positions.
"Mature" doesn't mean "competitive," it means "fairly well explored." In other words, it's unlikely that there are many huge breakthroughs left in silicon semiconductors. Just incremental improvements.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
All that number assumes is current consumption levels. It'll probably be less than 1/10th of that in reality, but 25,000 years is still a long time. However cheap power will lead to an increased standard of living for everyone. Increased standard of living invariably leads to decreased reproduction rates. Many first world countries are already below replacement rates.
Also: Current uranium reserve estimates in northern canada alone could power the current 16% nuclear power consumption of the planet for over 1500 years by conservative estimates. Allowing for no increase thats 240 years at current rates with a switch to full out uranium tomorrow, no breeders, just whats currently in use. Even allowing for the increase rates we've seen over the last 50 years or so we come out to a number thats higher than what you stated just for the deposits in one area of the globe. That makes me question where you're getting your data.
40 full time positions and 600 construction jobs would be nothing to sneeze at, even if the plant isn't really all that efficient. It should have a nice ripple effect, with some of those houses sitting empty getting new tenants, and, if they don't count it already, the construction that would need to be done for infrastructure. At least Harry Reid is effective for Nevada, if not the rest of the country.
Don't forget the machines...
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
Yeah? And?
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
A typical power plant in the US is anywhere from 500MW up to 1800MW, regardless of technology used. This doesn't include the smaller co-gen's but is representative of what the layperson would call a "power plant". There are hundreds of power plants throughout the US (nuke, coal, combined cycle, and even hydro)
This one solar plant can generate 110MW. That is a pittance compared to what is needed and hardly registers on the usage meter. Think of it this way: for every combined cycle plant (there are hundreds), we'd need to build (5) of these solar plants.
Worse, this one solar plant couldn't even get off the ground without federal loan guarantees.
If the technology scaled up to 500-600MW, all us engineers would be singing a different tune. Furthermore, if it scaled up that high, funding would become a non-issue and government loans would not be needed. In short, it would be a GREAT solution and my guess is that the wind energy business would have more funding and investment than it could handle.
But it is not that way....
Why? Because of scale. Wind and solar aren't even close to ready for prime-time unless you completely ignore the economics of it.
Absolutelly. They would lose less money to pay 50 guys walking in circles or just standing there. The greens have absolutely no common sense.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act?
Seems there are a lot of projects in Vegas tearing up good roads with that on the signs.
And like other road construction in Vegas, they often screw up the sewer lines and not fix them, so it smells like a sewer.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
As another AC replier pointed out, it's already showing up in the discount bin. Unlike AI or fusion power, this is a technology that has steadily progressed to the point that current solar cells are something like $1-2 per watt raw (plus the cost of the frame and mounting hardware).
As soon as someone figures out how to use solar power as a weapon, we'll have economical solar power.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
First, RTFA, this power plant is not photovoltaic but solar thermal. There are no solar cells there.
In other words, it's solar powered. That's all that's relevant to me.
Second, things won't get cheaper by magic, they get cheaper by the economy of scale, but that only after development costs are amortized. If there is no investment in any technology while it is expensive, it won't ever get cheaper.
Solar cells already have the economies of scale. My belief is that solar thermal won't go anywhere because they don't have a cost advantage over solar cells. So anyone who wants a solar powered application will go with solar cells unless they would rather have thermal heat instead of electricity (such as for warming a building).
But we do know it was us that scorched the sky.
I linked to the article, and either way beyond a certain point it stops mattering.
If we don't figure out fusion in a thousand years we deserve any problems we have.
-You use a lot less energy living in a tower block with apartments on all sides such that waste heat from one cuts down on the heating bills of the others etc.
And you're ignoring the fact that transporting that energy to the tower block with apartments is inefficient.
-Transporting people a few miles on mas transport is a lot more efficient than getting too and from a little farmstead.
You don't do much traveling when you work a farm ... you live where you work and grow most of your supplies, you do far less traveling in general ... and its possible, if we're reverting back to that sort of living, that you can also take advantage of things like animals for transportation as well as work on the farm where they are required anyway.
-Distributing food and other essentials also takes energy and is far more efficient in a nice dense city.
