Next Stage of the Solar Boom?

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Sounds a lot like the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System...

Mirrors concentrate solar energy. Generates megawatts of steam to power a steam turbine and generate electricity.

Love the concept. Put it in the desert where irradiance is high and the weather is great.

Except that it's frying birds at a terrible pace. It takes an hour of burning natural gas to bring everything up to temperature. And five years into operation, it has yet to produce its rated power output.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility
 
Problem with these articles is that thing aren't equal.

1,000MW of thermal needs 4,000MW of solar, plus storage,to harvest the same energy in a 24 hour period.

Thay are not "like for like" in terms of their output...yes, 1,000MW of solar can make aa thermal go out of business....bit can't replace the energy produced by 1,000MW of thermal
 
Sorry, this article turned me off right away.
We know what politics that this is slanted too.

In this article and I quote below ...
"respond to the urgent need to cut carbon emissions"

Why may you ask?

Simple-
We have 100% carbon free electricity right now being produced for DECADES in the USA, but ignorance has shelved new construction in the USA and a lot of the world but not China, China has 60 SIXTY new plants planned to come online over the next 10 years. We need to get our act together and stop bowing to others and stick to facts.

Nuclear Power has always been the answer until solar can be logically produced and produced with less harmful chemicals. Correct, solar panel waste produces 300% more toxic waste then nuclear.

Just discussing and educating, as many people who read this forum never knew this.

Nuclear Power 100% Carbon Free, available for decades now.
Solar Power 100% Carbon Free but takes a massive, massive amount of more land to produce then nuclear and is 300% more toxic then nuclear.

So why aren't we replacing the power plants with nuclear while Solar develops? Because lack of leadership and the press has everyone afraid of the boogymen, we should have been doing this for decades, the massive amount of USA carbon reductions would have been enormous if any one cares.

Darn, I should have been President decades ago, I would have Nuclear Power plants pumping out power all over the USA to the point that the rest of the world would look to us as an example of innovation for Carbon Free Electricity.
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I think Bill Gates selling "AI" to rotate the mirrors is why they say it's the next stage. Otherwise, the technology has been in use for a long time.
 
The planet receives something like 15 PETAWATTS of solar insolation every day. In the US, wind power has somewhere around 100GW installed already, solar is making somewhere around 96TW... the energies are there for the taking, whether in PV, concentrator, wave technologies, etc.

I'm all for power technologies that make daily electricity usage "cleaner" and also make the ICE's impact smaller. I know nuclear is a viable source, but there are huge repercussions when something goes wrong; I don't need to say anything more than Chernobyl to make that point. If there is a failure in a wind or solar array, there are zero risks to the surrounding area other than the loss of output. I also wonder why we haven't pursued more of the synthetic fuel technologies that have been around since the 1930s. I believe you would be able to make a cleaner fuel that would reduce particulates and things like NOx and CO while still maintaining a similar energy content to current gasoline. I think ethanol as a fleet fuel source is a bad idea, first because of the reduced energy content and second by tying up farmland that could be used for other crops to greater benefit.

But the underlying issue is that we still deal with the fallout of new technology suppression to maintain the status quo. A majority of engineers today in industry are forced to think only inside the box, restrained to making incremental improvements instead of honest breakthroughs. I think we'd be much better off spending more of our R&D grants on emerging technologies than subsidizing Big Oil and Big Auto. Let the visionaries who come up with viable technologies drive where industry is going. It's what set the US apart during the industrial revolution, and what we need to develop our future.
 
The underlying issue is with painting solar and wind as green. Solar in particular has a huge environmental impact. It is classified as hazardous waste, so it will continue to pollute even if not in use.
The engineers aren't the ones thinking inside the box, the uneducated people are thinking what the box tells them to think.
 
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It's interesting where you get the 300% more toxic number from. The problem with nuclear waste is that some waste like U-234 has a half life of about 245k years. I don't think you have that problem with solar unless you have waste that will be around for 700k+ years, I think some other by products of nuclear power are a couple million years.

Also as was mentioned before, the main problem with Nuclear is the long start up time and the cost overruns which appear to be normal with any project. It's one thing to plan for a project and then have the costs triple and then take years longer than you originally planned. That's carrying costs and when you borrow money, you still owe interest on it even when whatever you're building isn't producing a cent. Lots of time those projects go bankrupt. It's hard to push a concept where going bankrupt at the end is common. After going bankrupt and the project is sold for pennies on the dollar, then the whole thing starts to make money again.
 
Times have changed since the beginning decades of nuclear power. Today, you can get modular units, plop them down and run them with minimal fuss, except for the politics.
 
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Given the YouTube videos I've seen, I wouldn't say that a wind array has zero risks when one of the units has a blade or two disintegrate. Not the same as a nuclear plant gone wrong, naturally, but not zero.

Then there's the whole how do you dispose of the blades when they're at EOL. Blade Disposal.

I have friends still in the utility industry; in talking with them about wind turbines they've pointed out that the times you need the turbines the most are very likely the times when they're not running due to no wind - think August in the Midwest. And I'm guessing that on a day like today, with 60mph+ wind gusts, the turbines are parked as well - but don't quote me on that.
 
It's a shame that valuable materials like the blades are not recycled and have zero value because of improvised or amateur approach to renewable energy implementation.
 
Originally Posted by Dave9
Times have changed since the beginning decades of nuclear power. Today, you can get modular units, plop them down and run them with minimal fuss, except for the politics.


Yeah, not in the US though. They keep talking about it, but a factory and the orders to build them aren't there yet.

As for fusion power, it's always been 20 years away for the last several decades although with ITER, it might actually happen in less than 20 years this time. Sorta like AI, it was always 20 years away since the 70's but now it's pretty close.

Full time operation of ITER is scheduled for 2035. ITER started in 1985.
 
Yeah we all know what politics it's slanted to. If it was slanted right it would have been locked or ditched a long long time ago. I've seen this before
 
Originally Posted by Alfred_B
It's a shame that valuable materials like the blades are not recycled and have zero value because of improvised or amateur approach to renewable energy implementation.

There are valid technical reasons why they are not, do you know what they are?

Perhaps someone should have thought of that earlier if they wanted the whole process to be green.
 
If there was the will nuclear waste from power plants can be successfully processed and stored safely. My statement is only for the people who feel they going to be able to change the temperature of planet Earth.
I'm sure many more American citizens have been killed by solar and wind power then the nuclear industry of the past few decades.

Meanwhile communist China it's ramping up to build 60 nuclear plants over the next decade giving them in unending source of power.
 
Originally Posted by alarmguy


Meanwhile communist China it's ramping up to build 60 nuclear plants over the next decade giving them in unending source of power.



Which will allow them to remain as the manufacturing mecca.
 
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