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Google-Backed Solar Plant Catches on Fire (pv-tech.org)
An anonymous reader writes:"The world's largest solar plant just torched itself," read the headline at Gizmodo, reporting on a fire Thursday at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System. Built on 4,000 acres of public land in the Mojave Desert, the $2.2 billion plant "has nearly 350,000 computer controlled mirrors -- each roughly the size of a garage door," according to the Associated Press, which reports that misaligned mirrors focused the sunlight on electrical cables, causing them to burst into flames, according to the local fire department. The facility was temporarily shut down, and the fire damaged one of the facility's three towers, according to the Associated Press, while another tower is closed for maintenance, "leaving the sprawling facility on the California-Nevada border operating at only a third of its capacity."
The New York Times reported that by 2011 Google had invested $168 in the facility.
The New York Times reported that by 2011 Google had invested $168 in the facility.
...I'll throw another $168 their way.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
These guys are not good at programming anything else than webpages.
So, Google invested 168$ in a $2.2 billion farm, and it becomes "backed by Google". That's cheap marketing.
So this is the worst. Some cables needs replacing.
The tone of the article was suggesting some evacuation was in order.
HOLY FUCK!
The "invested $168 in the facility" link's URL is fucked up.
It is currently:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/05/21/236254/green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/google-pulls-the-plug-on-a-renewable-energy-effort
When it should obviously be:
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/google-pulls-the-plug-on-a-renewable-energy-effort
And it's not "$168", for crying out loud. The article clearly states (emphasis added),
Google still has invested $168 million in the venture
I don't expect a lot from the editors here, but holy fucking moley, this is just inexcusably bad! Fix the goddamn link URL! Fix the goddamn amount of money!
Gee, I wonder why... He submits any story about any accident at a nuclear plant, no matter how minor. But when there's a problem with a solar plant, he's nowhere to be found. Typical.
Mdsolar, is that you?
Don't worry, we always have coal backups to save the day!
No source article even mentioned Google. It was put in by the editor here, just to bring up the irrelevant $168 which is a crosslinked article.
This isn't the first such article with irrelevant slashpost crosslinking recently. It seems to be a completely pointless editorial trend to try to link articles with tangential posts.
One of the links in the story is 404/not found. Please fix it.
n/c
If we regulated it as heavily as nuclear it would be a 6 month shutdown and line by line review of the code.
No sir I dont like it.
Think of the bird children!
It's all done with smoke and mirrors.
give them time.
rajiv and anil are working hard trying to fix those bugs. doing the needful and all that.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
If this were mdsolar it would be "This hot new solar plant is *on fire*!"
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
You mean omellettes?
Actually, I think they were very lucky.
For the birds that came to be roasted, imagine if misalignment comes _your_ way. I was thinking about a more intelligent movement control, then I remember those cheap movies with AI gone awry.
Nuclear and oil don't involve giant aimable mirrors that catch shit on fire.
Archimedes was right! In your face Archimedes deniers!
Isn't that the one where Johnny Depp is assassinated and uploads himself?
Hits closer to home when the misalignment blinds pilots.
Would you prefer, "Solar Energy Has its First Chernobyl"?
You are welcome on my lawn.
If it had anywhere near the potential for disaster as nuclear, it almost certainly WOULD be as heavily regulated.
=Smidge=
But what about WHEN THE SUN GOES DOWN??? What then? Hmmm?
Mirrors powered by embedded Windows95? Am I right on mark? (Error! Error! Does no compute! Booooom!)
In some circles the headline is, "Obama Backed Solar Plant Catches Fire". Just how involved were either involved, how many other investors were there, and will their investment still eventually pay off? Lazy clickbait journalists and editors.
I gotta wear shades. -Status Quo
Google is a minority investor in the project. Why not mention the main investor????
From Ivanpah Solar Power Facility NRG has invested $300 million, Google $168 million and the US government has provided a $1.6 Billion load guarantee.
