Three California Solar Power Plants to Cost $2.0 Billion, $1.6 Billion and $2.2 Billion...

[NNadir]

...for a combined (peak) power 922 MWe, this at noon on a clear sunny day with no dust storms blowing.

A solar plant is very fortunate to realize 20% of capacity utilization - and I'm being generous here - so this is the equivalent of spending $5.8 billion dollars for a plant with an average continuous power output of around 180 MW.

All of these plants are being built with huge federal loan guarantees amounting to $4.7 billion dollars.

The plants will cover 12.2 square miles of previously undeveloped land.

This news comes from a publication of the American Chemical Society, Chemical and Engineering News.

http://cen.acs.org/articles/91/i50/New-Race-Solar.html

Some trenchant excerpts from the article:

Success will also turn on whether developers can overcome growing opposition to the projects’ large size and the environmental damage and habitat destruction that can occur with their placement. Of particular concern is their effect on fragile desert ecosystems...

Ecosystems? We don't care about ecosystems, solar power is, um, "green."

One huge PV unit—the Desert Sunlight Solar Farm—will produce 550 MW when complete. It will be built by the thin-film solar manufacturer First Solar with support and financing from a consortium of solar developers. First Solar claims the facility will be the world’s largest solar farm.

First solar's solar cells are glass layered with cadmium selenide which has, um, an interesting toxicology profile. It will be interesting to watch what happens when the Santa Ana winds blow up after this stuff has been sand blasted into a fine powder.

Here's one guy's take on cadmium selenide toxicology: http://works.bepress.com/mdokmeci/3/

Here's a paper from the primary scientific literature on the same topic:

http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v6/n1/full/nnano.2010.251.html

The CE&N article also contains this excerpt:

But there are problems with the jumbo size and location of these large plants. The Ivanpah project, for instance, will take up as much as 6 sq miles and is sited on the California-Nevada border. It is hundreds of miles from the homes and businesses of the Southern California population it will serve and so needs long-distance transmission lines. It is also located on fragile desert lands that turned out to be home to several hundred threatened desert tortoises. This fact was only discovered after developer BrightSource Energy began the $2.2 billion project.

It's not clear that these solar facilities will last much more than 20 years, but don't worry, be happy.

It's only money.

The fact that California schools suck, and are below national averages in Math, Science, Reading and Writing (http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/states/) is, um, good for the future of solar energy in the state, and the fact that California has the highest student to teacher ratio in the nation (25.6, Source http://www.nea.org/home/54597.htm) is unimportant when compared to an opportunity to cover vast stretches of desert with glass coated with toxic heavy metals and toxic chalcogens in order to be, um, "green."

All of the solar plants in all of California combined have yet to produce as much energy in a single year SONGS nuclear plant routinely produced before it was shut on a few acres of land, causing California's electricity related dangerous fossil fuel waste emissions to rise by 10%.

http://www.npr.org/2013/12/17/251781788/environmentalists-split-over-need-for-nuclear-power

[msongs]

1. corporate screw job.. instead, rooftop solar on every building in california nt

[PamW]

2. CORRECT!!!

NNadir,

Scientists have been telling us for decades that solar is going to be only a "bit" player in the energy solution.

We've been treated to the renewable propagandists telling us how cheap solar is, and that it is getting cheaper.

Perhaps you've identified the reason that the renewable propagandists have been able to sucker so many people into believing the "greenie wet dream".

The propagandists have taken hold in the California schools. One of my scientist colleagues gave a presentation on radioactivity in the world. He told me that the science teacher in a Bay Area high school had been instructing her students that the world was pristine and free of radioactivity until Man INVENTED radioactivity in 1945!!! High school students should at least know about Carbon-14 dating used in anthropology. How can they understand Carbon-14 dating if they are being instructed that radioactivity was INVENTED in 1945!!!

There is so much MISINFORMATION to dispel when the subject is energy. I appreciate the good insights that NNadir brings; but the propagandists out number us.

The good thing about science is that it is true, whether or not you believe in it.
--Neil deGrasse Tyson

PamW

[NNadir]

3. Really? A science teacher?

That's pretty bad. Maybe the teacher thought that uranium was a man-made element.

It would be a good bet that some of that teacher's students may have ended up here in this forum.

