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The World's Largest Solar Farm Rises in the Remote Egyptian Desert (latimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In 1913 on the outskirts of Cairo, an inventor from Philadelphia named Frank Shuman built the world's first solar thermal power station, using the abundant Egyptian sunshine to pump 6,000 gallons of water a minute from the Nile to irrigate a nearby cotton field. World War I and the discovery of cheap oil derailed Shuman's dream of replicating his "sun power plant" on a grand scale and eventually producing enough energy to challenge the world's dependence on coal.
More than a century later, that vision has been resurrected. The world's largest solar park, the $2.8-billion Benban complex, is set to open next year 400 miles south of Cairo in Egypt's Western Desert. It will single-handedly put Egypt on the clean energy map. That is no small feat for a country that's been hobbled by its longtime addiction to cheap, state-subsidized fossil fuels and currently gets more than 90% of its electricity from oil and natural gas. [...] The Benban complex, which will be operated by major energy companies from around the world, is expected to generate as much as 1.8 gigawatts of electricity, or enough to power hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses. It will consist of 30 separate solar plants, the first of which began running in December, and employ 4,000 workers.
More than a century later, that vision has been resurrected. The world's largest solar park, the $2.8-billion Benban complex, is set to open next year 400 miles south of Cairo in Egypt's Western Desert. It will single-handedly put Egypt on the clean energy map. That is no small feat for a country that's been hobbled by its longtime addiction to cheap, state-subsidized fossil fuels and currently gets more than 90% of its electricity from oil and natural gas. [...] The Benban complex, which will be operated by major energy companies from around the world, is expected to generate as much as 1.8 gigawatts of electricity, or enough to power hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses. It will consist of 30 separate solar plants, the first of which began running in December, and employ 4,000 workers.
So. they're going to get 1.8GW of the ~25GW they produce in total? For 12 hours per day, or less, of course.
That seems to translate to maybe 4% of their electricity production.
Color me unimpressed....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
n/t
Yeah right ... sure it will
Sure it will what? If you're going to piss and moan, at least state clearly what you are pissing and moaning about.
Fossil fool plants also cause bird deaths. Y'know, science...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/...
the pyramids were very large power plants and provided electricity to all people of EGYPT
That's fewer than 1% of the birds killed by hunters in Texas every single day. And just about the same as the number of birds killed by airplanes every month in North America.
Don't be a dope. And please, don't pretend you give one blessed fuck about birds getting killed when all you want is to spread FUD about solar energy.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It would take some kind of stupid bird to fry itself on a parabolic trough, don't you think? ( I know you don't understand the difference between the type of solar described in the LA times article and a parabolic trough but I will pretend you do.)
Five miles from the Nile and twenty miles from Aswan may be remote, but Egypt has far, far more remote locations. Like Bugs Bunny remote.
- "But night!!"
- "But this won't immediately cover all electricity generation, so it's useless."
- "Nuclear is the only answer. Please ignore the multiple nuclear plants under construction that have been abandoned in multiple countries."
- "I suddenly really, really, really care about birds, yet have completely forgotten about harm to birds from pollution."
- "What we really need is a physically impossible electrical grid that covers (insert very large geographic area here)."
- Elon Musk is a hero or a villain.
- "My calculations based on retail power costs in a different place, as well as a massive overestimate of the maintenance costs, indicate this plant could never possibly be profitable."
Egypt also has a ton of wind turbines along the coast of the Red Sea, which I was surprised to learn. These are positive steps.
That said, Egypt is also in the process of opening not one, but three gas power plants totaling 14.4GW of new capacity, dwarfing their solar initiative.
I have friends who sell and install private solar in Egypt, but with grid power directly owned and subsidized by the state, it's hard to compete. Which is a shame, because Egypt's air pollution and AQI is right up there with India and China, and has only gotten worse over the past decade. Unfortunately the government seems about as keen to actually address air pollution as it does to support human rights, which is to say, not very much at all.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
( I know you don't understand the difference between the type of solar described in the LA times article and a parabolic trough but I will pretend you do.)
It's ironic how opponents of solar energy are usually not that bright.
>> World War I and the discovery of cheap oil derailed Shuman's dream of replicating his "sun power plant" on a grand scale
Also, ya know, physics. Not everyone has access to abundant sunshine, cheap natives and water within arm's reach.
What boggles the mind is how NASA managed to convince the natives to help Spirit and where they got the water from! NASA sure are a crafty bunch!
