Triply so for reading comprehension.
The point is is that
solar thermal is not new. It's been a failure for several decades now. We'll do
the numbers below, even though there is NOT ONE fundie anti-nuke who can do numbers.
Nevertheless, let me get this straight and try to sort out the fundie babbling.
"Economical" solar power isn't economical without huge subsidies for the rich investors?
No subsidy, no return on investment?
You mean it's a game for yuppies?
What a surprise...
Tax credits, hand outs to rich people with solar fantasies?
I note too that the Luz plants are "lipstick on a pig"
dangerous natural gas plants, and have burned lots and lots of natural gas in their pathetic lifetimes.
There is NOT ONE fundie anti-nuke who can comprehend numbers but let's do them, using the numbers provided by the fundie anti-nuke post that alleges that 1) the plant produced 11,000 GWh of electricity over 22 years.
First let's talk average power: 11,000 GWh - your number (who knows if its a fantasy or not, let's just pretend this is true - amounts to 4 X 10
10 joules or 0.04 exajoules over 22 years.
It follows, assuming you didn't fail fifth grade and understand the number of seconds in a minute, the number of minutes in an hour, the number of hours in a day and the number of days in a year, that the continuous average power of the
economically failed yuppie 30 year old "solar thermal is new" plants is 57 MW, not 354 MW.
No wonder solar power is
trivial in California. That wouldn't even light the street lights in San Pedro, never mind all of headlights of all the dumb ass ZEV cars that fundies promise every ten years for 20 years after whatever year this happens to be.
Why am I not surprised that fundie "fake it" math is off by a factor of about 7?
Given that 1/4 of the energy comes from dangerous fossil fuels - the natural gas about which fundies couldn't care less - the situation is even more pathetic.
Fundies, of course, don't understand the first thing about math, or the first thing about
data either.
Let's calculate what 11,000 GWh which - if we believe fundie talk - generated 1.7 billion in alleged revenue since 1984. If we believe these numbers, the busbar power cost is more than 15 cents per kilowatt-hour, busbar being the cost at the power plant, the wholesale cost.
Now, I know that the fundie anti-nuke cult worships Governor Hydrogen Hummer - who usurped the legitimately elected Governor of California because of Enron fakery - you know Enron, the world's largest supplier of wind power at the time of the faked "crisis" - because of allegedly high
retail power prices in California.
In case you've forgotten who I'm talking about, I mean the guy who got worshiped here because of his smoke and mirrors "Brazzillion solar roofs" marketing campaign, that has failed to do anything about dangerous fossil fuel waste in California.
At no point in history, including the time that Governor Hydrogen Hummer usurped the legitimately elected governor, was the
retail price has high as the busbar cost of the failed solar thermal plants:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/page/sales_revenue.xlsIn 2006, the average
retail price of power in the United States was 6.1 cents,or less than one half the cost of the economically failed solar thermal plants. The data is here:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat7p4.htmlOnly in dumb ass fundie land is this an economic success.
In California right now, the average
retail power cost is 12.14 cents:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/epmxlfile5_6_a.xlsFrom this
data, it appears that when Amory Lovins' pal, the convicted felon anti-nuke Jeff Skilling - who promised to eat the next nuclear plant built in the US (I don't know if they serve nuke plants in prison) - was
stealing from the citizens of California in order to make the world safe for Repuke steroid crazed governors, the
retail price
peaked at 13.84 cents per kwh, still less than the economically failed solar thermal plants.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/page/sales_revenue.xlsDumb ass Repuke worshiping anti-nuke fundies would be up in arms if a nuclear plant produced power at 15 cents per kw-hr, but they don't. They are in most places, the cheapest form of electricity available with the possible exception of hydroelectric, when fully loaded external costs are included. It is not entirely clear, of course, that the external costs of hydroelectric is all that great, though, since all the world's rivers are dying, in part from the "renewables will save us" fantasy.
For comparison purposes, I corresponded with a guy at STNP publicly on the other website where I write. He reported a busbar cost at his plant of less than two cents per kw-hr.
Of course, we already knew that the fundie "renewables will save us" crowd couldn't care less about
poor people. That's why this particular fundie set is so easily mocked in
Tortilla Curtain.
And that's after the gas price increases that fundie anti-nukes have foisted all over the world because they couldn't care less about dangerous fossil fuel waste. Gerhard Schroeder ain't got nothing on Governor Hydrogen Hummer Steroid boy.
If you don't know what you're talking about, make stuff up.