Sure ... IN THE CITY its easy to move the goods around ... but ...
HOW DID THEY GET TO THE CITY? The food got there because it was collected from a bunch of farms, packaged in bulk from thousands of little and big farms around the country probably no where near where the city is.
Cities are incredible efficient if you completely ignore the fact that they are entirely dependent on support from the very thing you are calling inefficient.
Cities simply can not survive without the things you are calling inefficient and they provide nothing back to supplies that has real value. Money doesn't count as the farmers can survive just fine without it. Most farms are fully capable of being entirely self sufficient without any modern tech, but they can be far more profitable with modern tech.
The fact that you think cities are 'good for the environment' shows you have absolutely no idea what so ever about whats going on. You seem to think that transporting resources thousands of miles to places where they don't naturally occur is somehow more efficient than just using them at the source.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Machine propaganda!
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
The sun emits so much light that you can go blind if you look directly into it.
Only if you stare at it during an eclipse.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
it's like estimating the cost of a program using SLOC. a line of code really costs almost nothing to lay down, but it's got to be constructed, formatted, compiled, tested, reviewed, QA'ed, CM'ed, etc. all the ancilliary stuff adds up to a lot more than what the line of code itself costs.
Hire 600 people to do one job, and you're actually feeding a whole town.
For now we do. And to use that you have to build distribution. If making this store heat is cheaper than wiring the users to the hydro, then this is better. Plus, as this is an experiment, the value in knowledge adds to the value from the electricity.
I don't really get that kind of measurement. 100MW a 5 cents a KW is 250K dollars and hour.
No. At 5 cents a kWh, 100 MW is $5000 an hour, while the sun is up, or about $60k per day (assuming the equivalent of 12 full operating hours per day). That pays off in almost 32 years, ignoring time value of money. That's just over 3% per year return on investment. Not a serious return for a power plant (I'd consider 10% typical for a power plant).
there's no way the power plant will be as valuable as the money being laid out for it and I don't see the power producer paying off the loan.
Why not? it's over 20 years, so it's not a lot of money. It certainly isn't a gimmick./quote> Again how is the producer going to pay interest? The ROI is 3%. I doubt, even in today's financial climate and the government guarantee, that the loan has interest of merely 3%.
Oh, wait, you say that hydroelectric dams have contributed significantly to severely damaging fisheries?
While I agree in general, dams hurt fisheries from our perspective, the reality is, its just change, and someone always gets upset when change occurs.
I personally don't mind change, it sucks that some things get hurt in the process. I new damn may wipe out a species of fish on a river simply because it can't get to its spawning grounds and it can't adapt to somewhere else ... that sucks ... but thats life. We aren't the first damn builders, the Colorado river has been dammed several times as far as we can tell, by massive ice dams ... that eventually burst, wiping out life anywhere near its banks or in it for a thousand miles at a clip ...
And something else came back and took its place afterwords.
The environment changes before we existed. Extinctions happened before we existed. We don't control the world, we just suggest what it should do next, and most of the time, it doesn't listen even a little bit.
Lets be realistic when we're talking about this stuff, its really about protecting OUR lives. We need to keep the environment capable of supporting US. Sometimes that means we're going to save animals from extinction when they should have died out, and sometimes we're going to kill off species by accident or as an unattended side effect ... and once in a while, we're going to cause extinctions intentionally ... like irradicated smallpox and now arguing over destroying the last known live samples.
Its not 'damaging the environment', its simply changing it. The question is, are our changes going to doom US as a species, nothing else matters. Saving life on Earth is irrelevant from our perspective if we aren't here to witness it.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
peak solar=low demand?
"outside of peak demand" == low demand.
Because all of national endeavors must make sense financially, yes? If so, so long space program...
The United States is abandoning space very soon.
July 8, 2011 will be the last time we send people into space.
The shuttles are being decommissioned and there is no replacement.
Well, China will take our place I'm sure.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
The sun emits so much light that you can go blind if you look directly into it.
Only if you stare at it during an eclipse.
If you think so, try staring at it around noon during a normal, non-eclipse day. But don't complain if you don't see anything afterwards.
