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Saudi Arabia Puts World's Biggest Solar Power Project On Hold (dw.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Deutsche Welle: Citing Saudi government officials, the U.S. business daily The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Monday that Saudi plans to build the world's largest solar power generation facility had been shelved, as the desert kingdom was working on a "broader, more practical strategy to boost renewable energy." The solar project was expected to generate about 200 gigawatts of energy by 2030 -- more than three times the country's daily requirement. "It is easy to sway or grab one's attention, but difficult to do any execution," WSJ quoted a senior adviser to the Saudi government as saying. Now, no one was actively working on the project, the source added.
[T]he country's entry into the solar market is being hampered by high costs and logistical issues. The project's first phase alone was expected to gobble up $1 billion, and was due to be funded by the Vision Fund this year. According to the Saudi officials cited by WSJ, Riyadh hadn't yet made any decisions on the project's details, including land acquisition, the structure of development or whether it would receive subsidies from the state. "Everyone is just hoping this whole idea would just die," a Saudi energy official familiar with the matter was quoted as saying. Instead, Saudi officials said the government was now devising a broader renewable energies strategy to be announced in late October, which would help clarify renewable energy goals.
[T]he country's entry into the solar market is being hampered by high costs and logistical issues. The project's first phase alone was expected to gobble up $1 billion, and was due to be funded by the Vision Fund this year. According to the Saudi officials cited by WSJ, Riyadh hadn't yet made any decisions on the project's details, including land acquisition, the structure of development or whether it would receive subsidies from the state. "Everyone is just hoping this whole idea would just die," a Saudi energy official familiar with the matter was quoted as saying. Instead, Saudi officials said the government was now devising a broader renewable energies strategy to be announced in late October, which would help clarify renewable energy goals.
they re running out of sun.
Nothing ever started, no plans were even drawn, and no one worked on it. Doesn't look like there was much of a project to "shelve".
They burn about 800,000 barrels of oil per day just for electrical generation. Oil is plentiful and cheap. Go with what you know!
Seems that the best thing any country can do, is invest in energy that would last the people for the rest of their lives. Isn't this their main business now? $1 billion USD, seems cheap if that gets them 200GW of energy piped to the people.
--
Building a better mousetrap merely results in smarter mice. - Charles Darwin
$2 per gallon. It's hard to justify installing expensive solar panels, when they can just burn gasoline instead.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
No way to prevent the plebes from accessing those nasty sun rays, so they can't make money for doing nothing.
Can we now do a Trump and proclaim them Persona Not Grata? If you buy/sell their oil you can't trade with us. At least until they join the 20th century. I'll settle for that, give them a while to join the 21st century.
Farking barbarians, got lucky with the oil.
"Everyone is just hoping this whole idea would just die," a Saudi energy official familiar with the matter was quoted as saying.
Was it the oil sheikhs ritual of bathing in bathtubs full of crude oil that gave this idea a hint of doubt? Just curious.
1) You are APK.
2) The original comment about Jews was also posted by APK.
3) APK has been posting anti-semitic comments for two decades, dating back to at least his time on ArsTechnica as AlecStaar.
4) The posts about Jews are off-topic spam.
5) Don't like the Hosts File Engine posts? Great! Every time you post your anti-semitic spam, I'll reply with the Hosts File Engine posts. Deal with it.
Elon took their word and ended up in the mess. He was naive babe in the woods to these wolves.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
640 gigawatts ought to be enough for anybody.
You are https://hardware.slashdot.org/... and a song about you https://www.youtube.com/watch?... hohohohoho!
ROTFLMAO that song about sums them up.
It's ironic how APK attacks others for posting anonymously or pseudonymously, yet he doesn't have the courage to sign his anti-semitic spam with his initials. What a chickenshit.
Ironic you say posting anonymously is bad though you do it. Hypocrite jew. That song is funny and sounds like you. Hahahaha!
I never said posting anonymously is bad. I called your hypocrisy about anonymous posting.
You are Alexander Peter Kowalski and everyone knows it.
You are APK. You and c6gunner are both Nazis, two peas in a pod.
APK's hatred of c6gunner is actually repressed sexual frustration. APK is butthurt that c6gunner rejected his sexual advances.
You know you are https://hardware.slashdot.org/... and you said it not nazis.
Why doesn't Slashdot block repetitive spam cr@p like this? It is the same posts over and over, day after day. This is a five minute exercise in Perl to kill this spam.