In fact why mention the investors at all? Did they have something to do with the day to day running? Did someone from Google sneak out one night and mis-align the mirrors?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
There is no radiation leak. There are no emissions other than the smoke of the burning cables. The only downside here is that energy production for the plant is at 1/3 capacity because only one of three towered is currently operating.
Granted, heading into summer with reduced capacity sucks for all those wanting to run their air conditioners. But, there is no environmental hazard. A disaster here is nowhere near the scale of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, or one the BP Gulf oil spill or Exxon Valdeeze (sp) oil spill.
Having a fire break out in a concentrator tower is not the plant 'torching itself'. To get a usable Carnot temperature differential.for power generation, the temperature on the heated end of the tower has to be high, so that's where the excessive temperature risk is concentrated. But when journalism is being practiced by scribes who nothing about science, every error condition has to treated as an apocalypse. Welcome to our world, solar developers.
(eom)
What if it were a sun-orbiting solar station?
(Cue Laser Destruction Beam moving accross the US)
Of how Urgent Words Can Fuck Up Simple Minds.
Like these of Anglos or other Germanics.
> But what about WHEN THE SUN GOES DOWN??? What then? Hmmm?
The Sun never goes down... on the British Empire.
IOW, it's always sunny during the day, everywhere.
If we can distribute it, solar energy from illuminated areas would feed dark areas... a country like the US comprising various time zones would benefit the most from that.
Of course, it's funnier to dig/refine things from the Earth. :-(
Ok has anyone else noticed bugs on the front page?
I'm getting cases where after an auto-refresh:
- New articles appear underneath the top text advert and have a big yellow box around them.
- Clicking titles to article just opens a new Slashdot front page, not the article.
I work in a factory and stuff is occasionally installed wrong or fails in such a way that stuff breaks, sometimes by melting or having smoke come out of it. Nobody was injured and the result of the problem didn't cascade and create other problems (at least nothing serious apparently) which means it's not a huge deal. Replace the cables, align the mirrors properly this time, update the process for mirror alignment and verification and get on with life.
I seriously wonder what kind of sheltered life people must be living to not have experienced stuff breaking down and having to repair it. Have you not owned a car? A washing machine or dishwasher? A computer with a hard drive? I've twice been in the vicinity of electrical transformers that exploded rather spectacularly, both of which due to high winds. They're up on a pole so nobody got hurt. They were fixed within a matter of hours. Seriously, stuff breaks down, usually for quite run-of-the-mill reasons, often due to human error, and it has to be fixed. Why the shock and mock outrage?
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Good point though.
Fuck you, I gave those hacks a view because of you, OP.
The least you could do is link to an archived copy of the article.
Worst case, we could have done without knowing this if the Gawker cancer was the only option.
Nuclear plants, when running normally, do not kill 28,000 birds a year.
In fact most nuclear plants will never have an accident at all, much less one that harms the environment.
Meanwhile these solar reflection arrays BY DESIGN will kill tens of thousands of birds a year if they are operating "properly".
The tower setting itself on fire was, to anthropomorphize the situation, an act of suicide over the guilt build up. The tower just could not take it anymore. Strange that a tower should care more for the environment than you.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Who forgot to trun on no disasters?
With the many green companies failing I'm surprised if this would be the first.
Evergreen Solar
SpectraWatt
Solyndra
Beacon Power
Nevada Geothermal
SunPower
First Solar
Babcock and Brown
EnerDel’s subsidiary Ener1
Amonix
Fisker Automotive
Abound Solar
A123 Systems
Willard and Kelsey Solar Group
Johnson Controls
Schneider Electric
Brightsource
ECOtality
Raser Technologies
Energy Conversion Devices
Mountain Plaza, Inc.
Olsen’s Crop Service and Olsen’s Mills Acquisition Company
Range Fuels
Thompson River Power
Stirling Energy Systems
Azure Dynamics
GreenVolts
Vestas
LG Chem’s subsidiary Compact Power
Nordic Windpower
Navistar
Satcon
Konarka Technologies Inc.
Mascoma Corp.
A small fire... Plant personnel had the fire out by the time firefighters got there.
