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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.
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!
$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
1 billion was just Phase One. They'd have to spend several billion more to actually Do the project (buy land, buy panels, install panels). - Also "last the rest of their lives"? Solar panels lose efficiency with age.
- They drop to 80% after 25 years, at which point they are meant to be replaced (25 =/= typical human span of 75-to-80). I recall a solar panel I bought in 1985 to power a little toy windmill..... day after day the windmill spun, but after 10 years the panel had degraded to where it lacked the juice to spin.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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
- They drop to 80% after 25 years, at which point they are meant to be replaced (25 =/= typical human span of 75-to-80)
No, it is not meant to be replaced. That would only make sense if the efficiency had drastically improved, e.g. the new panels give 130% or more power than the original ones.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Bio-fuels are not the solution to anything (unless you are reclaiming a waste stream that would otherwise be burned or something).
Photosynthesis is less than 1% efficient in producing electricity. Commercial solar cells are currently 21% efficient.
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.
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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.
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