Posted on 02/13/2014 10:48:49 PM PST by grundle
Of course this isn’t a problem for the spotted owl...
Wait until the next hail storm.
In 1949 a solar furnace for melting steel was built in France.
We should add...this French furnace in 1949...handled 50kW of power. It was a state-funded university project. You would have thought that he’d have won the Nobel Prize for stuff like this....but apparently didn’t get much publicity out of the episode. There’s also some suggestion that he really stepped on various toes of the French and European science community by building this and proving several industrial uses. Even the Wiki guys barely give him eight lines of text. He was probably sixty years ahead of his time.
and at a cost of ONLY $16,000 per house!
$11,111 per home?
If this puppy can keep this up for enough years, it could break even.
If Darwin is correct, no changes will have to be made to the solar thermal generators, the birds will adapt and develop skins and feathers which are impervious to high temperatures.
Phoenix?
Phoenixes? Phoenices?
$2.2 BILLION to produce a PEAK output of 377 MW, but with only a 29% capacity factor - which translates into 110 MW (avg) power plant. That is a cost of over $20/W! Conventional power plants cost $1-2/W.
Another payoff from Obama to Google.
The initial capitalization of the plant isn’t the only cost there, though.
There’s also the fuel, which for this sun plant is zero.
It might or might not add up to a stunning bargain, but to dismiss it based on a one dimensional analysis is not thinking.
Idiots!.....The birds are drinking the windex and choking on paper towels.
The problem is that it can't power any homes at night, so it is mostly useful for 1/2 the year (at most) that A/C needs coincide with power generation. The rest of the time the power is not created at peak time (evening) therefore it is simply not needed since a conventional boiler can't be turned off every day and turned back on at night.
Nope. There's O&M which for this plant is huge. Fuel for conventional plants costs money, but other O&M costs are much lower.
Bookmark.
The problem is you also need the water and lots of it.
When solar panels collect dust and grime, they lose much of their effectiveness, so they must be cleaned frequently. Where, exactly, are we going to get the water needed for cleaning in the middle of the desert? And who’s going to be out there wiping down 500,000 acres of panels?
Furthermore, the more distant a source of electricity is from where it’s used, the more of it you lose during transmission, as much as 50% over 115 miles.
Birds. If the wind generators don’t get them, the solar array will.
The cost is to the lowly taxpayer. The benefit is to the Regime's politically connected friends.
Yesterday’s thread on the topic (different news source, not duplicate)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3122668/posts
Includes some more pictures
No, but electrical power usage goes down at night. Solar in this area (Vegas) produces the most power when the AC load is the highest.
The government subsidies are the real problem, not the technology.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.