Might it cause the spam to mutate? It might, but the spam-message is clear and can be detected and blocked.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
in about 20-30 years as solar, nuke & wind take over. The rest of the world is tired of worrying about the Middle East going crazy and bowing to their royals. Saudi Arabia for their part know this and are trying to figure out how to modernize. That's why they let women drive, they want them in the work force being productive and bringing cash in for the ruling class.
Right now Saudi Arabia has a modern army thanks to weapons purchased with oil money. Take the oil money away and that won't last, and the decades of pissing all over their neighbors will bite them hard. Again, they're well aware of this and are trying to pivot. The hard parts going to be that they've used religious conservatism to keep their poor in check and they're pushing back against modernization.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Can't Slashdot put in some type of cr@p filters? Why do we have to scroll past huge walls of racist spam that is exactly the same day after day?
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Perhaps the sand under the solar panels, in the shade, will be a better environment for life to grow. Imagine -- we place solar panels, thinking they're "forever" but we have to keep moving them (or putting new ones up) and by doing so, we keep reclaiming the desert!
There is a lameness filter, which was modified to limit APK's spam. It isn't effective because APK is obsessed with spamming Slashdot. And yes, he is responsible for the anti-semitic spam you see. He just doesn't have the balls to admit it.
"to hide fact on jews"
Your accent is showing.
I guess /. needs to stop posting stories critical of S.A.
entry into the solar market is being hampered by high costs
Who knew that a high-priced energy system cost a lot?
I feel like it would be pretty easy to identify some statistical characteristics of this type of spam. For one thing, it's really long compared to a real comment. Basic token frequency analysis would probably show it to be clearly different from typical real comments.
One of the admins could pick out a bunch of obvious spam like this, GNAA, the weird shitposts I've seen recently describing the events of someone's day that looks Markov generated. There's plenty of volume of it, and it should be pretty easy to find by reviewing -1 comments. Gather it up (with legitimate posts for comparison) into a corpus and feed it into a Bayesian filter and use the results to power an automoderator. At first, the automod mods spam to -1. Let users metamod the automod to weed out false positives (but with the spam content being so significantly different from real content, I feel like the classification should be pretty good).
Let that go on for a while until they're satisfied with automod's performance, and then set the automod to mod spam down to -2. Don't allow normal users to mod to -2. Don't allow -2 posts to be further moderated. Add -2 to the message filtering controls, with -2 messages being hidden by default. If we collectively agreed to ignore -2 posts, then we have created a system that effectively shitcans spam, even though it's still there, by making it invisible. Spammers can continue to post crazy racism, and it will just flow into a gutter that we made for it. Users can continue to metamod automod, so we could continue to catch false positives.
One weakness is that modding to -2 makes it obvious that the automod caught a post, and a clever spammer could use that fact to refine their post to avoid automod. But we throttle anonymous posts, so that might be hard to do. I guess you could come up with some more elaborate shadowban system, so it appeared to the spam poster that their message was up, but it sounds like a lot more work for not much payoff.
Relevant: the only two words in the English language that contain the substring 'apk' are 'napkin' and 'napkins'. Outside those two cases, is it possible that the lameness filter could have an eye out for that substring? Just a thought.
Back to the normal business of oppressing women and minorities and attempting to islamise the west.
So you're writing this from the yard?
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Someone spot a woman looking at a book?
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
And here I thought that "gigawatts" were a unit of power (energy/time)...
I remember reading some SF back in the day where the author used the phrase "(metric prefix)watts of energy" a lot. Always made me want to smack him one....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
So you get a higher rate of return by buying a piece of worthless land and putting solar panels on it, a better return than bank interest and the tax write offs means it is tax free.
Getting a higher rate of return than bank interest making at least some amount of profit. Just buying solar panels and some otherwise unused land doesn't automatically equal profit. Solar panel installations have a large up front capital cost which has to be recouped over a period of YEARS. Breakeven isn't going to happen immediately even in the best of circumstances. I don't think I've ever seen a solar installation with a breakeven faster than 5 years and over 10 isn't uncommon.
Tax incentives on solar can help reduce tax burden IF you manage to make a profit but they don't (generally) eliminate tax altogether and certainly not in perpetuity. If the solar installation isn't profitable tax incentives might ease the pain slightly but they aren't going to make a business profitable that wouldn't be otherwise.