One of the long term risks of nuclear energy, in my view, is that in a continuous recycling scheme, it may actually serve to reduce the radioactivity of the biosphere. Whether it does or not depends on the recycling of crustal uranium from the mantle.

Recently, writing over at Rod Adam's website, I showed by appeal to references, that the earth's upper layers contain about one trillion metric tons of uranium, 5 billion tons of which is dissolved in the planetary hydrosphere:

http://atomicinsights.com/plutonium-nuclear-war-nuclear-peace/

I do not mean to characterize all California teachers as substandard. There are many fine and dedicated teachers in California, and I doubt that there are many science teachers would teach what you say was taught. But the education system there is, in fact, very poor.

The California Education Budget, for their substandard - but improving - schools is around 97 billion dollars. If one can do math - and this would rule out a great many anti-nukes, none of whom can do math - one can calculate the percentage by which California school funding could be improved by applying the money being squandered on this rather toxic and dubious solar energy scheme.

[PamW]

4. Really - it was a science teacher

NNadir,

Yes - my draw dropped too when he told me.

However, this colleague had a 125 year old shark's tooth, and he was using one of the Lab's radiation detectors to show it was slightly radioactive.

The science teacher asked him what he did to make the shark's tooth radioactive.

My colleague replied, "Nothing!!! That 125 years ago, the shark was alive and swimming in the sea. It was ingesting seawater, and its body was extracting minerals from the seawater in order to make shark teeth. Some of those minerals in seawater are salts of uranium and thorium. Hence, those salts are radioactive, and the shark's teeth made from them are also radioactive."

The teacher inquired, "You say those shark's teeth are 125 years old?"

"That's right" was the reply.

The teacher then inquired, "Then how can they be radioactive because Man didn't invent radioactivity until 1945?"

???!!!! Yes - a science teacher in the Bay Area.

PamW

[cprise]

5. BEV production is surging

Have a nice day...

[NNadir]

6. Really? Saving the World...

with Bull about Electric Vehicles? ...or something else?

What's surging is the degradation of the atmosphere.

This is the result of lots of similar kinds of bull about how, for instance, covering California's deserts with glass will make a difference to climate change: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/weekly.html

December 19, 2013 - 2013 being the year of the "surging BEV" - the concentration of carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa was measured at 398.06 ppm - the "CDFFW" - the concentration of dangerous fossil fuel waste in the atmosphere.

All of our "renewables will save us" asses are great at soothsaying. For more than a decade here, and many decades before that everywhere else, we've had all kinds of soothsaying about how solar and wind will save the day by year so and so.

During last year's carbon cycle we didn't hit 400 ppm at Mauna Loa until the week of May 14, which was the highest value ever recorded. I wonder if some of our oblivious bourgeois soothsayters here - we have so many of them - would like to hazard a prediction about what date in 2014 we'll hit it again this year, maybe using their experience with "Surging BEV" production - whatever the fuck that is.

How about a soothsaying prediction about what the CDFFW will be in May of 2014?

This is the real result of fear and ignorance destroying the largest source of climate change gas free energy infrastructure in two of the world's largest industrial nations.

When I hear junk about how the production of this or that bourgeois climate excusing fantasy object is "surging" - and it's been going on here a long time, and everywhere else even longer = I generally want to throw up.

Have a nice weekend.

[Kaleva]

7. Edwards Air Force Base is about 408 square miles large.

Read an article sometime ago about the possibility of dedicating 100 square miles of the base to solar power generation. The infrastructure on the base takes up little space so there is lots of open terrain there.

[caraher]

8. But isn't the open terrain an essential feature of the base?

I'd imagine a test pilot looking to set a plane in trouble down someplace safe might find filling 1/4 of the base with solar collectors unappealing.

Though after the F-35 there probably won't be any money left for the USAF to develop piloted aircraft anymore...

[Kaleva]

9. One reason it's so big is to keep prying eyes as far away as possible...

from observing aircraft being test flown. Another advantage the base is is that it's almost always sunny every day there

[caraher]

10. Well, for that purpose having a solar power facility might be a plus

One more obstacle to anyone snooping at ground level?

[NNadir]

11. Well, I wonder if there's enough cadmium on the planet to cover the...

...entire state with solar cells, from the Oregon border to the Mexican border, Big Sur, the San Joaquin Valley, the western shores of Lake Tahoe, Kings Canyon, Yosemite - already home to the grand renewable energy triumph represented by Hetch Hetchy dam - and of course, 100% of that useless ugly desert.