An eclipse just happens to be the only time when people would voluntarily stare at the sun.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Untrue, True Native Americans could be some of the most savage torturous people known to man.
However, that was generally after you started raping their wives and daughters and killing them to take their land. Native Americans WERE savages when we European settlers turned them into that by bending them over and not even offering lube.
Don't get me wrong, the Europeans settlers almost always certainly deserved it considering the atrocities they brought with them, I hold no ill will against Native Americans, we were the dicks, but you guys know how to make a man suffer when he deserves it ... and that tends to be why Native American 'Indians' were labeled as savages.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Not as much as you might think, just as the dust blows onto the mirrors, in a dry climate, it doesn't stick together, so it also blows off.
Take a look at what happened with the mars rovers, how many years have they gone without a good wipe down of the solar panels and they are working on a planet with no water worth mentioning in the atmosphere or the ground so there is dust EVERYWHERE.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
That money comes from somewhere - the private sector. So private sector expansion is reduced by the $.75B these "created jobs" cost (as if the government will return the money to the private sector when this "loan" is repaid). And considering the private sector is a lot more efficient that government procurement, it's likely a net loss of jobs.
When you steal money from the future, there will eventually be a cost, even if you don't notice it. That which is seen, and that which is not seen.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Yes, I really would rather pay $7 per watt today then invest $1 in electricity futures. I don't play the stock market and I stay the hell away from market speculation.
I would like to point out that the government doesn't need to guarantee loans for something that is guaranteed to win on a cost basis. So I am betting that the risk is too high for venture capital to do this without government intervention. I expect that those numbers people are waving around are best-case scenarios. Or even fantasy-case scenarios. Regarding "window cleaning," I am not as worried about the solar collection as I am turning the latent heat into power. I am supposing it would be a steam turbine, but don't actually know.
My number 5 was really in response to his unnumbered fifth point, that the federal government is unintentionally sabotaging "renewable" energy. I was arguing that they are, in fact, the only reason we have any renewables in the US at all. I absolutely agree with you that these incentives are an integral part of this transition. We should be investing as heavily in that as we should invest in something as pivotal for the continuation of the human race as, say, space travel, and far more than we invest in something as wastefully pointless as, say, foreign wars over nothing.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
...until we have more solar energy production online than we can use in real time. And we are not with a factor of 100 of that point, yet.
...since the industry won't even build a plant without government loan guarantees.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
That's merely an advantage of my position that we all know I'll be right for at least 500 years.
Interesting argument that.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
And the trick to immortality is to not die.
if there's some kind of limit as to how many of these plants we can build. But as far as i can see, there's no reason we can't build 5 of these to replace one conventional plant. If doing so drives the price per MW to unacceptable levels, that's a problem. If it doesn't, it's not. Nobody cares if there electricity comes from one giant plant or a few smaller ones.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Interesting, they just tore down a similar system called Solar One in Daggett, CA. There is supposedly another project going on east of the Mohave Desert as well.
1 - Shipping and mining of feedstock - I presume you mean fuel... I really don't see how this is a problem at all, it creates a lot of industry and drives new technologies. It's a good thing all around. There's no way a sane person can see this as a drawback.
- Lets see. How about the children of dead miners? I suspect they might like their parents back.
- How about the cost? all that fuel mining and transport costs people money. Sure it employs people, but given the Koch Industries profits that's a lot of money a whole lot more average people would still have if the 'fuel' was free as it is with solar. Rather than concentrate the money into the oligarch's hands lets keep it in people's pockets....crazy I know and I'm a rabid liberal. With government people have a say in how money and taxes are spent, not so with big industry.
2 - Long term cost with storage of waste - You've clearly never heard of breeder reactors [wikipedia.org], or the negative radioactive waste drawbacks of things like coal [scientificamerican.com]. Combine the already-lower radioactive waste of nuclear with breeders, and you've got an extremely planet and people-friendly power source.
Wait you're defending nuclear with coal? talk about cognitive dissonance. BOTH are bad and have significant waste issues. Nuclear waste for 1 year of production requires 100s of years of storage - we still don't have a safe place to put this stuff yet. That price is not included in the utility power prices. That's not fair. Likewise with coal, the cost of emitting CO2 isn't currently included in the price. Once it is included, trust me, coal will go bye bye fast.