It's a non-story.
But boy... Doesn't "WORLD'S LAAAAAAAARGEST SOLAR PLANT !!!TORCHED!!! ITSELF! OMG! LOL! BBQ!" sound sooo much better?
Gawkerism at its best.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
According to scientists at JPL computer simulations show cancer-causing particulate emissions from this toxic fire will have spread across four states in just 3 days. Mark Shatner, Director of Environmental Science was quoted as saying, "This is the worst environmental solar disaster in history and demonstrates once again why all solar plants should be encased in a protective concrete shell to prevent these kinds of cancer-causing emissions."
Mmmmm .... Popcorn!
Have gnu, will travel.
If this were nuclear or oil we'd have a fucking environmental disaster on our hands.
Actually fires happen in nuclear plants just like any other industrial facility. They rarely pose a nuclear safety risk because of the extensive systems in place to mitigate fire impact. Of course, if the fire damages any safety systems the plant would need to be shut down until repairs are complete. There have been a few serious fires that have gotten plenty of press, in all cases the plant was safety shut down using the designed features for doing so. No environmental disasters.
Have gnu, will travel.
Non-native speaker here, please excuse my ignorance -- but why does stuff "catch on fire" in English? Or should I ask, what does it catch while on fire? More fire? My sprachgefuhl tells me it either "catches fire" or it "is on fire". Can someone resolve this for me, please?
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Forget the birds. Won't someone please think of the gamblers flying into Las Vegas?
Have gnu, will travel.
For centuries unscrupulous businessmen and employees have used the cover of a "devastating fire" for to cover up failures of owners/managers and to mask theft by the employees.
The Ivanpah solar plant was backed not just by Google's ($168 million), but by Obama's Department of Energy ($1600 million — strangely omitted from the write-up) as well. And it proved to be a major failure long ago. Just two months ago it was reported on the very edge of closing down for not producing enough energy:
And what it did produce, cost $200 per megawatt hour — nearly six times the cost of electricity from natural gas-fired power plants. Worse! It actually used the evil natural gas to supplement the solar-cells' output... (Remember this the next time someone tells you, how we could "power the planet" with only a fraction of the land covered by solar cells — if only the evil oil/nuclear/whatever weren't sabotaging the efforts.)
This fire may really have been an accident. But a suspicion, that it was deliberate is certainly no less credible, than the FUD-spreading accusation, some German nuclear plant deliberately released nuclear waste in the air 30 years ago.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Right, because an accident could be an unlimited liability economy shattering disaster... Compared to a nasty fire. It's the magnitude of the risk that governs the magnitude of the response.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Why the shock and mock outrage?
I see this is your first day on the internet. Here, have a cookie.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
If people were afraid to develop new technology we'd still be living in caves.
Even if there is cost parity, molten salt plants have the benefit that they continue to generate electricity long after the sun goes down, something which obviously is not possible with visible spectrum photovoltaics.
I'm sure some dimwitted, newly minted MBA decided to save a few bucks by nixing the engineers recommendation to put mirrored mylar over the external wiring. Probably saved a few thousand dollars, got his bonus and his dick sucked by some VP who will never be held responsible. Thanks, American corporate culture!
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
This article made me wonder if a hacker could bring down a passing airliner with this system.
Problem is that your nuke plants are baseload and are *expected* to be up & running at all times, so shutting down just one for safety ususally means having to find a gigawatt of power somewhere else
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Android
Destroying 4,000 acres of land is an environmental disaster. Just because it is the desert doesn't make it any less of a disaster.
... Fault-tolerant design. Like for example, NOT put the things that catch fire if you point concentrated sunlight at them, where it is physically possible for said light to be pointed at them. Not just cables, but anything, in much the same way early fighter-aircraft had machine guns that were phase-locked to the propeller so that when you fired the gun, you didn't chop the blades of your propeller off.
(Early craft had machine guns operated by the pilot and to aim them, you actually pointed the plane itself at the target. They could have mounted them on the wings, but that complicates aiming them, and apparently, early on, they just didn't have the technology.)
