User profile

NyeCountyLocal

Five heliostats will produce nothing! It will take 55,000 heliostats to produce 100MW.

Also, the union workers will be from San Bernardino, all of them, not Nevada. Read the hearing transcripts on the California Energy Commission website.

Nevada Solar One is wet-cooled and uses 400 acre-feet of water from the Colorado River each year. Where will it get more water when it expands?

This is the same plant that hired cheap labor from El Salvador and Mexico during initial construction. Will this happen again or will it really be local labor this time?

This information is from: Manuel Romero-Alvarez and Eduardo Zarza. 2007. Concentrating Solar Thermal Power. In, Frank Kreith and D. Yogi Goswami (eds.), Handbook of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. CRC Press: Boca Raton, London, New York.

SEGS 8 and 9 are parabolic trough solar thermal power plants, built at Harper Lake, California, the last solar plants built by LUZ before it went bankrupt. SEGS 8 was built in 1989 at a cost of $231 million (it does not have thermal storage). Due to technical improvements, SEGS 9 was able to bring the cost of electricity down to 9 cents per kW-hour; Daggett SEGS 2 was 16 cents/kWh--it had thermal storage.

None of the SEGS plants are competitive with conventional energy, and were not profitable (LUZ went bankrupt in 1991). Capital cost is 3 times that of fossil fuel plants. With thermal storage the investment costs are very high- $4000 per kW. So Cresent Dunes will be absolutely dependent on federal grants and tax breaks from the US Treasury (our tax dollars at work)to keep it going.

I talked with the project manager of Solar Millennium's Amargosa Valley parabolic trough solar plant proposal, which will use molten salt thermal storage. He said it will be able to store heat 3 hours after sunset (NOT all night). It also helps buffer the heat collection during cloudy days (yes the desert does get cloudy even in Nevada--look outside). He told me the thermal storage tanks are very expensive. This is not 24/7 electricity like coal or natural gas.

BrightSource's Ivanpah SEGS power tower project will cost AT LEAST $1 billion. It is much larger than Crescent Dunes, but it does not have thermal storage in the plan.

I wish we could get another national monument or park in Nevada. I was in Death Valley National Park yesterday and the place was quite busy, a lot of tourists from all over. It would help Nevada's economy. (A lot more than solar plants that barely put out any electricity and create a blight on the land).

solarforces, the last time I checked natural gas was a fossil fuel. If we could put photovoltaic panels over the entire city's rooftops to cut down on coal, that would be fantastic--I am totally for that. And more energy efficiency and conservation would help.

I am skeptical, however, that we are going to ever replace coal, unless we do it with nuclear. Utility-scale solar thermal is extremely inefficient:

Brightsource's Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System proposal takes over 4,000 acres of public land. This plant's nameplate capacity is only 400 megawatts (MW): with a capacity factor of 25% that would equal 100 MW. Compare this low efficiency to Southern Co./Georgia Power Co.'s Plant Bowen coal-burning power plant which occupies 2,000 acres but puts out 3,160 megawatts maximum at 70-90% capacity. This does not take into account the terrible cost of mountain-top removal mining for coal in the Appalachias, but the question should be asked how solar thermal will replace coal? Desert-top removal is just as bad.