I think the area around the Salton Sea has lots of selenium, so we don't need to worry about getting that toxic element, we can mine it right there and make locally grown solar cells.

We'll prove then that California is the most environmentally conscious state in the Universe.

[kristopher]

12. Is that the way the minds of nuclear cheerleader's work; given a choice of clean vs dirty....

...technologies, they latch onto the dirty every time even when the clean is superior in almost every way?
I mean, silicon cells have higher conversion efficiencies, cost less and don't use the toxic materials you're talking about, which is why they have 90% market share. And yet, reflecting your decision making regarding nuclear, you ignore the obvious advantages and inexplicably insist in the worst choice of those available.

16th September, 2013
PV Module Choices: c-Si vs. Thin-Film

PV solar is becoming one of the most common renewable energy sources in Europe. All solar power is not the same, however. Individuals and companies who wish to install solar PV modules must take into account a number of different variables, including cost, efficiency, size, and durability. The main type of PV cells are silicon cells, which are classed either as monocrystalline or polycrystalline modules. Thin-film (amorphous silicon, CdTe, and CIG/CIGS), but not nearly as popular as the aforementioned technology.

Silicon cells make up the majority of the market, with an estimated 90% market share. Of this 90%, 70% are multicrystalline cells, and 30% are monocrystalline cells. The costs for these types of cells depend heavily on the type of technology used. Standard multicrystalline cells have an average cost of $0.19/watt, while standard monocrystalline cells have an average cost of $0.24/watt. Monocrystalline N-Type cells are more expensive due to their increased efficiency, having an average cost of $0.28/watt (more spot prices).

<snip>

CdTe, or cadmium telluride thin-film cells use cadmium telluride instead of silicon to absorb and convert sunlight into energy, and it is the only thin-film PV technology that can currently compete with multisilicon cells. This market is currently dominated by First Solar. The main problem with these cells is that telluride is a very rare element, meaning that if production of these cells was ramped up, then the reserves of Te could run out. Another problem with the production of these cells is the toxicity of cadmium, which causes problems with waste disposal. The efficiency of these cells is between 12-13%.

Finally, CIS/CIGS(Copper Indium Selenide/Copper Indium Gallium Selenide) thin-film cells use copper, indium, gallium, and selenium to produce a semiconductor material. This material can be deposited on flexible substrate materials, producing highly flexible, lightweight solar panels. They are not very efficient, with an efficiency of <13%.

http://www.thequartzcorp.com/en/blog/2013/09/16/pv-module-choices-c-si-vs-thin-film/15

Is that because the toxic ingredients remind you of nuclear wastes? I suppose your ultimate preference for nuclear could based on the fact that relative to nuclear the CdTe waste is easily managed and that just doesn't get your juices flowing.

But that would be a distorted, ignorant, downright idiotic approach to take when reading what you wrote, wouldn't it?

And it certainly wouldn't be up to the standards that DU strives for on the EE forum.

[NNadir]

19. The First Solar industrial solar cells in California are all cadmium telluride based.

Tellurium is far more toxic than selenium, the former being toxic in large quantities, although small amounts of it (in the form of selenomethionine) is an essential nutrient.

Last year I attended a lecture at the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment by the former Chief Scientific Officer of First Solar, Dr. David Eaglesham.

http://acee.princeton.edu/events/highlight-seminar-series-eaglesham-to-speak-on-state-of-the-art-photovoltaics/

He described the company's technology in considerable detail. I questioned him during Q&A on this toxicology issue, (and several other issues) and unlike so many of the badly educated apologists for the failed expensive solar industry, he did not prove to be a liar. He conceded the point, offering the rather weak excuse that cadmium is a side product of zinc production.

I will say this for him: He was a very gracious man, very much unlike the anti-nukes who prowl around here producing howler after howler.

In my career, I have worked on the synthesis of aromatic selenols, thiols, and tellurinol analogs, and thus, out of a sense of responsibility, made myself familiar with the risks of these elements. So I'm hardly a bourgeois brat who knows nothing at all about chemistry, speaking endlessly, in cut and pastes, on subjects he knows nothing about.

Now, there are lots and lots and lots of chemical pollution issues associated with the production of all kinds of semi-conductor systems, whether cadmium based or not, as anyone not living with solar cells pasted on his eyes, and wind turbine blades stuck in his ears can figure out.