>> Shuman's plant used parabolic troughs to power a 60-70 horsepower engine
Cool, so he was also a pioneer in "clean energy" frying birds as they flew. http://www.latimes.com/local/c...
I would prefer 10M dead birds from concentrated solar to the 10B dead birds that oil is killing.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
This has to be one of the most inane useless responses I've ever seen on Slashdot that wasn't supplied by an AC like myself.
Meanwhile, in 1916, Shuman was doing this.
What have you done?
Solar power in a Desert country that is reasonably close to the equator where solar would make seance. What is next Geothermal energy in Greenland?
Bore through the Atlas Mountains to re-establish the inland sea that use to be there 6000 years ago. Would re-create rainfall in the western Sahara and add countless farming & fishing jobs.
They need to get on the phone with Elon Musk or at least someone who can provide them with energy storage to cover the surplus they'll generate during peak daylight hours.
So, the Egypt killing him part is speculation, but the head engineer of a $5 billion dam project being built on a Nile tributary in Ethiopia was recently found dead in his car in what looked suspiciously like a faked suicide. There's a lot of potential for big energy money in Northeast Africa right now, enough to make whichever state can harness it first a major geopolitical player.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
That's a nice list of predictions, here's mine: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
Seems like you have a bit of underdog syndrome going there blindseer. Nuclear has been going since the 50's when it was "too cheap to meter" and received billions of dollars of taxpayer funded subsidies - and still does.
Nuclear Ideologists have been laughing at solar, wind and geothermal projects for the entire time. You're a prime example of someone fighting those visions of the future by attempting to hold us to a failing nuclear past.
You've ignored solar, laughed at solar and you've been fighting solar so that it won't win.
I see nuclear power has now finally gone beyond being ignored. Seems we're at the "laugh at you" stage now.
No one is laughing at Nuclear Power, it's a very serious matter that we have to deal with in our generation. It's an onerous responsibility forced upon us by the Cold war generation. Our responsibility is to deal with the radionuclide AND carbon legacy left to us by a generation that didn't know any better because we do know better.
That's why people are tired of all your bullshit, and that's why they're laughing at you. Your Nuclear Ideology is so completely absurd and divorced from reality that you've made it clear it's everyone else. Here's my list of why they laugh at you:
While all the greenies were concerned with oil and coal companies polluting the air and water by protesting against that in previous decades, the oil and coal companies manipulated pro-nukkers into attacking greenies while they destroyed IFR in its infancy. You concentrated on blaming people that may have been your allies if you you weren't so morally superior and dogmatically skeptical.
Whenever anyone tried to explain that to you pro-nukkers you instead concentrated on destroying them for asking intelligent questions that you had no answer for. When they went out and found the answers themselves the true nightmare of the effect of radionuclide contamination on the human genome became apparent and you pretend it doesn't happen. That's when everyone could see that you were Nuclear Ideologists, that your worldview is a political system based in social proof, rhetoric and a very dangerous lie.
Nuclear Ideology, it's the false reality too expensive to maintain.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
That's 6000 birds killed per year at a single 400MW solar power facility. Let's scale that up to the 100GW that nuclear power provides in the USA.
100GW / 400MW * 6000 = 1.5 million
But then we have to factor in the capacity factor difference to get a more accurate comparison of actual energy produced. Nuclear power in the USA has an average capacity factor of over 90%, but just to make the math easy let's just assume it's four times that of Ivanpah, which has a capacity factor of about 20%. That means if we replace nuclear power in the USA with concentrated solar thermal power that would mean 6 million birds killed.
Now, we can not simply take this as the total because nuclear power does not kill zero birds. I did some searching on the internet and I get different numbers of birds killed by nuclear power but they fall between 500,000 on the high end to 300,000 on the low end. So, that would mean at least an additional 5 million birds killed if we replaced nuclear power with concentrated solar thermal power.
For comparison I've seen estimates that coal kills somewhere between 8 million and 25 million birds per year. Coal produces about 30% of the electricity in the USA. A little back of the envelope math tells me that on the low end of those numbers coal is as dangerous for birds as solar. If we take the high end of bird kills then solar looks pretty good by comparison to coal.
Wind produces about 5% of the electricity in the USA (compared to about 20% for nuclear) and kills somewhere around 250,000 birds. Scale that electrical output up to what nuclear produces and that's about 1 million per year. Not that bad, but still higher than nuclear.
