Hmm...
Can a technology that has a power source that consumes about 620 million tonnes of hydrogen per second, really be described as green?
Mind you it would explain my last electricity bill.
Spanish firm brings 20MW solar ‘ranch’ online in Arizona
A new 20MW solar ‘ranch’ has officially opened in the deserts of Arizona as part of a major push by Spanish firm Iberdrola Renewables into the US energy market. The Copper Crossing Solar Ranch in Florence, Arizona, is one of the bigger renewable energy installations in the US and covers 144 acres of scrubby desert. With less …
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Thursday 10th November 2011 00:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
Optional
Personally I'd guess there's plenty of desert left and so for the moment I'm more interested in seeing if all that shade can't turn that patch into something more amendable to producing things we can eat or at least turn into fuel. Then again the Sahara might be an even better place to try that sort of thing since it's rather bigger and growing.
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Wednesday 9th November 2011 23:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
"enough power for around 3,400 homes a year."
Is that fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between energy and power in the press release, or is it locally introduced?
Power: typical proper unit on a domestic scale is kW, typical loose unit is "enough to run nnn homes".
Energy: typical proper unit on a domestic scale is kWh, typical loose unit is "enough to run nnn homes for a year".
The young people of today...
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Wednesday 9th November 2011 23:15 GMT Sebastian Flothow
"power for around 3,400 homes a year"
That really should be "power for around 3,400 homes" PERIOD. After all, we're talking about power here, not energy. It's bad enough that PR folks and mainstream journalists fail to grasp basic concepts of physics; a technology-related publication really ought to do better.
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Thursday 10th November 2011 16:49 GMT Tom 13
Forgone revenue is not the same thing as money taken from tax payers,
particularly when it matches with all other corporations which receive similar tax breaks (including socialist green companies).
And oil companies are barely on par with your local grocery store in terms of actual profitability. But then I guess flames like you don't actually care about facts, only their own self-righteous indignation.
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Thursday 10th November 2011 00:28 GMT GrantB
For those complaining about Power vs Energy
The "20-megawatt (MW) facility is expected to produce approximately 54 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) annually"
Can't find how much the entire project cost, but you could dig up the how many cents per kWh at retail and get some rough idea on return on investment.
Back of the envelop estimate, would look at ~4000 houses spending ~$1500 per year on (peak?) 'leccy during the day, then retail income would be ~$6m per year. Land is cheap, running costs (other than glass cleaning) is cheap so the big cost other than transmission infrastructure (regardless of power source) would be 66K x $n for the panels. Guessing at ~$500 per panel, that is a something like $30m +.
Will take a while for ROI, but if they had to pay for the carbon emitted by a coal powered equivalent, then seems not unreasonable.
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Thursday 10th November 2011 01:25 GMT robo-rob
Interesting numbers, let me add some more:
The average American uses 250 kWh/day (source: Without the hot air) which means that 54 million kWh is enough for 591 Americans. This 250kWh includes all transport, heating/cooling, embodied energy in stuff, food, electricity...
The average European uses half that Energy, so we could supply twice as many from that facility.
I wonder how do they store that energy for night time?
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Thursday 10th November 2011 09:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
good point on A/C
Arizona has subsidised aircon for poorer families in the past.
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0729heat-airconditioning29.html
for anyone who claims that UK FIT tariffs are a green tax, paying for aircon for people in the US (or heating for people in the UK) are the opposite. It's probably cheaper to help the people move to more temperate zones.
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Thursday 10th November 2011 09:24 GMT GrantB
I wonder how do they store that energy for night time?
Probably don't have to. I would guess with the local climate, air-con would be the biggest power consumer for the industrial/business users they are targeting.
So drive the air-con during the day off solar, then continue to use coal/gas generation (or whatever they had before) for base load overnight.
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Thursday 10th November 2011 09:38 GMT Duncan Macdonald
Air conditioning
A huge part of the electrical demand in US desert areas is air conditioning during the daytime. This demand drops considerably during the night. The solar generation matches this load profile quite well. The conventional generation is still needed but the daytime peak requirement will not be as high as before.
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Thursday 10th November 2011 09:38 GMT Simon Neill
Storage
Well, they don't. That is the MASSIVE problem with a lot of renewables - they aren't dependable.
However, if we can replace a gas power plant with a solar one we are saving emissions. Only works in places with dependable good weather though. Then the nuclear/coal plants that can't be switched on and off at will carry the load at night.
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Thursday 10th November 2011 13:42 GMT Loyal Commenter
Storage?
This os one of the arguments in favour of solar-thermal using molten salts (which can retain their heat for several hours after sunset). According to wikipedia, solar thermal collectors can have an efficiency of up to 41%, although I would imagine that this drops once you introduce the additional step of thermal storage. I don't know how the set-up costs vary between an array of panels and an array of mirrors and a collecting tower though.
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Thursday 10th November 2011 13:22 GMT Bernard M. Orwell
Apologies AC10:47...
It was a link to a video of the redoubtable James May visiting and explaining the Solar Tower array in Spain, quite a remarkable piece of energy tech. I strongly reccomend that you watch the video when you get back home.
In the meantime, here's a paper (pdf) on the subject.
http://www.iea.org/impagr/cip/pdf/issue36solarp.pdf
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Thursday 10th November 2011 13:29 GMT bob 46
its about 1/25 acre per home (which I'm sure you worked out yourself - not trying to be patronising) but my point is - that sounds pretty good to me. Thats about 160m2 per house, or a square of panels just under 13 m to a side.
So yes, you could get a house and garden comfortably enough on that plot (well, a UK house and modest garden anyway), but I read this as the panels being in places people didn't want to live, so it sounds like good use of land.
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