- that said, nuclear will be necessary in the short term (50-100 years) while we get renewable sources up to scale, that doesn't make it a 'good' solution though. Also consider that nuclear isn't viable without $10s of billions in loan guarantees from the government. That cost isn't reflected either.
3 - Proliferation - Ya, we're clearly stopping openly-hostile, fundamentalist Iran from building nuclear power plants. That's totally happening. If you call tuxnet on this, you're crazier than Ahmadinejad.
A. Q. Khan. nuff said.
5 - Solar and wind production in the US - At the APPA conference in Nashville this spring, one of the foremost investors in "renewable" energy in the country outright stated that they would have put absolutely nothing into solar/wind/geothermal if they didn't receive federal grants for it. It'd've simply've been a waste of time and money. Federal support is the only reason we have anything like this project.
To repeat, renewable sources are quite economical when the full costs of operation and disasters are included in other fuel sources. CO2 release for coal, and Fukishima for nuclear. We need government subsidies for renewable until the true costs for established industries are reflected in their prices.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
When idiots don't want to face the fact that they are living in a desert.
For anyone wondering, here is an example of the kind of person I was talking about.
"Drive through the middle of Iowa sometime, a wind farm can stretch for hours of driving down the interstate."
I drive through Iowa all the time, the longest time you'll spend driving through a wind farm is 15 minutes, and I believe that's the one north of Des Moines on I-35.
What is the economic cost of the 112 deaths during the construction of the dam?
At least he's not using "basically" along with it...
First $1B for 110 MW is very similar to the capital cost of other energy plants such as nuclear. Current estimate on nuclear are in the $5-6/w capital cost range according to several google-able papers. That doesn't include external costs that are HUGE for nuclear (waste management, security issues, fuel transport and disposal, regulatory management, etc), nor does it include fuel costs.
Whereas the solar system has no fuel costs and few externalities.
The real question is does it work out economically? Apparently so, since this is a commercial venture not a demo project. In addition, Bill Weihl Google.orgs energy investor, Vinod Khosla, and NREL are all predicting this type of solar hitting $0.05/kWh by 2015. That competes with coal and soon.
On the issue of clouds: You need to do you're research. The Solar-one demo project using this same technology has a 99% availability. That is huge. No other plant has that kind of availability. Nuclear in recent history has just passed the 90% mark, after being stuck at 80% for 3 decades. And their good reason for this:
1. The sun never fails to come up
2. It has built in storage
3. Yes there is solar availability even in cloudy weather
The only fallout of concern from Fukushima is political, not nuclear. And thanks for ignoring my actual arguments, by the way. That's classy of you.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
I don't have the 1928 actuarial tables at my fingertips, but I'd estimate pretty low given life expectency and lifetime earnings of your average manual laborer at the time.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Apparently we've got a job for all the homeless with squeegee's that I see roadside.
The only fallout of concern from Fukushima is political, not nuclear.
Given the cost is estimated at $300 billion dollars to rebuild the country, that is 'cost' renewable sources don't have when they fail. Nuclear cannot ever fail, and since we humans are the ones building and operating them, failures are going to happen.
And thanks for ignoring my actual arguments, by the way. That's classy of you.
Actually I did. You said no sane person could call mining and feedstock transport bad. I gave clear reasons why it *is* bad.
You said nuclear costs aren't a problem. I clearly showed that there are massive costs associated with nuclear that are not factored into the cost of its electricity.
For the proliferation argument, I misunderstood your answer to be that proliferation is not a problem. However if you think we aren't actively trying to stop nuclear proliferation, you are naive.
For point #5, you said "Federal support is the only reason we have anything like this project." which I took to mean that renewable isn't viable because it isn't cost effective. I clearly showed *why* this a false comparison to make.
But whatever you say...
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
...They have Vegas, legal prostitution outside of Clark County, Medical Marijuana, and now the first large scale solar plant. Hmm, I know where I am moving now.
The world is how you make it
My point was that I'm sure we could do this project far, far cheaper if human life was just as cheap as it was back in 1928.
