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.

Comments

FIX THE FUCKING URL, SLASHDOT EDITORS!

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:If they need some money...

[mi]

...I'll throw another $168 their way.

You may wish to rethink your offer — you and I have already sunk much more into this failed enterprise. The submitter's write-up and TFA both concentrate on Google's puny $168 (million), for which Google would've gotten a solid return, had the project worked, while strangely omitting the $1,600 million, which Obama's DOE gave them in loan-guarantees without any hope of earning a profit.

Think of what useful things could've been funded with the money, had it been done the fair — Capitalist — way. You know, when the people making investments a) dispense their own monies, rather than those of captive taxpayers; b) face personal losses from failures and rewards from successes...