Free Republic

California regulators may force a massive solar thermal power plant in the Mojave Desert to shut down after years of under-producing electricity — not to mention the plant was blinding pilots flying over the area and incinerating birds. The Ivanpah solar plant could be shut down if state regulators don’t give it more time to meet electricity production promises it made as part of its power purchase agreements with utilities, according to The Wall Street Journal. Ivanpah, which got a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the Obama administration, only produced a fraction of the power state regulators expected it would....

An Unconventional Desalination Technology Could Solve California's Water Shortage By Dina Spector 11 hours ago   View photo. WaterFXA parabolic trough collects energy from the sun. The heat is used to evaporate clean water from the salty agricultural drainage water of irrigated crops.This year, farmers in California's Central Valley likely won't receive any water through the federal irrigation program, a network of reservoirs, rivers, and canals that is normally replenished yearly by ice melt from the Sierra mountains.Crippling water shortages have made desalination technology more attractive, including a startup, WaterFX, that uses the sun to produce heat. The heat separates salt...

IBM and Your Changing Energy World BY Dana Blankenhorn | NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- If I had a technology that could cut the cost of solar energy production to as little as 10 cents per kilowatt-hour (KwH), I'd be dropping everything to get it to market. But I'm not IBM (IBM_). IBM announced last week it will spend a $2.4 million grant from Switzerland studying a solar energy technology called High Concentration PhotoVoltaic Thermal (HCPVT). HCPVT combines the concentrated solar energy system used in the newly opened Ivanpah plant in California, where mirrors direct sunlight to a central point and...