Also, no such thing. The so-called nuclear cycle is a myth. UK, France and Germany all tried to build fast breed reactors and failed (because the cooling system uses sodium which catches fire when it is exposed to air).
I guess russians are lying to the world. Please tell us more!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-600_reactor
Secondly, prototypes are not suppose to generate power. So your examples of Japanese or France is misleading, again.
'modern, meltdown proof'
No such thing. There is always a small chance of meltdown, no matter how many backups systems you have
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor#Passive_safety
"Self-regulation of the IFR's power level depends mainly on thermal expansion of the fuel which allows more neutrons to escape, damping the chain reaction...IFRs are able to withstand both a loss of flow without SCRAM and loss of heat sink without SCRAM. In addition to passive shutdown of the reactor, the convection current generated in the primary coolant system will prevent fuel damage (core meltdown). These capabilities were demonstrated in the EBR-II.[9] The ultimate goal is that no radioactivity will be released under any circumstance."
I guess it is impossible after all. The demonstration was probably faked, like the moon landing.
Some plants use expensive and dangerous to process MOX fuel, but that gives almost negible saving on uranium use and you still have to dispose of the spent MOX fuel in the end.
They are *burning* plutonium. It significantly reduces the amount of newly mined uranium required while operating in conventional uranium reactors. 20% reduction, I guess it's nothing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOX_fuel
What kind of argument is that? All trees are solar powered and they most definitely don't have any PV cells.
Well, as you can see, your belief is wrong, otherwise solar thermal power plants would not be built.
There are more benefits of solar thermal than just building heating:
- the ability to save the heat in the molten salt to keep producing electrical power at night
- the ability to use heat engines and even gas turbines, which leads to a higher efficiency than current photovoltaic cells
- usage of solar heat directly for steel melting or hydrogen production
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
"that is 'cost' renewable sources don't have when they fail."
all in one go or in little bits?
Is a destroyed city bellow a hydro dam a cost or the medical bills of the people hurt?
Things like that could run into multiple billions easily.
The medical bills of people hurt if there's a leak of some toxic solvent at a plant making solar panels could be very very expensive, look at bhopal for what can happen when an ordinary chemical plant has an accident.
Hydro dams don't collapse every day, chemical plants don't suffer toxic leaks all the time etc but these things aren't as black and white as you make out.
spread across the entire world the cost of simply using a significantly more expensive source of power can quickly run into the hundreds of billions and that money could be spent elsewhere saving lives or making peoples lives better.
there is an opportunity cost in human lives if you pick a power source which costs a lot per watt.
So you have to weigh it all against each other in terms of cash costs, risks in humans lives and financial risks- not just basing it on what makes headlines most often.
What kind of argument is that? All trees are solar powered and they most definitely don't have any PV cells.
You're setting aside a fixed amount of land for generating electricity from solar power. If growing trees were even better for cost per watt than solar thermal or solar cells, then that would be the method I'd compare solar thermal to.
Well, as you can see, your belief is wrong, otherwise solar thermal power plants would not be built.
The seven hundred million loan guarantee voids your argument. If I had government offering loan guarantees for my fantasies, then I'd get the money as well. Banks don't care what the money is for, only if the money will get repaid.
The profit here is in being a political merchant, someone who acquires public funding. I don't think this solar thermal business will survive the next Republican administration.
There are more benefits of solar thermal than just building heating:
While those are nice points, they don't make up for a poor cost per watt.
Estimate power at 100 MW (75k US homes is something like 1.2 kW per plus a cushion by rounding up to near single digit of precision). Estimate cost of plant at near the loan guarantee amount (over $700 million).
Yes, I really would rather pay $7 per watt today then invest $1 in electricity futures. I don't play the stock market and I stay the hell away from market speculation.
It's speculation building power plants in the first place. If you really weren't into speculation, you wouldn't pay for either.
The thing is, I barely recognise your stereotype at all. Maybe things are different where you live.
The environmentalists that pass through my sphere -- in the pages of New Scientist and The Guardian, in the British Parliament, my own friends, they are mostly rational people with evidence-based belief systems.
