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.

I live in Amargosa Valley and I will be watching Solar Millennium very closely to see whether they actually hire locals. I am skeptical with the talk I've heard.

This power plant will still need to pump groundwater in our basin that is overdrawn. Why can't we get federal funding and grants to citizens to place photovoltaic on city rooftops? That would employ a lot more skilled workers because it would be an almost endless job on thousands of roofs.

More government help to big companies, profits go to a foreign company (Solar Millennium is based in Germany), and nothing to us homeowners (except higher electric rates to pay for this expensive boondoggle). Thanks.

The sad truth is we will not be replacing fossil fuels with renewables ever-- wind and solar must be backed up by coal, natural gas, and hydro. I have been told nuclear cannot be used to back up intermittent sources because you cannot rev up and power down a nuclear power plant. Coal, unfortunately, is the best baseload, even though it can be energy-consumptive to rev up and down when the sun shines and clouds move over, or when the wind blows.

When will folks get out of their fantasy world?

The best way to deal with arctic melting is efficiency and energy conservation.

"But a single water-cooled solarthermal plant could consume up to 2,000 acre-feet of water a year ..."

The reporting these days is amazingly bad. When I last read the plan of development for Solar Millenium's solar thermal plant in Amargosa Valley, it read they need 4,000 acre-feet of water per year for wet-cooling.

Are we going to ignore our valuable desert waters?

If the Sun was actually following the story on the toad it would know that solar is not even the biggest threat facing it. There was a proposal to plough up 5,000 acres of valley wetland and adjacent habitat near Beatty for housing in a BLM land transfer (something that has broken Vegas-Summerlin, I note, in foreclosures from too many houses and not enough buyers with actual money).

What a shame this issue has been dummied down for politics.

I can't believe how ignorant the world still is. Solar and wind are not going to save us or the economy. I have been going to many of these scoping meetings and reading the development plans of these projects: Solar Millennium's own report on Andasol 1-3 in Spain, large solar thermal parabolic trough plants, state that they have been operating at 15% capacity. Solar Millennium's Amargosa Valley project will be a copy of these plants, and the nameplate capacity is said to be 484 megawatts (MW). Now that is the maximum theoretical capacity if there was no night, no clouds, no freezes. In the real world the solar thermal plants operate at only 15%-- that's a little over 72 MW! And they need 4,000 acres of land scraped up to produce this piddly amount!

A typical baseload coal power plant produces 1,000 MW at 70-90% capacity, on a couple hundred acres of land.

I'm not saying I am for coal, I'm just saying we are not going to replace this with solar or wind. Get real folks!

In addition, the cost of coal is around 2 cents per kilowatt-hour. Solar thermal is still up at 12 cents. Solar Millennium's Amargosa Valley plant will be using experimental heat storage technology which they admit is very expensive-- I don't think they will be bringing the price down any time soon.

That translates to higher electricity costs, which can only be handled two ways: in Spain their government puts in massive subsidies to hold up these solar thermal plants (which is not working); or the cost will be passed onto the ratepayers. Hmm, I wonder what our future is?

How can you trust the newspapers when they can't even get the facts straight on renewable energy? This statement is incorrect:

"Solar tower plants, which have yet to be built in the United States...."

You drive by one on highway 15- Solar Two power tower in Daggett, California (see http://www1.eere.energy.gov/solar/csp_ba...)