For instance, the solar industry recently replaced the use of the greenhouse gas SF₆ with NF₃, not because the latter is safe, or that it is not a greenhouse gas, but because no one has gotten around to regulating the latter.

Here for instance is a discussion of the point in something called "the primary scientific literature" with which anti-nukes here are completely unfamiliar: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pip.1058/full

"Life-cycle greenhouse gas effects of introducing nano-crystalline materials in thin-film silicon solar cells" Prog. Photovolt: Res. Appl. 2011; 19:453–463

I have the full paper in front of me right now as a PDF, and I suppose I could be a dumb guy lacking original thoughts and cut and paste sections of it, but what would be the point?

I note that when the solar industry made this switch, the atmospheric concentration of NF₃ increased by more than 800% within a few years - its rising still.

It should be said that not all practitioners are ignorant liars engaging in obfuscations and denial. Some are acknowledging these problems openly. Dr. Eaglesham - perhaps chastened by First Solar's poor financial performance - was considerably more honest than what one sees here in the continuous shit-for-brains denial that flies around.

By contrast, in the case of nuclear energy, which is often addressed here by people who are ignorant not only of chemistry, but of physics, biology and physical chemistry, the risks associated with by products are ameliorated by the high energy to mass ratio associated with nuclear fuels. Because of their extremely low volume compared to every other energy technology, they have been safely stored for more than half a century with trivial loss of life.

By contrast, air pollution, in the period between 1990-2010 has been described as killing six million people per year, this while we spent the last six decades picking lint from our navels while waiting for the grand solar revolution, which has yet to produce in a single year even one of the 538 exajoules of energy that humanity is now consuming.

(Source: The Lancet Volume 380, Issue 9859, 15 December 2012–4 January 2013, Pages 2224–2260. "A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990–2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010" http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673612617668)

As it happens, I also have the Lancet paper in front of me, published almost 60 years - more than half a century - after the first nuclear power plant came on line. Nowhere in the paper does the storage of nuclear fuel appear as a major cause of death on this planet. Nuclear accidents don't appear either. That should tell a rational person something, but unfortunately, one often encounters irrational people with big flailing mouths when nuclear energy is discussed. The irony is that many of these flailing mouths use gas, oil and coal powered computers to do said flailing.

The solar industry will never be as clean, as sustainable, or as safe as the nuclear industry, and only its repeated failure to produce significant energy has prevented this from becoming as widely and as well known as it will be if this delusional and wasteful path continues to soak up money, resources, and most importantly, in an environmental sense, time.

Thanks for your comment. Enjoy the rest of the weekend and by all means, the coming holidays.

[unhappycamper]

13. Slightly off topic, but I'd rather spend $5.8 billion

on solar (or some sort of renewable energy) than $5.6+ billion dollars on a Zumwalt-class destroyer or $1.8 billion dollars on Arleigh Burke-class destroyers.

[NNadir]

14. Rather than distribute toxic elements across a pristine landscape, I'd rather...

...do a billion other things with $5.8 billion dollars.

Something worthwhile, something that might contribute to humanity for the long term...

This wasteful exercise in distributing electronic waste across the deserts, for instance, represents more than 5% of the entire State of California's education budget.

This solar exercise - as fashionable as it is - represents tremendous waste of money for a short term game that will dump a huge toxicology problem for future generations to clean up, this along with a billion other problems we're leaving on them because our generation has been so poorly educated.

[kristopher]

15. You'd spend it on things like this?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/112760569


Scottish nuclear fuel leak 'will never be completely cleaned up'

The Scottish Environment Protection Agency has abandoned its aim to remove all traces of contamination from the north coast seabed
Rob Edwards
The Guardian, Wednesday 21 September 2011 07.48 EDT


<snip>

...Tens of thousands of radioactive fuel fragments escaped from the Dounreay plant between 1963 and 1984, polluting local beaches, the coastline and the seabed. Fishing has been banned within a two-kilometre radius of the plant since 1997.

The most radioactive of the particles are regarded by experts as potentially lethal if ingested. Similar in size to grains of sand, they contain caesium-137, which has a half-life of 30 years, but they can also incorporate traces of plutonium-239, which has a half-life of over 24,000 years – meaning that is the time period for half of the material to break down.

