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Hey. we’ve been waiting on you, Lisa. About time you got here.

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com

Candidate Near-Term Uses for Solar Power

Solar: Maybe in deserts next to the sea, use solar power to take the salt, etc. out of sea water for domestic water, agriculture, etc. So, do reverse osmosis, electrolysis, whatever the engineering says is best.

If Joule Unlimited can get their varieties of algae working, etc., then use solar to make motor fuel.

Use solar energy, water, and coal to make gasoline via, say, some version of the old Fischer-Tropsch process. Put the gasoline in a pipeline and sell it.

In each case, the biggie question is — cost effective?

Cost Analysis

For the candidate projects, and Ivanpah, mostly should be able to do a fairly accurate cost analysis just from the first project plans with the engineering, etc.

That the Ivanpah project was supposed to produce cheap power, say, $0.02 per KWH or $20 per MWH, but ended up at $200 MWH suggests that cost analysis from the first project plans with the engineering was fraudulent.

That is, that project wasn’t challenging research such as hydrogen fusion, asteroid mining, curing cancer, or showing that P = NP and, instead, was all just some fairly straightforward engineering.

I smell politics, not R&D or engineering.

Feeding the US Electric Grid

Apparently the Ivanpah project was trying to feed the main US electric power grid, or at least the California part of it.

There, to me, IMHO, first-cut, the problem is not the solar power but the storage. IMHO, even if the solar power, as electric power, was free, cost $0.00 MWH, capex and opex, it still would be worthless on the grid due to no storage. So, the issue is storage. My guess is that, net, the storage alone costs more per MWH than current main grid power sources.

Storage

So, for R&D on solar, f’get about solar and work on storage instead.

People have tried storage: Hot salt, flywheels, classic batteries, new capacitors, pumped hydro, compressed air, etc.

Gee, I didn’t mention compressed springs and twisted rubber bands — maybe we need to rush to try those! “Obama, $1 billion for twisted rubber bands! Please!”.

Since so far the free market has not deployed much in storage, we can short-cut the engineering-economic (name of a department at Stanford) arithmetic and conclude the cost is too darned high.

Summary

I’m for serious R&D. I’m not for foolish boondoggles. Ivanpah looks to me like a boondoggle. The next US Attorney General may have some cases to bring.

About as likely as the classic ‘Free Beer Tomorrow’ sign in all the finest bars.

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Agreeing more with you than you do with yourself.

Go, Heels.

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com

Solar is the future. I’m sick of hearing that argument. It doesn’t mean we subsidize it today. Coal is cheap. Natural gas is cheap. Oil is cheap. Nuclear once built is stable and cheap. It’s stupid to do solar on large scale. If you want to put it on your house and run a closed circuit, so be it. Unbundle energy. But to do it at scale when it’s a totally unproven and inefficient technology is not only unwise, but it’s being stupid. Americans don’t like stupid.

Terrific data and exposé Fantastic.

$1 Billion for Salt

Yes, yes, yes, yes, I know that that Mojave desert is a very special place with a lot of sunlight, but, but, but, but how the heck will that plant supply power at night?

Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay I’ve got it: All they need is some salt! Well, quite a lot of salt. And use the excess energy during the day to heat the salt to be really hot, and at night use the hot salt to make steam! “Obama? Just need another $1 billion or so for some salt? Please?”.

Paid Positions

Gee, $1.6 billion: Now I’m starting to understand better why on a lot of Internet fora, e.g., Hacker News, Business Insider, various liberal sites, some of the Greenies argue so vociferously for clean, renewable energy!

I argue back, but the most they do is just call me ugly names.

So, that arguing is a special case of the old observation that “Can’t argue with someone who is being paid for their position.” or some such.

Skyrocket

Of course Green energy costs more, a lot more, but you have to understand, it also kills birds, blinds airplane pilots, and doesn’t work at night!

As in

“Obama: My Plan Makes Electricity Rates Skyrocket”

at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlTxGHn4sH4

Yup, “skyrocket”, e.g., 600%.

Gingrich Patronizing Coeds

I still like the way Speaker Gingrich addressed two very, very wound up Amherst University coeds, hysterical, over-achieving, overly assertive, wildly gullible, enviro bimbos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8lY-AIhGbU

The video didn’t show the girls very well, but one of them might have been pretty: “Honey, my car is just outside. How about we get some coffee and talk about being Green and 100% all-natural?”.

We know that God must have loved bimbos because he made so many of them.

CO2

The Greenies and their arguments about CO2 make no sense to me: E.g., from the present, back to the 1970s, 1940s, the 1700s, …, several hundred thousand years, the record of CO2 concentration changes fails to fit at all well the record of temperature changes.

Sunspots

A better argument, but I suspect needing more details on CO2 from volcanoes and in the oceans, is

The Great Global Warming Swindle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52Mx0_8YEtg

So, CO2 is just irrelevant. Instead, what’s crucial are clouds, which have a net cooling effect, seeded by cosmic rays, at times blocked by the solar wind from sun spots. So more sunspots, fewer clouds, warmer planet. And, unlike CO2, the sunspot data fits the temperature data.

Bought and Paid for

Of that $1.6 billion, gotta suspect that some of it ended up in a Swiss bank account.

Al Guru’s Scam

The exposé here is a stake through the heart, at least some nails for the coffin, of Saint Laureate Al Guru’s flim-flam, fraud scam.

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You will get no disagreement from me that solar should be huge but it is not there just now. What we need is pilot projects which allow us to find the financially efficient G spot for solar.

It is also disconcerting that the project was justified on the basis of patently false assertions. “I don’t know for sure” she have been in the convo.

This is essentially a failed full scale project that was funded by the government when reasonable folks suggest there is a need for more pilot projects.

In much that same way that space travel is being privatized, solar has to work on its own and the public can’t be asked to fund the whims of the likes of Google. Let Google funds its own ideas.

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com

As for holding a $1.6B carcass… no big deal. I’ve seen the governments budget. When solar gets to the point of the Joint Strike Fighter, let me know.

Until the, you gotta spend money to make sunny…

The plant is likely to be shuttered because nobody wants to buy $200/mwh power — even in California that is SIX times the alternative.

This was funded with YOUR money.

http://themusingsofthebigredcar.com/solar-energy-prescription-aloe-vera/

BRC
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com