Lhogue’s Recent Comments

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  Hear, hear

  Sunflower, everything you say makes sense to me.

  I especially liked "Solar will not stop coal unless it is used Archimedes style to burn down coal facilities."On Biggest California utility contracts for world's biggest solar power deal posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago 23 Responses

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  Coal is not the issue?

  Sunflower: your statement that coal is not the issue is interesting. Carl Zichella of the Sierra Club keeps claiming that we need to "do it all" to stop new coal-fired power plants from coming on line in the western states. And folks in this forum often say you have to compare the impacts to the desert to the impacts of mountain top removal mining.On Biggest California utility contracts for world's biggest solar power deal posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago 23 Responses

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  Smaller CSP with storage

  Mwright1, thanks for the info.

  For me, that raises the question: why aren't we seeing more smaller CSP plants (50-100MW) with storage rather than these large (400-900MW) with no storage that require scraping the desert?

  The smaller size would make it easier to find better, truly disturbed sites for these projects. Desert activists have been saying that a better spot for BrightSource's Ivanpah project would be the ag fields around Daggett (east of Barstow). These are arranged in circles of about the same area as the adjacent original Solar One site. But that alternative was rejected by the CEC as too expensive. A smaller project would probably be able to take advantage of the particular land use pattern at that site.

  Aerial photos here and here.On Biggest California utility contracts for world's biggest solar power deal posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago 23 Responses

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  A little pushback

  Check out this op-ed in the L.A. Times for a different view of large-scale solar.

  Joe, thanks for clarifying that BrightSource does not plan to have storage capacity at Ivanpah. It provides peaking power and would most likely offset some portion of a gas-fired peaker power plant rather than a coal plant.

  Can you point to an existing CSP plant that uses the molten salt technology? I know some companies, such as Abengoa, are planning to use the technology in Spain and Arizona. Can BrightSource's technology, which uses solar heat to turn water directly into steam, be retrofitted to have this storage technology? How about Stirling Energy Systems' dish-Stirling technology (assuming that ever works commercially)?

  Those are the two companies with large projects farthest along in the approval pipeline for the California deserts. Together, they will cover 36,700 acres. The way the planning process is going right now, we have to assume all of that will be intact habitat (Ivanpah, and both of SES's projects are in functioning habitat, not "disturbed lands.")

  36,700 acres of the desert scraped, and not one coal-fired power plant offset. (There is some debate over whether SES will or will not scrape the desert, but no debate over BrightSource's Ivanpah project, which will remove functional plant cover from the entire area.)

  Meanwhile, potential storage technologies for PV are continually discounted, even though MIT claims hydrogen fuel cell storage for PV systems is less than ten years from being commercially ready. Sure, the response is "we can't wait around ten years for storage to become available." But is this response credible when we're building large-scale solar plants without storage?

  To answer Sunflower's question, yes the Ivanpah project will have gas-fired backup. It will be used at startup every day, as I understand it, and on cloudy days. I still want to find out whether the gas turbine would also run at night.

  At least, unlike most of the news coverage on this contract, Joe's post didn't reprint BrightSource's lie that the 1300 megawatts would power 845,000 homes. That number only works if you think a home can be powered on 1.5 kw of nameplate solar capacity. On the other hand, when denying that PV will "work," the CSP industry uses a figure of 5 kw nameplate capacity to power a home with solar.

   On Biggest California utility contracts for world's biggest solar power deal posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago 23 Responses

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  Dear Corn Refiners association:

  Please keep your mercury out of my body. And check out this sweet surprise video, (which I'm sure everyone here has already seen).On Cheap-chicken ad from KFC hides true cost of food; here's a tastier, low-cost alternative posted 9 months ago 17 Responses