Posted on 05/21/2016 5:38:40 AM PDT by rktman
Liberal karma.
ping
Exactly! I’ve had mailers in my PO box that talk about putting solar panels on your roof. I’ve even looked into it a bit. They market it as, “Buy this and your electric bills go away!” It’s like pulling teeth to get a price out of them. After my startup costs, I want to know how long it will take for this solar setup to pay for itself. Their reluctance to answer is actually a big answer (and red flag) for me. They like to tout the government subsidy for doing it, they talk about it like it’s free money. Then I see them pucker up as tight as a snare drum when I ask, “If this is such a good deal, why do people need to be paid to do it?”
This makes me think about the microwave power from space scenario. A very advanced idea, but what could possibly go wrong? The beam could never be mis-aimed, could it?
Someday they will abandon this Rube Goldberg monstrosity.
The copper cable and piping will be torn out and recycled but there will be acres and acres of mirrors, supports, and other junk left there polluting the desert for countless hundreds of years.
$1.6 Billion up in smoke. What the heck, we didn't really have anything better to do with our money, now did we?
Final cost: $2.2 billion dollars.
The installation sprawls across approximately 5 square miles of federal desert.
The facility has 173,500 heliostats, each with two mirrors.
The 347,000 mirrors are 70 square feet each.
Natural gas is burned as a back up heat source to power the boilers when there isn't sufficient sunlight.
Designers initially expected to need steam from gas-powered boilers for about an hour a day.
After operations began, they found they needed to keep boilers running more than four times longer — an average of 4½ hours a day.
No, I get it. And you are 100% correct!
How are the mirrors kept clean?
Do they use water or some chemical? How much water is used and where does it come from?
Hmmmm. Suspicious that Lake Mead is at it’s lowest level since they first started filling it after Boulder Dam was completed. I wonder.
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