Doesn’t work at night, doesn’t generate power from solar for portions of daytime when sun angle is too low, also less effective in winter than summer, mirrors need expensive and prone to failure heliostat trackers to maintain focus, windy days can cause trouble for the trackers, cloudy days reduce sunlight intensity, turbine used to generate power must be run up from dead-start using other means if plant is to efficiently produce power from solar energy, otherwise too much daylight is wasted getting water up to temperature and turbine up to speed. To compensate the turbine is put up on running gear via steam produced by burning natural gas, which can also allow it to run at night. So it’s basically a natural gas fired power station augmented a few hours a day by sunlight when enough of the heliostats are working and its not too windy and not too cloudy and not too far North (or South)…. But other than that….
Ivanaph uses a lot of natural gas (mainly to preheat the system), so much so that just burning it in a regular powerplant would provide about 1/4 Ivanpah’s output.
The best bit, though, is that while state rules insist that a plant can’t rely on nonrenewables for more than 5% of its electricity production and still be in the renewable class as required, they found a way around it at Ivanpah; the gas used in preheating just isn’t counted, which somehow makes it “green”.
However, in spite of it all, Ivanpah is an excellent facility if the criteria is success at cooking wild birds on the wing.
The voices of Kamaoa cry out their warning as a new batch of colonists, having looted the taxpayers of Spain, Portugal, and Greece, seeks to expand upon their multi-billion-dollar foothold half a world away on the shores of the distant Potomac River. European wind developers are fleeing the EU’s expiring wind subsidies, shuttering factories, laying off workers, and leaving billions of Euros of sovereign debt and a continent-wide financial crisis in their wake. But their game is not over. Already they are tapping a new vein of lucre from the taxpayers and ratepayers of the United States.
The ghosts of Kamaoa are not alone in warning us. Five other abandoned wind sites dot the Hawaiian Isles — but it is in California where the impact of past mandates and subsidies is felt most strongly. Thousands of abandoned wind turbines littered the landscape of wind energy’s California “big three” locations — Altamont Pass, Tehachapi, and San Gorgonio — considered among the world’s best wind sites.
The only way solar power makes sense is if it is collected in orbit and converted to microwaves, then beamed where it is stored or used..
Just make sure you’re not in the beam path when there’s an attitude glitch.
The beam is pretty harmless. Very low energy density. And if it’s off target, phased-array antennas defocus.
There are dozens of practical problems that come to mind, but as this has been written about for years, I don’t want to pollute the thread with objections that have already been raised and answered, or at least considered*. So, maybe I need to do some homework. Is there a resource you would recommend?
* I realize this is anathema to internet discussion protocol, where I should simply pick what I see as a problem, latch on to it like a pit bull, refuse to budge, and label all my critics as stupid, but I just don’t have it in me right now.
He hasn’t written anything there since 2008, but Colonel Smith’s blog is a pretty good place to start.
It’s just another page in the saga of incompetent renewable energy policy of the Obama administration. It’ll be interesting to see how much on the hook, the US government is for this particular project.
The improvement in PV modules costs have rendered concentrating solar thermal nearly obsolete. At best, it has thermal storage going for it, but I think gas near term and batteries longer term renders that moot.
As for burning natural gas: the supercritical CO2 oxycombustion Allam Cycle looks very interesting: it has a LHV efficiency of 59%, uses a single stage turbine, and enables pipeline-ready compressed (30 bar) CO2 to be produced at zero marginal cost. I could see these things becoming popular for enhanced oil recovery, at the very least.
Doesn’t work at night, doesn’t generate power from solar for portions of daytime when sun angle is too low, also less effective in winter than summer, mirrors need expensive and prone to failure heliostat trackers to maintain focus, windy days can cause trouble for the trackers, cloudy days reduce sunlight intensity, turbine used to generate power must be run up from dead-start using other means if plant is to efficiently produce power from solar energy, otherwise too much daylight is wasted getting water up to temperature and turbine up to speed. To compensate the turbine is put up on running gear via steam produced by burning natural gas, which can also allow it to run at night. So it’s basically a natural gas fired power station augmented a few hours a day by sunlight when enough of the heliostats are working and its not too windy and not too cloudy and not too far North (or South)…. But other than that….
It’s worth bearing in mind when comparing Ivanpah to natural gas powerplants that Ivanpah is in fact both;
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/plant-688596-gas-energy.html
Ivanaph uses a lot of natural gas (mainly to preheat the system), so much so that just burning it in a regular powerplant would provide about 1/4 Ivanpah’s output.
The best bit, though, is that while state rules insist that a plant can’t rely on nonrenewables for more than 5% of its electricity production and still be in the renewable class as required, they found a way around it at Ivanpah; the gas used in preheating just isn’t counted, which somehow makes it “green”.
However, in spite of it all, Ivanpah is an excellent facility if the criteria is success at cooking wild birds on the wing.
The birds and pilots have a ways to go. As does the clean-up of the thousands of abandoned wind turbines.
The voices of Kamaoa cry out their warning as a new batch of colonists, having looted the taxpayers of Spain, Portugal, and Greece, seeks to expand upon their multi-billion-dollar foothold half a world away on the shores of the distant Potomac River. European wind developers are fleeing the EU’s expiring wind subsidies, shuttering factories, laying off workers, and leaving billions of Euros of sovereign debt and a continent-wide financial crisis in their wake. But their game is not over. Already they are tapping a new vein of lucre from the taxpayers and ratepayers of the United States.
The ghosts of Kamaoa are not alone in warning us. Five other abandoned wind sites dot the Hawaiian Isles — but it is in California where the impact of past mandates and subsidies is felt most strongly. Thousands of abandoned wind turbines littered the landscape of wind energy’s California “big three” locations — Altamont Pass, Tehachapi, and San Gorgonio — considered among the world’s best wind sites.
The only way solar power makes sense is if it is collected in orbit and converted to microwaves, then beamed where it is stored or used..
Just make sure you’re not in the beam path when there’s an attitude glitch.
The beam is pretty harmless. Very low energy density. And if it’s off target, phased-array antennas defocus.
There are dozens of practical problems that come to mind, but as this has been written about for years, I don’t want to pollute the thread with objections that have already been raised and answered, or at least considered*. So, maybe I need to do some homework. Is there a resource you would recommend?
* I realize this is anathema to internet discussion protocol, where I should simply pick what I see as a problem, latch on to it like a pit bull, refuse to budge, and label all my critics as stupid, but I just don’t have it in me right now.
https://spacesolarpower.wordpress.com
He hasn’t written anything there since 2008, but Colonel Smith’s blog is a pretty good place to start.
It’s just another page in the saga of incompetent renewable energy policy of the Obama administration. It’ll be interesting to see how much on the hook, the US government is for this particular project.
The improvement in PV modules costs have rendered concentrating solar thermal nearly obsolete. At best, it has thermal storage going for it, but I think gas near term and batteries longer term renders that moot.
As for burning natural gas: the supercritical CO2 oxycombustion Allam Cycle looks very interesting: it has a LHV efficiency of 59%, uses a single stage turbine, and enables pipeline-ready compressed (30 bar) CO2 to be produced at zero marginal cost. I could see these things becoming popular for enhanced oil recovery, at the very least.
http://www.gasturbineworld.com/gearing-up.html