Or takes down an airliner by causing fuel tanks to explode.
1) This is a non-event, about on par with the non-events in nuclear power that mdsolar regularly submits (which for some baffling reason gets approved). The reflected sunlight set a few wire bundles on fire, and the fire damaged some piping. That's it. Ars Technica has about the only non-dramatized coverage of it I've read. I suppose you could view the hype as counterbalancing mdsolar's anti-nuclear hype, but I'd just rather not have hype of any kind on /.
2) The danger of solar comes mostly during installation and maintenance. Working on the roof (where most PV panels are installed) is the most dangerous construction job out there. And the always-generating nature of PV panels makes them an electrocution hazard. Not really an issue here since Ivanpah is a solar thermal plant.
3) After fuels that you burn and Banqiao, solar is the most dangerous energy source once you normalize for amount of electricity generated. About 10x deadlier than nuclear power,
Problem is that your nuke plants are baseload and are *expected* to be up & running at all times, so shutting down just one for safety ususally means having to find a gigawatt of power somewhere else
Somewhat true, but since nuclear plants have such high capacity factors (90% in US), you don't need much spinning reserve on the grid, because its unlikely you'll lose more that one unexpectedly, and most of that 10% down time is planned. Whereas, with wind for example, you can see a drop in output in all windmills over a very large area. Just like in Germany, when sometimes they can't even supply 2% of demand. You need backup for the entire system, not just one or two plants.
http://larryniven.wikia.com/wi...
Even if there is cost parity, molten salt plants have the benefit that they continue to generate electricity long after the sun goes down, something which obviously is not possible with visible spectrum photovoltaics.
The Ivanpah Solar Power does not use molten salt but its entire cycle is steam. However now that you bring it up one needs to do a cost comparison of molten salt energy storage to new battery technology.
I think concentrating solar production like the Ivanpah will be left in the dust for photovoltaic in the future... photovoltaic is getting cheaper, has less problems, less environmental impact and can easily be decentralized or located closer to the demand.
Besides which, you are almost certainly spinning for a GW anyhow. It's a very typical size for thermal plants.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Yawn. Don't pretend you give a shit about the birds.
I care vastly more about the environment, including birds, than most on Slashdot.
Actually, I don't know of ANY nuclear plant that doesn't have a reported incident.
Yeah like a light out on panel three... an incident is not an accident, moron, and has ZERO impact to the environment.
Yawn.
Maybe you should post when you are so tired, you are are not making any sense to anyone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's not AmiMoJo. If it was she'd by harping on about how this would never happen in Japan, or how it's a white man's fault.
A spokesperson for the plant said itâ(TM)s too early to comment on the cause, but it appears that misaligned mirrors are to blame.
It's to early to comment on the cause, so let's do it anyway.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Do you have a link for that? I couldn't find the quote.
If you have a software error that can cause such a thing your design is rather poor. If we were worried about safe power generators we would be building in an iterative fashion rather than the many many one off plants we have built so that the contracting works is spread around enough places to get political support.
No sir I dont like it.
You mean like the coal plants that we know emit far more radiation and kill far more than any nuclear reactor ever has? Fukushima is at what 6 so so scary.
No sir I dont like it.
You sir don't know how to calculate basic math.
The plant cost $2.2B and has a gross capacity of 392 megawatts, therefore the build capacity cost were $5.6/W. The DOE EIA shows coal averages $4.4/W but can be as high as $6.6/W for cleaner plants, and nuclear built costs at a similar $5.5/W. So it was built for a very conventional cost.
But that is just build cost. Then comes the fixed and variable O & M costs for which solar is very low. Half of coal, and a third of nuclear. And that is with coat and nuclear getting all sorts of governmental freebees on the external costs of environmental, health & security impact.
