Posted on 03/23/2014 9:34:30 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Let's hear it for an attractive nuisance crawling across the desert!
There’s a two foot fence all the way from I-15 to Ft Irwin (about 35 miles) which the government had to build to keep the Desert Tortoise from getting run over. Folks around Barstow call it the million dollar fence.
I think this system is modeled on the one in Spain that proved to be unable to sustain itself financially without government subsidies.
I sincerely had high hopes for solar energy as a major supplier of electricity after reading all the hype about the Spanish installation.
I hope this installation has learned from the past and will work better—and not wind up blinding pilots and migratory birds or something.
an NRG, GooGle and ‘Brightsource’ project as I recall.. doe subsidied and Kennedy sold..
>>Water vapor typically absorbs twenty to fifty percent of the sun’s energy over the US. Incident solar flux on a square meter in Death Valley is around 500 watts/square meter at high noon because of water vapor from the Imperial Valley. <<
Would a sun tracking Fresnel lens increase the output?
Thanks.
Would a sun tracking Fresnel lens increase the output?
I’m not a specialist in optics B4Ranch, but a Fresnel lens wouldn’t change the impinging solar energy flux. I’ve heard of some interesting applications for electrically focused Fresnel lenses, which might reduce the cost of tracking infrastructure, cost which is very significant when you are talking about ten million tracking heliostats.
Most large solar installations need tracking, especially those with tower receivers, necessary because the reflected energy must focus as much energy as possible on the receiver. The receivers are heat exchangers filled with plumbing through which a heat conducting fluid runs. I don’t know what they use today, but ethylene glycol was common thirty years ago. The receiver is so “black”, ideally a “black body” to absorb as much of the energy focused on it as possible. I once visited a smaller facility and was shown by its operators that the optical coating is so efficient that you see only blackness - no detail - when looking into the cavity.
“I think this system is modeled on the one in Spain that proved to be unable to sustain itself financially without government subsidies.”
Yes Wildbill. They look very similar. I wondered if the artwork might have been borrowed from the Spanish plant.
I had high hopes too, but learned after having to do a business plan, that Solar cannot be competitive with hydrocarbons or nuclear, and nuclear has no emissions that haven’t been dealt with for over sixty years. The beauty of nuclear “waste” is that radioactive emissions are so easy to see and manage, and because their relative volume is so tiny. Of course for the naïve there are always newspapers to sell because we can easily measure picocuries of isotopes, isotopes that we are exposed to every day by cosmic ray and other natural background radiation.
When Harry Reid can get a few more millions in donations from eco-lawyers by preventing the use of the completed storage facility in Nevada, there will be lots more nonsense about dreaded radioactivity from Fukushima contaminating California. Harry, when he finally retires, can then afford, like Al Gore, to buy that beachfront retreat, where he can watch the Pacific glow at night.
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