The particles are milled shards from the reprocessing of irradiated uranium and plutonium fuel from two long-defunct reactors. They are thought to have drained into the sea with discharges from cooling ponds.

In 2007, Dounreay, which is now being decommissioned, pleaded guilty at Wick sheriff court to a "failure to prevent fragments of irradiated nuclear fuel being discharged into the environment". The plant's operator at the time, the UK Atomic Energy Authority, was fined £140,000....


http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/sep/21/scottish-nuclear-leak-clean-up

[NNadir]

16. Given the level of discourse I hear here...

...and given that the students in California are such poor performers...I'd spend it on education.

Here, in this place, for instance I hear lots of ignoramuses - obviously poorly educated - who think that every radioactive atom in the universe represents a fatality and that coal, oil and gas should be burned to generate electricity to express these bizarre fallacious ideas.

Spending this money on a nuclear plant, rather than this toxic short term garbage, would of course, be saving lives in California for a good part of a century, but that won't happen - precisely because people are so badly educated.

Fear and ignorance have won the day.

The oceans of this planet contain more than 500 billion curies of radioactive potassium-40 for the record, which is the lowest amount it has ever contained. It is an artifact of the creation of this planet. Humanity, and every other species on the planet seems to have evolved and survived in spite of this, not that there is a single paranoid anti-nuke on this planet who is educated enough to recognize it.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/07/06/991377/-How-Radioactive-Is-the-Ocean

The response to this well known and easily verifiable fact? People burning fracked gas (which leaches radon), oil (which has led to an increase of radioactivity in the Gulf of Mexico and lots of other places, and coal (which contains significant uranium) to have a hissy fit over radioactivity that has killed and injured no one because it comes from the object of their irrational hatred, nuclear technology.

Nuclear technology need be risk free to be vastly superior to everything else. It only needs to be vastly superior to everything else, which it is, including, for the record, expensive, wasteful and toxic solar garbage.

[kristopher]

17. You can't tell the difference between those two things?

You compare

oceans of this planet contain more than 500 billion curies of radioactive potassium-40

to

...Tens of thousands of radioactive fuel fragments escaped from the Dounreay plant between 1963 and 1984, polluting local beaches, the coastline and the seabed. Fishing has been banned within a two-kilometre radius of the plant since 1997.

The most radioactive of the particles are regarded by experts as potentially lethal if ingested. Similar in size to grains of sand, they contain caesium-137, which has a half-life of 30 years, but they can also incorporate traces of plutonium-239, which has a half-life of over 24,000 years – meaning that is the time period for half of the material to break down.

The particles are milled shards from the reprocessing of irradiated uranium and plutonium fuel from two long-defunct reactors. They are thought to have drained into the sea with discharges from cooling ponds.

And you wonder why people laugh at your claims to some sort of superior grasp of science and reality.

[Iterate]

18. Agree in part, that any nation which can't manage

a 4-bin recycling program with categories for electronics, batteries, and toxics should loose sovereignty and not be allowed any technology more complex than a campfire.

So how are we doing? Oh, no mandatory recycling. Looks like you found a new life's cause. Maybe a small tax on electricity would be just the ticket to finance the new program.

The voluntary, free market US rate for municipal compliance is 34% overall, 19% for electronics.

EPA Revises National Recycling Rate Upward Slightly
http://waste360.com/environmental-protection-agency-epa/epa-revises-national-recycling-rate-upward-slightly

Anyone else doing better? Yes, currently about 70% overall, but I won't say who it is. Don't loose heart though, it's possible to raise the rate of recycling pretty quickly:

Highest recycling rates in Austria and Germany – but UK and Ireland show fastest increase
http://www.eea.europa.eu/media/newsreleases/highest-recycling-rates-in-austria

To the issue of e-waste specifically, rather than having ALEC write the law, the US could adopt this one:

EU beefs up electronic waste recycling
But Computer Aid warns EU decision on WEEE directive ignores environmental benefits of refurbishing 'e-waste'
....
By 2019, this target will rise to a collection rate of 65 per cent of sales from three years previous, although countries have the alternative of collecting a comparable figure of 85 per cent of all e-waste generated.

85% recycling of e-waste is doable. One country processes more e-waste than it collects internally has a overall zero-waste goal for 2020. I won't say who it is.

It can be done. It is being done right now.