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jpak Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Oct-19-09 05:09 PM
Original message
Utilities Take a Shine to Solar Power
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2009/10/utilities-take-a-shine-to-solar-power

SunPower Corp. is set to start work on a 250 MW solar photovoltaic power plant in California which will, when complete in 2012, provide electric power to Pacific Gas and Electric Co. The plant will dwarf the largest PV project currently in existence, a 17 MW facility at Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas, Nev.

Solar energy, such as the 250 MW SunPower PV facility, increasingly is being developed at utility scale. Bolstered by lower costs (due in part to market imbalances that currently favor buyers), state renewable portfolio standards, federal incentives and even a bit of creative thinking, solar energy is gaining a foothold in many utility companies’ generation portfolios.

Ron Kenedi, vice president-Americas for Sharp Solar, calls this the “beginning of the utility era” in the U.S. solar market. Utility demand for PV could be “huge” and may grow to be the company’s largest segment. “It’s happening all over at once,” he says. (For caption and credit information, click on this image in the image gallery below.)

Others agree. “Our opinion is it appears to be a booming market segment,” says Matt Cheney, CEO of Renewable Ventures, a financial firm which has been in the market since 2006. The company is part of Gemini Solar Development, which is building a 30 MW PV facility for Austin Energy east of the Texas state capital. “Utilities are waking up to the importance of solar,” Cheney says.

<more>
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diane in sf Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Oct-19-09 07:17 PM
Response to Original message
1. It's perfect for here, because when the south and central valley heat up, solar is at it's peak
and can power all their AC.
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NNadir Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Oct-19-09 09:06 PM
Response to Reply #1
3. Really? How come less than 1% of the already pathetic renewable energy in California
Edited on Mon Oct-19-09 09:13 PM by NNadir
comes from solar?

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/solar.renewables/page/state_profiles/california.html

It seems to me that for years and years and years and years, hundreds of tons of dangerous fossil fuel waste dumping into the atmosphere (about which you couldn't care less), you've been all pushing bull about how wonderful solar is, how it's affordable, how it's exploding, blah, blah, blah, blah...

Note that the 0.3% figure is compared to the renewable energy industry.

Compared to dangerous natural gas in the state of California, it's even worse, not that you give a shit about burning dangerous natural gas in your state.

The entire renewable industry in California produced http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/solar.renewables/page/state_profiles/r_profiles_sum.html">52,173 thousand megawatt-hours of electricity. Of this (see the first link above) just 557 of them came from the solar genie that all the dumb anti-nuke fundies always prattle on and on about. In fact, more than half of the so called "renewable" energy in California came from dams that have been silting for many decades now.

While you and your dumb friends were all singing the happy solar song and dancing the happy solar dance, the generation of electricity using dangerous natural gas rose to http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/st_profiles/sept05ca.xls">115,700 thousand megawatt-hours, an all time record. This means that 53 years after the invention of the solar PV cell, dangerous natural gas generated electricity outstripped solar electricity by a factor of 207,721 times as much electricity produced in California from dangerous natural gas than by solar toys.

Let me know, by the way, if you're keeping all that dangerous fossil fuel waste in your backyard, or whether you're dumping in the atmosphere that supports the rest of humanity, the bulk about whom you couldn't care less.

Have a nice oblivious evening.

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ArbustoBuster Donating Member (956 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Oct-20-09 05:21 PM
Response to Reply #3
4. Do you ever do anything other than pimp nuclear?
And do you ever get tired of being wrong?
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jpak Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Oct-20-09 06:19 PM
Response to Reply #3
5. The fake NJ molten salt breeder has produced *zero* ex-o-jewels of energy
It is made up

It never existed

It never WILL exist...

...except as delusion of a sick mind...

:rofl:
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NNadir Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Oct-20-09 07:11 PM
Response to Reply #5
6. Well then, why don't you send some giggles to refute the claims...
Edited on Tue Oct-20-09 07:12 PM by NNadir
...http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V3X-4VKVBX8-1&_user=1082852&_coverDate=07%2F31%2F2009&_alid=1056907412&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_cdi=5742&_sort=r&_docanchor=&view=c&_ct=360&_acct=C000051401&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=1082852&md5=b165c2e36b1d7b9153ed4f92d0dffc0c">here

and

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V4D-4118J80-F&_user=1082852&_coverDate=10%2F31%2F2000&_alid=1056907412&_rdoc=2&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_cdi=5756&_sort=r&_docanchor=&view=c&_ct=360&_acct=C000051401&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=1082852&md5=cf2992bb98adf5153d3fdb2ca99ea7cc">Here

and

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V1R-4VP1758-4&_user=1082852&_coverDate=05%2F15%2F2009&_alid=1056907412&_rdoc=3&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_cdi=5681&_sort=r&_docanchor=&view=c&_ct=360&_acct=C000051401&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=1082852&md5=69c72b4efab5bc9382862c62eb88abfe">here