Low interests rates makes all renewables a pretty good investment, just depends how long they will stay low.
If your business model depends on continued low interest rates in order to profit on solar then it is a bad business model. Low interest rates can help boost profit but if your profit depends on them then the business will fail the moment interest rates rise.
Solar provides a pretty good return upon land that would otherwise have very little value.
Solar panels CAN provide a good ROI but it's hardly a foregone conclusion. The financial math that goes into making that happen is quite a lot more complicated than you are making it out to be. The good news is that the cost of solar power technology is dropping fast so the ROI math is looking better all the time.
Fossil fuels are doomed, just a harsh reality, the worst one to go first ie coal.
Sadly this isn't a foregone conclusion either. Fossil fuels are plentiful and our existing infrastructure depends heavily on them and there is no mechanism to get them to pay for much of the pollution they generate. Plus they are heavily subsidized to the tune of about $5 trillion annually. Getting ride of them essentially means tearing out massive amounts of infrastructure globally and replacing it. That isn't going to happen unless the alternative that replaces them is a slam dunk better option financially speaking. I'm hopeful some combination of solar/wind/nuclear can get us to that happen state of affairs but with the amount of money behind the fossil fuel industry they aren't going to go quietly into the night.
... are not to be trusted... they bought up the electric car and then destroyed it... now the are fopping/fooling the world by making them believe they gonna supply electricity LOL.
Your article comes from CoalSwarm.
CoalSwarm, a global network of researchers tracking fossil-fuel infrastructure, analyzed satellite imagery as of July 2018, and discovered that the construction of around half of those 150 plants is still proceeding, despite the government orders.
Just like that OP NYT article, which sources Urgewald, which again, sources CoalSwarm Database.
We also included companies listed in the CoalSwarm Database as they are planning new coal power plants.
Getting that? Got that? Good.
Now go read the very first line in the link I quoted above, debunking those numbers. Well... putting them in context.
It goes kinda like this...
Dr Christine Shearer is a researcher and analyst for the US-based energy research group CoalSwarm.
The stuff you're quoting is accounted for - AND THE COAL PLANT NUMBERS ARE STILL DECREASING.
As for this...
U.S. Exports expected to be up 60% in 2018 go figure.
Again... actually reading the article and looking up sources helps to put things in context.
(Montel) US seaborne thermal coal exports could surge 60% this year amid a shortfall in global supply and healthy import demand, the director of consultancy Perret Associates told Montel on Wednesday.
Guillaume Perret estimated the country's coal exports could rise from 36.7m tonnes in 2017 to 58m tonnes this year and 60m tonnes in 2019.
You are relying on predictions of a consulting firm which lives and dies with coal. So take that in consideration when you ask yourself if they are biased.
https://www.perretassociates.c...
Now scroll down to the bottom of the text where they try to sneak past the ugly truth.
Meanwhile, he said domestic coal demand in the US "will be flat at best, or erode slightly" over the coming years.
And demand from Europe is also on the wane, with the EU-15 countries expected to import just 90.2m tonnes of seaborne thermal coal this year versus 107m tonnes last year.
I.e. Even people selling you coal are admitting, though "hiding" it in last lines of the text, that the demand for their product has peeked and is on decline.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
If the spam filter gets too aggressive it stops legitimate posts. There are solutions like beynesian filtering, but it's easier to just let such stuff get modded down to -1.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
No that is just APK's shit grammar. He can barely manage to string 2 words together coherently on the best of days. You see he has gotten stomped on pretty hard lately so now APK is posting unsigned to make it look like he has support because he is just a giant pussy that can't defend himself or his ideas from valid criticism. He is probably pissing himself in the corner now wishing his mother hand't fled back to Poland to live out her retirement dream of not having to care for her retarded man child of a son.
A lot of people don't realize that Saudi Arabia has over 50 degrees of celsius per day!
And when your trucks move at a rate of 500,000km, it can be hard to cover enough distance. Plus, consider that the trucks have 300L fuel tanks, and produce over 1,000 horsepower per hour. That's a lot of something!
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Have to say it, this is impressive. It's like seeing all of Facebook in just one post.
The solar project was expected to generate about 200 gigawatts of energy by 2030 -- more than three times the country's daily requirement.
Apk stomped you with facts and you ran after you impersonated him c6gunner https://science.slashdot.org/c...
Three letters"