Major California Solar Project Moves Ahead

[phantom power]

California regulators on Wednesday recommended that the state’s first new big solar power plant in nearly two decades be approved after a two-and-half-year review of its environmental impact on the Mojave Desert.

The recommendation by staff members of the California Energy Commission — which still must be accepted by the commission board — comes three weeks after the federal Department of Energy offered the project’s builder, BrightSource Energy, a $1.37 billion loan guarantee to construct the 392-megawatt Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System.

The Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife and the Center for Biological Diversity favor solar energy projects, but objected to building the BrightSource power plant in the Ivanpah Valley of Southern California, saying it would harm rare plants and animals like the desert tortoise.

Other environmentalists argued that the project, which features thousands of mirrors that focus the sun on 459-foot-tall towers, would mar the visual beauty of the desert.

http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/major-california-solar-project-advances/

[tabatha]

1. Another persepctive:

It’s a blackbrush forest out there, and it grows inconsequential, short-lived Joshua trees out of it here and there, ephemeral companions, barnacles on a whale. Though individual blackbrush plants in a stand may not be particularly old, a solid stand of blackbrush is an astonishingly ancient community.

This is how Webb, Steiger and Turner said it:

“Time span for recovery may be longer than past periods of climatic and geomorphic stability.”

They’re talking geological epochs here. They’re talking the blackbrush community beginning when there were standing lakes in the Mojave with sabertooth cats and ground sloths drinking out of them.

And we see it as less valuable than a few megawatts of power to run our swimming pool filters.

http://faultline.org/index.php/site/item/unexpectedly_ancient/

[XemaSab]

2. There are millions of acres of desert

that are nothing but creosote srrub.

Why not kick out all the ATV's and used the trashed areas to build solar facilities?

[joshcryer]

6. ATVs don't really go off-road on flat land, and most are forested.

Plus the Forest Service is really unfriendly to ATVers who use the land as a playground. It's one thing to drive a truck slowly over some rocks. It's another thing entirely to fly over it with 4-wheelers and dirt bikes, which are banned in most off-road locations run by BLM or the Forest Service. So I think your characterization about off-roaders and our forests is misguided.

There's only one big dirtbike/4-wheeler area that I know of that might qualify, the Olancha Dunes. But then, you'll probably get backlash for that, and rightly so, it's a wonderful area (one of the few places that heals itself despite the ATVers).

[XemaSab]

7. I'm talking about ATVs on BLM land in the desert

and I did a survey out there for a potential solar site with a big ATV guy, and he said he likes his hobby but it DESTROYS the desert.

[joshcryer]

3. ~48,999 more to go.

[bik0]

4. eSolar - same idea...

24,000 mirrors that can melt steel...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_qMHNJw1w4

http://www.idealab.com/inside_the_lab/videos/esolar_wef.html

[joshcryer]

5. That project is 5MW.

Just for perspective.

[bik0]

8. The Ivanpah project needs 8 acres/ MW vs. eSolar's 4 acres/MW

eSolar's panel spacing is more compact. In the video the eSolar CEO said 5MW on 20 acres. eSolar's towers are only 150 ft high.

Ivanpah...

The proposed project includes three solar concentrating thermal power plants, based on distributed power tower and heliostat mirror technology, in which heliostat (mirror) fields focus solar energy on power tower receivers near the center of each heliostat array. Each 100-MW site would require approximately 850-acres (or 1.3 square miles) and would have three tower receivers and arrays; the 200-MW site would require approximately 1,600-acres (or 2.5 square miles) and would have 4 tower receivers and arrays. The total area required for all three phases would including the administration building/operations and maintenance building and substation and be approximately 3,400-acres (or 5.3 square miles). Given that the three plants would be developed in concert, the proposed solar plant projects would share the common facilities mentioned above to include access roads, and the reconductored transmission lines for all three phases. Construction of the entire project is anticipated to begin in the first quarter of 2009, with construction being completed in the last quarter of 2012.

http://www.energy.ca.gov/sitingcases/ivanpah/index.html

[NNadir]

9. This is like the time David Brower "traded" Glen Canyon for Snake River Canyon.

The Sierra Club is useless bunch of Sunday wannabees whose contempt for nature is becoming only slightly less obvious than their contempt for the poor.

I wonder who told David Brower that he owned Glen Canyon?

The sad thing is that this garbage in the desert isn't going to last very long before it's abandoned and useless.

The Sierra Club didn't send anyone out to the Dagget plant to clean up the Therminol that caught fire and burned for days, spewing a cloud of toxic black smoke for days.



That is a solar thermal plant burning there, a tiny solar thermal plant.

http://www.basinandrangewatch.org/AV-SolarMill-scoping-Aug2009.html

In the meantime, NREL is perfectly willing to fess 'up in open, that many of their "solar" plants are actually - no surprise here - dangerous natural gas plants, designed to burn dangerous natural gas and dump, unrestricted, the waste into the favorite dump of "solar will save us" types, the earth's atmosphere and land.

http://www.nrel.gov/csp/troughnet/power_plant_data.html

Of the 12 solar thermal plants listed by NREL here, not one of which is bigger than gas fired power plant that might power a small university or factory, 6 of them are actually gas boilers.

Heckuva job. Somebody call Joe Romm and have him oversee another billion dollars of "research and development" that produce essentially nothing.

[joshcryer]

10. I like David Lewis' comment on the page.

You might like it too.

[Kolesar]

11. If you are going to agitate, at least get your facts straight

Echo Canyon http://www.nps.gov/glca/planyourvisit/upload/Dam%20Overlook2.pdf

[NNadir]

12. It's always amusing how lazy people post vague link on a subject they know nothing about

and assume that everyone gets the point, as if there were a point.

I'm not agitating. I'm merely pointing out that glib lazy responses - including the massively misguided myth that "solar is great" - are just that, glib, and often when viewed in retrospect, horrible.

This goes for Glen Canyon as well as Hetch Hetchy. (At least John Muir fought the latter with no compromises.)

Solar is only seen as so great because it's been a miserable failure - it doesn't produce significant energy.

To obviate external costs, a form of energy has to produce at least one exajoule out of the 500 now consumed by humanity.

Solar hasn't, it doesn't and probably won't, but if it does, we'll see what's it's really all about.

Solar has a huge energy/mass/land use density ratio problem and such problems, like the destruction of Glen Canyon for "renewable" energy, also a land use energy density problem - if filling formations with silt can be called "renewable" - have environmental meaning.

There are zero advocates for the solar fantasy who will be here after desert winds blow this crap apart and make it into toxic landfill. Future generations will see it like an awful fait complete, just as I, the future generation who lives with Brower's decision, see Glen Canyon as such.

He "regretted it." Golly Gee. His regret is worth shit, even biodigestable shit.

Stop being so lazy and find out what actually happened before you start lecturing anyone.

[Kolesar]

13. It's not Snake River canyon, agitator...eom