Posted on 11/18/2014 9:18:06 AM PST by Timber Rattler
The largest solar power plant of its type in the world - once promoted as a turning point in green energy - isn't producing as much energy as planned.
One of the reasons is as basic as it gets: The sun isn't shining as much as expected.
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
I love it because it is a totally cool engineering marvel and a triumph of technology.
I hate because it is an expensive, ill conceived project that was doomed from the start because it never could perform it's intended goal of commercial grade large scale solar power generation.
It's a huge technological white elephant that kills birds by burning them out of sky like a death ray and it never should have been built in the first place.
It was built because it was intended to be a no risk, inside job project paid for with taxpayer money given for free to Obama Cronies and made profitable by corresponding government purchase contracts at what should have guaranteed a constant operating profit to the Obama Cronies on the power plant Obama paid them build with no out of pocket money on the part of the crony “investors”
Now the project is performing so badly the investors want the government to bail them out of the investment they never paid for in the first place
Welcome to life in Obama’s Banana Republic
but the globull warming crowd is sure the earth is warming and not cooling...
Maybe some global warming would help.
I can see it now: global warming >> oceans heat >> more evaporation >> more clouds >> sun gets blocked out by clouds >> less sunlight reaches the solar panels! /s
They forgot one little problem: during the summer from middle July on, you can get monsoon rains coming up from the Gulf of California and the Pacific Ocean off Baja California, and that can sometimes affect the operation of boiler-type solar power plants. Now, if that installation was mostly photovoltaics, that would be a different story since even with some cloud cover, you’d still be generation power.
All those dang bird friyin’ mirrors. Are the hail proof?
More Marxism will fix that.
Pray America is waking
Just expand daylight savings time. Problem solved.
“The Erf is Doooomed...”
Embrace the Erf.
Must have been designed by an MIT professor.
5 square miles (that’s 3,200 acres) and $2.2 BILLION dollars to [allegedly] produce enough electricity to power 140,000 homes.
And it can only produce 50% of its design capacity.
A gigantic waste of money, time and loan.
The saddest part is, this thing would still be a losing proposition if it produced TWICE the amount of electricity it was designed to produce.
Excellent!
...money time and land...
Sorry about that. Fumble fingers.
This is Ivanpah. I encourage people to take a look at it on Googlemaps. Its huge.
Now contemplate the Bundy ranch...you know the one that had to reduce its herd of cattle in the name of protecting a turtle.
That turtle’s range, and protected habitat, sprawls from California to Nevada. Nothing is immune...he swathes of land are essentially ‘off-limits’ because of this turtle - including much of the training area at Ft Irwin.
Except Ivanpah.
That giant 5 square miles of mirrors where all the desert brush has been cleared out - that was turtle territory. But its ok, because solar is GOOD...it can’t hurt the turtle, even with something as genuinely damaging as clearing 5 square miles of desert.
But independent ranchers and cattle are BAD. So make believe damage, like turtles getting hurt by cattle who really haven’t bothered them for the last 150 years - that type of damage does matter.
... and they’re roasting birds and producing CO2!
Just another reason to vote “YES” for the Keystone XL pipeline.
My wife and I have driven by the plant several times and we agree with everything you say.
It is amazing to look at and what’s even more startling is the haze that is created at the towers when all of the mirrors are pointed at the towers.
If I ride a bike in the desert I am leaving a damaging footprint. If they build 10s of thousands of acres of windmills and solar panels, that’s ok. And God forbid we would build a nuke plant.
On Dennis Prager there was a woman who wrote a book about alternative forms of energy. She said you need 7 sq miles of solar panels to replace one nuke generator.
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.