If you wander through the "Green Futures Field" at the Glastonbury Festival, then you'd think the whole movement was crystal healing, aura massage nutjobs.
If you go to the Centre For Alternative Technology in Machynlleth, you'd find a lot of serious, pragmatic, science.
They don't want it because it means they can't refine nuclear weapon grade fuels.
Or maybe they just don't want to be reliant on the US, Russia and France for their energy needs.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
From the company building the site:
The project will be a solar generating facility located northwest of Tonopah, Nevada, in Nye County with a nominal net generating capacity of 100 megawatts (MW).
"Nominal net" sure doesn't seem to indicate "peek".
Besides, they tell us the expected annual output of 480,000 MWh. As I pointed out above, $100/MWh would be a bargain. So in the first year alone they are looking at pulling in $48 million if the price of electricity drops. But realisticly, they'll ship the power to Cali, there $150-200/MWh would be more accurate. They should have no problem paying off the loan on a 15 year schedule, and still have plenty of money left over for labor and maintenance.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Argument from ignorance? No, that doesn't apply here. At least not to me. I do wonder about people who babble about 500 year evacuations when trivially, such an event wouldn't happen for almost 5 centuries. Further why would such an event happen? The half-life of most dangerous radioactive materials is a few decades or less. It probably would still exist in detectable quantities, but there would be a vast reduction in radioactivity, just from the passage of so much time. When we also consider that it's just not that hard to bulldoze earth and even flush ground water (for radioactive levels that are lethal with long half-life isotopes), there's no reason to expect 500 year evacuations unless there is a complete and utter absconding of duty by the government responsible for the territory in question. Then the evacuation would be an indictment of the government not of nuclear power as a whole.
Conclusion, that is.
Also, read through the article on argument from ignorance.
Your claim that you are "right for at least 500 years" as there has not yet been any such case of evacuation could be used as a textbook example of that fallacy.
"It asserts that a proposition is necessarily true because it has not been proven false (or vice versa)."
Like I said - a textbook example.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The speculation that society isn't going to crumble apart in a few years is a pretty safe bet.
Taking your view, BREATHING is speculative that life is going to be worth living in a few minutes.
Seriously though, "market speculation" means something. Like buying futures. It's one of those stock-trading terms. The need for power plants is pretty solid, and I'd like to encourage solar power and new power storage technology. Deal with it.
The speculation that society isn't going to crumble apart in a few years is a pretty safe bet.
If you think that's the only risk to building an overly expensive solar power plant using technology that is in the process of being obsoleted by solar cells, then you do need to stay away from speculation.
Seriously though, "market speculation" means something. Like buying futures. It's one of those stock-trading terms. The need for power plants is pretty solid, and I'd like to encourage solar power and new power storage technology. Deal with it.
"Speculation" doesn't equal "market speculation." If you were referring to market speculation, then you should have said so. I would have pointed out that neither action, building a solar thermal plant for a high cost, or waiting a few years to build a far cheaper solar cell-based plant is an example of market speculation. You aren't speculating on the future shifts in the perceived value or price of securities, but instead betting on future technological or economic capabilities of two solar-based power generation techniques.
If you were referring to market speculation, then you should have said so.
"...then invest $1 in electricity futures. I don't play the stock market and I stay the hell away from market speculation."
DATS DA JOKE.
Joke? Then I invoke the ultimate penalty for a poor joke. YOU MUST EXPLAIN IT TO ME.
So would you rather be paying for solar $7 per watt or $1 per watt (which is what solar cells are expected to hit in a few years)?
So you see, the entire joke hinges on the slight deliberate misinterpretation that you're asking which we would want, $7/watt now, or $1/watt in a few years. I run with that and say that no, I don't invest in futures and stay away from speculative markets. Which shows that I'm referring to your $1/watt prediction that doesn't yet exist. The humor lies in the misinterpretation that turns out to be true. Some of this is reference humor, as Slashdot has a story about revolutionary solar tech every month or so. You have to remember to play to the crowd.
And now that the joke has had the very last drop of humor squeezed out of it and rendered down into a biodiesel alternative fuel, let us lay it to rest and never speak of it again.
R.I.P.