We describe the combination of capital and O&M as LCOE (levelized cost of energy). For which the plant it is a quoted at a LCOE of $0.146/kWh. NOT $200/kWh. Which is competitive which a number of conventional fuel sources like natural gas (wikipedia). PV still ranks cheaper, but there have been few bigger thermal projects to drive down these costs. You might notice that the DOE only quotes the LCOE of theoretical nuclear projects to be delivered in 10 years or fully capitalized 40 year old plants, because the last nuclear plants to be built in the USA had terrifyingly bad economics, and even then don't include their obvious myriad of externalities.
And this is (partially) why in the free market, wind, solar, and decentralized gas-turnbines are killing it. In the last 10 years solar+wind have been leading new capacity installation world wide. by the end of this year solar will have reached 321GW of worldwide capacity, Wind 517GW... most of which was installed in the last 10 years period. Whereas worldwide nuclear capacity declined from 375GW to 372GW in the same period.
" because its unlikely you'll lose more that one unexpectedly"
When something happens that's bad enough to trip a nuke plant offline, it usually affects a sizable chunk of the grid.
And getting your nuke plant back online isn't trivial.
Here's an example full of irony - in late Feb 2008, a sudden decline in wind production required the Texas grid operators to cut power to several large interruptible industrial customers, dropping over 1.1 GW of demand within 10 minutes.
So a near crisis was averted and a big pile of fodder was grown for the anti-wind crowd who still bring this near-miss event as a testament to the dangers of reliance on intermittent power.
http://www.reuters.com/article...
But the last 2 lines of the Reuters link above mentions an actual outage that the renewable energy detractors *never* bring up - the *very same day* in Florida an electrical fire at a substation in Miami triggered a cascading failure that knocked Turkey Point Nuclear Station offline and caused a blackout affecting 3 million across all the way to Tampa & Daytona and it was at least 4 hours before power was restored.
http://content.time.com/time/n...
"Just like in Germany, when sometimes they can't even supply 2% of demand"
Looking at Fraunhofer's charts of electricity production for the past 6 years, those times are quite rare or coincide with high solar output.
But, yes, intermittency is a concern. That said, Germany has had pretty darn good forecasting in place since about 2009.
And, more importantly they have a modern grid with good interlinks to other markets, something the USA could improve domestically.
https://www.energy-charts.de/p...
The Tres Amigas Superstation, if it ever gets built, will be of tremendous benefit to ERCOT and the southern grids.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Its a matter of frequency. Events like Turkey Point outage are very rare, nuclear plants have shut down unexpectantly many times and its not typically a problem. Low wind output is a lot more frequent. In Germany, there's already been several times this year that wind couldn't supply 5% of demand. Its only thanks to conventional sources who are reliably ready to go that they can handle that intermittency.
Low wind does not coincide with high solar output. Yes, there are summer days with low wind, but also summer nights with low wind, and winter days with low wind. For Germany, demand is higher in winter months, so that is the baseline. Once again, it is reliable conventional sources that enable wind and solar to be used to the extent they are, along with much help from adjacent grids who also are made up of primarily conventional sources.
Strange how a lot of submissions about bad things supposedly happening in Nuclear come from mdsolar.
But something big in Solar power, like a huge facility fire, gets reported by someone else.
Coincidence?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Did you check the Onion? Probably got slashdotted. I am sure the article will be up again soon.
Human Rights, Article 12: Freedom from Interference with Privacy, Family, Home and Correspondence
What has that got to do with this story? Hint: nothing.
anybody???
They start with bundles of wires; then next, it's the airplanes in the sky. Before long, they put one of those things in space and point it at the earth. Then we have a James Bond villainesque situation going on. I always thought Google was evil, but now we know just how evil!
Brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
After all, they get loan guarantees out the wazoo, and the underwriting of costs for nuclear is worth 7Billion a year, if any private company were willing to do it AT ALL.
Oh, no, you won/t will, you, because it's not the money or the government that has you biting the birchwood, but the fact it's on "green" projects, like some hippie commune, amirite?
You don't cry about submissions patterns elsewhere, but as soon as "something" can be said to make renewable solar sound unsafe or built on lies, you suddenly come out and throw out scary insinuations and accusations. Only solar. Never, say, oil or fracking.
Coincidence?