and

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V4D-4XBP9F5-1&_user=1082852&_coverDate=09%2F30%2F2009&_alid=1056907412&_rdoc=4&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_cdi=5756&_sort=r&_docanchor=&view=c&_ct=360&_acct=C000051401&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=1082852&md5=7db4d92ec678ef27cb068b77cbd1ec86">here

and

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=MImg&_imagekey=B6TGD-4T13CS9-1-F&_cdi=5252&_user=1082852&_orig=search&_coverDate=01%2F31%2F2009&_sk=998699998&view=c&wchp=dGLbVlb-zSkWb&md5=213f7c764fc565a698920a15f2d4fec7&ie=/sdarticle.pdf">here.

Apparently, having never opened a science book in your consumerist life, you seem to believe that the world nuclear science will be impressed by your vapid smileys, innuendo, and religious devotion.

You are not qualified in any way to say what people are and are not doing, since you insist on nuclear ignorance. Um, the ignorant can say nothing about the educated that is, um, educated.

While you were putting together the dinner list for the locally grown Maine produce from local gas heated greenhouses that locally grown locos can locate by driving their swell wind powered cars on Interstate-95, the world nuclear science community was publishing scores of papers on Molten Salt Reactors.

Most people laboring in this community, the MSR community, are trying to save the stupid from themselves, not they ever expect the stupid to be bright enough to understand what has happened. Like all mystics, we cannot expect the stupid to continue to criticize what they can't understand.

In fact, during the last 7 years that you've been here announcing that "solar will save us" using 33 year old rhetoric from your fellow mystic Amory Lovins - who famously claimed in 1976 that solar will save us by 2000, and in 1980 that "nuclear power is dead" - several hundreds of papers on the subject of MSRs have been published, covering everything from computational phase diagrams, to neutron kinetics, to the physics of bubbles in viscous liquids, to alloy metallurgy and a whole bunch of other stuff that you don't know shit about.

In fact, fundie boy, in 10 years you'll still be here posting giggle faces, and I will still be doing something else - should I live - about which you also know nothing: Working productively.

Have a nice ignorant fundie day, ignorance boy. Why don't you and Mom go out and wonder that forest land that you've been sustainably managing generation after generation after generation in your family. And if you have to sell a parcel to sustainable clear cutters from those glucosan emitting particulate generators that you're always hawking there, I might giggle a bit myself.

It's too bad, in a way, that you are scientifically illiterate, since were it otherwise, I could refer you to this swell paper, "Black carbon in marine particulate organic carbon: Inputs and cycling of highly recalcitrant organic carbon in the Gulf of Maine."

It begins like this:

Black carbon (BC), the soot and char formed during incomplete combustion of fossil and biomass fuels, is ubiquitous (e.g., Goldberg, 1985; Masiello, 2004; Park et al., 2003; Schmidt and Noack, 2000; Suman et al., 1997). Upon its emission to the atmosphere, BC influences cloud droplet nucleation (Kaufman and Fraser, 1997) and absorbs solar radiation, thereby affecting the temperature and water content of both the atmosphere and the ground underneath Jacobson, 2004, Kaufman and Fraser, 1997). It has been suggested that these effects have caused floods and droughts in recent years in China and India (Menon et al., 2002). In addition, BC has been characterized as carcinogenic and a cause of problems such as asthma (Dockery et al., 1993; Künzli et al., 2000). Perhaps such impacts are not surprising since we know that BC is an important carrier of organic pollutants like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) (Lohmann et al., 2005; Neff, 1979).


Couldn't care less about what the wastes of your fantasies do to people's lung tissue?

I thought so...

For everyone who is interested in the topic, here's the abstract: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VC2-4VJM30D-1&_user=1082852&_coverDate=02%2F20%2F2009&_alid=1056924065&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_cdi=5942&_sort=r&_docanchor=&view=c&_ct=998&_acct=C000051401&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=1082852&md5=232040b704771a23773a8f5ae044b4e9">Marine Chemistry 113 (2009) 172–181

Have a nice Bernie Madoff/Lehman Brothers evening, Fundie boy.
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jpak Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Oct-20-09 08:44 PM
Response to Reply #6
7. You have claimed that YOU invented a molten salt breeder reactor
YOU have not

:rofl:
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DLnyc Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Oct-19-09 08:44 PM
Response to Original message
2. "bolstered by . . . state renewable portfolio standards, federal incentives . . ."
Federal (and state) policies DO make a difference. When the various actors see things like carbon caps and renewable incentives solid in the future, their calculations change significantly.

We will probably be forced to go to completely to solar and other renewables eventually . . . might as well encourage an orderly transition beginning now.
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