None of this compares to the billions of birds killed by domestic cats but domestic cats don't hunt eagles. Windmills, solar collectors, and (I can only assume) nuclear power plants, kill eagles. Domestic cats don't kill eagles. If people care at all about protecting threatened eagle species then wind and solar are not the energy sources you are looking for.
Oh, one more thing. Electric power lines kill somewhere around 50 million birds per year. There's wide error bars on that, and I don't know how many of those would be eagles. If the solution for addressing the intermittent nature of wind and solar is putting up more power lines to move the electricity from where it is produced (as the sun and winds move) to where it is needed then we can expect this number to grow. How many more birds would be killed? I believe it doesn't matter, I've already shown that nuclear power would reduce the birds killed while wind and sun would increase it. I've established that birds would be saved with nuclear power, the only question is the magnitude.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
That's still fewer than the number of birds killed by Texas hunters every year.
Can you please stop pretending you care about birds? You embarrass yourself. It is possible for you to say that you don't believe there should be any solar energy used in the US, and only nuclear plants should be built and subsidized by the government without having to make up some big narrative about saving the lives of birds.
If you loved birds, you would hate hunting, and my guess is you're one of these brave militia types who believe that the tree of liberty has to be watered with the blood of innocent animals. Or something. For liberty. So don't play. Peddle your FUD elsewhere.
You are welcome on my lawn.
That's still fewer than the number of birds killed by Texas hunters every year.
I don't dispute that it's fewer. I also don't dispute that lots of birds are killed by hunters in Texas. I'm just curious though where you got that number. Is that birds taken in legal hunts? Illegally killed? Both? I'm guessing that if this is all legal hunting then how is that relevant? The reason that hunters can take these birds as game is because it is deemed as part of population control of certain species. That's how conservation works.
Can you please stop pretending you care about birds?
Oh, right, I forgot my usual disclaimer. Birds are jerks. I don't care about the birds.
It is possible for you to say that you don't believe there should be any solar energy used in the US, and only nuclear plants should be built and subsidized by the government without having to make up some big narrative about saving the lives of birds.
I just thought it would be relevant to the discussion to put bird deaths by the different energy sources into perspective. I'm not arguing that nuclear should be used to the exclusion of all other energy sources, only that nuclear must be part of the solution to solve our energy problems if a modern economy is to continue existing.
If you loved birds, you would hate hunting,
I don't see why I can't love birds and hunting. Birds are jerks but they are also tasty.
and my guess is you're one of these brave militia types who believe that the tree of liberty has to be watered with the blood of innocent animals. Or something. For liberty. So don't play. Peddle your FUD elsewhere.
The whole of the arguments against nuclear power are based on fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Whenever there's a mention of trying to get a new nuclear reactor built there's mention of Chernobyl and Fukushima. Both those reactors were second generation designs, designs that required active safety systems to prevent a meltdown. With Chernobyl the active safety systems were disabled by drunken fools that wanted to impress their superiors. With Fukushima the problems were the active safety systems were overwhelmed by a combination of ignoring known faults in the design (just having the sea wall to spec could have saved the plant) and that it was hit by a rare tsunami that exceeded expectations. Well, we have new expectations now. We also have had passive safety systems, that don't require external power like second generation designs, for at least 20 years now.
What kind of FUD did I bring here? I showed my math. I know I didn't cite my sources but if you dispute them I'll go dig them up for you.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Solar power plants are also legal.
You just thought that nuclear power is so great that to make your point you had to turn a discussion of solar power into pearl-clutching over dead birds.
We can revisit this discussion when nuclear power doesn't need government subsidies to exist. It's been around like half a century, and it still requires government support. You would think a mature world-saving technology wouldn't need government support OR you trying to hijack discussions of solar power with FUD.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You would think a mature world-saving technology wouldn't need government support OR you trying to hijack discussions of solar power with FUD.
I'm fine with doing away with the energy subsidies. Let's not subsidize solar, wind, oil, coal, ethanol, or even nuclear. Let's level the playing field and see who wins.
Given how loudly the wind lobby screams (usually into my phone in election years) when their precious subsidies are threatened I suspect even "mature world saving technology" that is wind wouldn't be very successful without the subsidies they've been getting.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Bore through the Atlas Mountains ...
Elon has this plan...
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Um. Not to point out the bleeding obvious, or anything, but taking away subsidy today doesn't account for the investments of subsidies in various tech types in the past. So it doesn't create a level playing field.
From wikipedia:
Cats that live in the wild or indoor pets allowed to roam outdoors kill from 1.4 billion to as many as 3.7 billion birds in the continental U.S. each year, says a new study that escalates a decades-old debate over the feline threat to native animals.
