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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!!!!!
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!
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.
It's all done with smoke and mirrors.
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?
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=
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?
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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,
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.
Yeah. Hi mdsolar.
And, actually, I HAVE brought up submission patterns elsewhere.
And no, I didn't "wait until something can be said to make renewable solar sound unsafe".
Because renewable solar really isn't all that unsafe. This was an unfortunate accident that damaged a facility. But nobody died. Shit happens.
But the last couple submissions screaming about "dangerous stuff going on at nuclear facilities" came within a day of one another and both were from mdsolar.
And mdsolar has a track record of FUD'ing up discussions that have to do with anything related to nuclear power. And with a handle like mdsolar, it's sort of hard to NOT suspect bias, if not outright shill-hood, here.
However, there's a submission about a fire at a solar plant, and he's strangely...absent from the discussion.
And for your edification. I basically think this country's power generation needs to switch off of oil, coal and NG and move over to an improved nuclear baseline supplemented by renewables with power storage (not natural gas supplemented by renewables, which is what many of these "renewable facilities" actually are).
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!