Let's not pretend wind power is a meaningful threat to birds.
Solar power plants are also legal.
Apparently you've never hunted because if you did then you would have taken a state mandated course to get a license, where things like why the state allows hunting is explained. The state allows the legal killing of birds because the state has biologists and other scientists that figure out how many birds of a species are "extra" and fit for being culled from the population. This is different than birds that wind up dead from other human activity, like building solar thermal plants, where the birds that die are random and may be the kind that the biologists consider "not extra". In fact it may be worse than merely being "not extra", these birds may be threatened with extinction.
A quick Google search tells me this:
According to a study in the Wildlife Society Bulletin, every year 573,000 birds (including 83,000 raptors) and 888,000 bats are killed by wind turbines — 30 percent higher than the federal government estimated in 2009, due mainly to increasing wind power capacity across the nation. This is likely an underestimate because these estimates were based on 51,630 megawatts of installed wind capacity in the United States in 2012 and wind capacity has grown since then to 65,879 megawatts. And, at one solar power plant in California, an estimated 3,500 birds died in just the plant’s first year of operation.
https://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/license-to-kill-wind-and-solar-decimate-birds-and-bats/
Those dead raptors could be a species that are considered a nuisance, and the conservation officers might be glad they are dead, or they could be bald eagles, which are protected. If these hunters in Texas are shooting bald eagles then they deserve to go to prison. If they are hunting plentiful game birds, and exceedingly numerous nuisance birds, then they deserve thanks.
It seems quite certain that these solar collectors are killing protected species of birds. In that case maybe the solar power plants should no longer be legal. You can dismiss the concerns of dead birds that are protected under law now because the numbers are small, at least for now. This is because solar power produces less than 5% of our electricity. What happens if the dreams of moonbats like Helen Caldicott are realized and all our energy comes from the sun and wind? That means we can't dismiss the deaths of these birds any more. These power plants might put those Texas hunters out of business as there aren't any birds for them to kill any more.
I like to hunt birds. I'd like to keep hunting birds. I won't be able to hunt birds if these windmills and solar collectors keep killing them. Maybe if you shut up and fucking listen for a bit you might learn why it's important which species of birds are being killed, both by hunters and stupid fucking solar panels. Legal hunters ARE NOT killing bald eagles. Legal solar panels ARE killing bald eagles. You might not care if bald eagles get killed but other people do. If solar panels are killing the birds I want to hunt, or the raptors that control the rodents, then I don't want solar panels anywhere near me. I'll take nuclear power instead.
FYI, from wikipedia:
Cats that live in the wild or indoor pets allowed to roam outdoors kill from 1.4 billion to as many as 3.7 billion birds in the continental U.S. each year, says a new study that escalates a decades-old debate over the feline threat to native animals.
So let's not pretend wind power is a meaningful threat to birds.
Then you'd be wrong. Compare the unsubsidised LCOE columns, and look how nuclear is still double the cost of wind.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Um. Not to point out the bleeding obvious, or anything, but taking away subsidy today doesn't account for the investments of subsidies in various tech types in the past. So it doesn't create a level playing field.
That's correct. What I recall is that wind and solar needed subsidies to "jump start" the industry. Well, it's got its jump start now. Let's see if it can sink or swim on its own.
There's something different about nuclear power and government subsidies though. Nuclear power can propel submarines and aircraft carriers. Uncle Sam therefore has an inherent interest in nuclear power, it makes the US Navy go faster, farther, and without having to stop for fuel. It's been a long time since the US Navy protected American interests with wind propelled warships. Solar panels on a main battle tank isn't going to make it move any faster.
I remember ethanol being a valuable commodity in making gunpowder in World War One, but is it all that valuable now? I mean as a commodity for national defense. Maybe I'm mistaken but I'm quite sure we don't use the same kind of gunpowder today, or at least we make it differently now. I'd think the government would rather corn syrup be kept as is, instead of converted to alcohol, for dumping on pancakes, or making energy bars, or other food product. Again, I say that with the thinking of national defense being the primary concern of the federal government. If there's another big war then I suspect that those corn ethanol plants will get shut down real quick, because the US imports a lot of calories in sugar and other foods and burning food in that case is a bad idea.
Well, burning food in any situation is a bad idea. Ethanol is shit for fuel, no one would even consider burning it if it wasn't for the government subsidies. It may have been a neat little experiment to try out for a while but that should be the first energy subsidy to go. If I'm wrong about that then ethanol should do just fine on its own, given all the money it got for a "jump start".
Everyone got a jump start. Time to see how every energy source can compete now.
If you actually bothered to read the report, rather than just look at the charts and graphs, you'd see that they point out that their cost analysis did not account for issues like the regional needs and existing electricity generation capacity.
In other words, it's complicated.
If wind power didn't need these subsidies then the wind lobby wouldn't spend so much money on push poll calls, radio advertisements, and letters in the mail, for me to vote a certain way. What has happened is that these wind subsidies have turned into a political money laundering scheme. A political party can now vote in favor of wind subsidy to encourage these subsidies getting turned into political contributions. The politicians can leverage a their vote in favor of a wind subsidy to get money for reelection.
I'll give you two guesses on which political party benefits from energy subsidies, like those for wind.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Yeah, they talk about regional variations further down; keep reading. But this is just illustrative anyway, and obviously the region of Egypt will likely vary rather more from those figures. Solar, for example, is likely to be somewhat cheaper per MW than listed, given their latitude and climate. I couldn't find any equivalent reports for Egypt itself, sadly.
I can see you prefer to believe that "politics" is the main reason why nuclear isn't as cheap as wind, but the evidence cited so far does not bear out that view. Feel free to provide anything that substantiates your point of view.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
"It will single-handedly put Egypt on the clean energy map"
Right, because Aswan doesn't exist.
Much like the pyramids.. Government provides a job building something useful, while tens of thousands of people are otherwise unemployed and potentially getting into trouble.
Here you go. Nuclear is objectively cheaper, but that doesn't matter with renewable mandates and subsidies that allow them to pay people to waste electricity and still make money.
Advocates love to point at LCOE as "proof", but that is not an accurate reflection of the real costs, and the EIA even warns that it should not be used to compare variable with reliable sources.
This was paid for by a state guaranteed loan from Germany, which is never going to be paid back because Egypt won't stop being an economic basket case. Western governments are using loans as disguised foreign aid to prop up countries in a Malthusian trap ... trying to keep the status quo going for a bit longer. It's all going to come tumbling down, the only question is if there will be an Europe at the end of it or if we will join Africa and the Middle-East's descend into Anarchy.
I'm guessing we will, I'm also guessing the US and Israel have plans to sabotage/capture all nuclear material in Europe and the non Israeli Middle East for when it does happen. It would be silly not to have them.
100GW / 400MW * 6000 = 1.5 million
That has got to be the dumbest misapplication of maths I have ever seen. And I've seen some pretty dumb shit posted on Slashdot before.
Okay then, how would you do the math?
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Nuclear is nice if you want baseline power you can just anywhere that won't necessarily get cracked wide open by a fault line.
Nuclear has had a ridiculous, insane amount of bullshit FUD spread about it because of old reactor designs, two preventable disasters, and ignoring newer reactor designs that don't do any of the things people cry about. The most modern reactor designs could basically be bombed and cause less environmental damage than a shitload of coal sludge or a few years of fly ash.
The NIMBY crowd is still huge and encompasses basically everyone left center and right because...well, NIMBY people are pretty universally stupid and driven by a primal fear that bypasses party/political affiliation.
It's still way the fuck more expensive than basically all alternatives and still has its own drawbacks and hazards.
My answer: Nationalize electricity production. If we can spend a shitzillion dollars on a piece of shit jet that won't ever accomplish anything outside of asphyxiating pilots when they cross the international date line we can spend it on completely taking over power generation so we can just wholesale move to whatever makes the most sense in terms of protecting the environment and meeting our future power needs.
Opinion pieces that gloss right over construction and decommissioning costs aren't reliable sources either.
LCOE is not the whole story, I agree - dispatchable power has extra value, and you need a certain amount of that. While you can make renewables more dispatchable with storage, that adds extra costs, so the big picture is going to depend on local grid needs. And I'm not against nuclear; there are cases where nuclear makes far more sense than renewables. But you have to look at the costs of both objectively, and for a number of cases, unsubsidised renewables with added dispatchable storage are still cheaper than nuclear by LCOE.
No single energy source works best for all possible cases, so why not be objective about all the costs (including LCOE, health, environment, grid stability, capital risks etc), and just use what works in a given situation for the best overall price?
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Sure as fuck not by linear extrapolation. There is not a single thing linear in the power generation industry, not size of plants, not cost, and sure as heck not your doom and gloom "I care about a few birds" scenario.