MitchJi
10 MW
Hi,
Picture-Surface Area Required to Power World w/ Solar Panels
- Thread starter MitchJi
- Start date
TPA
10 kW
Environmentalists are unwilling to give up even that much area.
dogman dan
1 PW
Looks like New Mexico could power the US, therorticaly. You'd have to move that box a bit though, it looks like they have in on Sedona Arizona right now. :lol: :lol: Move it down to a more useless area, along I-10 in Texas and New Mexico and it will be no problemo. The enviromentalists would have to realize New Mexico is part of the Us to even begin squawking.
Seriously though, this time, You could locate a lot of solar projects in northern Mexico, and let just the watts cross the border if using up some over grazed and now worthless desert is a problem with the biologists.
We have a lot brewing localy right now, if the economy doesn't kill off the projects. The big solar electricity one is going to be located right on the borderline just east of El Paso. It's going to use the mirrors focused on towers method. Glass cleaning job anyone? The other interesting project here is for aglea biofuel.
That sure would be a switch if New Mexico had all the cheap energy. We sure have plenty of useless land. Enough use a huge chunk of the state just to catch falling rockets.
Seriously though, this time, You could locate a lot of solar projects in northern Mexico, and let just the watts cross the border if using up some over grazed and now worthless desert is a problem with the biologists.
We have a lot brewing localy right now, if the economy doesn't kill off the projects. The big solar electricity one is going to be located right on the borderline just east of El Paso. It's going to use the mirrors focused on towers method. Glass cleaning job anyone? The other interesting project here is for aglea biofuel.
That sure would be a switch if New Mexico had all the cheap energy. We sure have plenty of useless land. Enough use a huge chunk of the state just to catch falling rockets.
MitchJi
10 MW
Hi,
The DOE estimates 10% of the Nevada deserts could supply 100% of U.S. demand.
Where do you plan to get the water for a large volume of algae production in New Mexico :wink: :? :wink:
dogman said:
The DOE estimates 10% of the Nevada deserts could supply 100% of U.S. demand.
Where do you plan to get the water for a large volume of algae production in New Mexico :wink: :? :wink:
aaronski
1 kW
TPA said:
In my neighborhood they're blocking a wind farm, saying it would harm migrating birds and ruin the skyline. I'm all for the environment, but some environmentalist are just anti-change.
dogman dan
1 PW
Steal the water from the pecan farmers. 
Just joking, the pecan farmers use a huge amount of water localy. 6-12 acre feet per year for pecans. I think the pilot plant is going to be using fossil water from the aquifer initially. Oddly, we still have some big reserves of good water in southern NM. We had a huge lawsuit 30 years ago when Texas tried to tap it for El Paso. Long term though, under the fresh aquifer, there are even bigger reserves of brackish water that they say the algea can use no problem. The other option is recycled water, like the city's sewer effluent. We'll see, but they talk about the algea production being a semi closed loop where a large percentage of the water used is reclaimed. Nobody's thinking of open ponds with a ton of evaporation. Of course, the economy could tank the whole thing, and I doubt the algea fuel will be profitable at less than $150 a barrel oil. The solar electric mirror setups make plenty of sense though, since the electric company can just raise the rates if they need to to cover the costs, and get tax writeoffs from the govt. No doubt, in 5-10 years they'll break even and then the thing will become a money machine.
One thing for sure, we have plenty of sun, and land that is only good for one cow per several square miles. The ranchers would love to rent out the space. We could easily generate the power, but transmission and temporary storage are the big problems to solve. But it's clear that at least enough to supply local needs is going to get built eventualy.
Just joking, the pecan farmers use a huge amount of water localy. 6-12 acre feet per year for pecans. I think the pilot plant is going to be using fossil water from the aquifer initially. Oddly, we still have some big reserves of good water in southern NM. We had a huge lawsuit 30 years ago when Texas tried to tap it for El Paso. Long term though, under the fresh aquifer, there are even bigger reserves of brackish water that they say the algea can use no problem. The other option is recycled water, like the city's sewer effluent. We'll see, but they talk about the algea production being a semi closed loop where a large percentage of the water used is reclaimed. Nobody's thinking of open ponds with a ton of evaporation. Of course, the economy could tank the whole thing, and I doubt the algea fuel will be profitable at less than $150 a barrel oil. The solar electric mirror setups make plenty of sense though, since the electric company can just raise the rates if they need to to cover the costs, and get tax writeoffs from the govt. No doubt, in 5-10 years they'll break even and then the thing will become a money machine. One thing for sure, we have plenty of sun, and land that is only good for one cow per several square miles. The ranchers would love to rent out the space. We could easily generate the power, but transmission and temporary storage are the big problems to solve. But it's clear that at least enough to supply local needs is going to get built eventualy.
Lock
100 MW
Lots of useless land in my neighbourhood... they're called "roofs"
One of my neighbours installations looks like this:
http://www.cachelan.com/green/solarVuLive.php?ac=chb&dr=solera
One of my neighbours installations looks like this:
http://www.cachelan.com/green/solarVuLive.php?ac=chb&dr=solera
voicecoils
1 MW
MitchJi said:
What conversion efficiency is assumed?
northernmike
10 kW
Lock, you're neighbours with Coach House??
My cousin is editor-in-chief there!!
Cool!
My cousin is editor-in-chief there!!
Cool!
Lock
100 MW
Yah man... They're just down the (bpnicol) lane from me. I know one of their lead graphics guys, Rick/Simon, from living on the Island. I have a standing offer from Rick for when I finally get my scooter/act together to stop by Coach House and plug in to their panels... BTW, speaking of dropping by, thinking of showing up for their Wayzgoose party on Thursday...
http://www.chbooks.com/events/sept_3_wayzgoose_party_coach_house
...otta be a v.cool crowd...
lLok
http://www.chbooks.com/events/sept_3_wayzgoose_party_coach_house
...otta be a v.cool crowd...
lLok
MitchJi
10 MW
Hi DM,
With Solar Thermal short term storage (night and brief cloudy periods during a day) are not a problem. Several cloudy days in a row are a problem. One solution is a combination of Solar Thermal and Wind (at night and during cloudy periods [storms]) its windy.
One more advantage of Solar Thermal is that its cheaper than PV now and prices should go down drastically when it is scaled up and with more R & D.
I think its explained here:
http://www.landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127
dogman said:
With Solar Thermal short term storage (night and brief cloudy periods during a day) are not a problem. Several cloudy days in a row are a problem. One solution is a combination of Solar Thermal and Wind (at night and during cloudy periods [storms]) its windy.
One more advantage of Solar Thermal is that its cheaper than PV now and prices should go down drastically when it is scaled up and with more R & D.
voicecoils said:
I think its explained here:
http://www.landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127
voicecoils
1 MW
MitchJi said:
Cheers, 20% conversion efficiency per square mile is what they assume. That's high but not crazy.
the area becomes even smaller with space based solar arrays as they're not vulnerable to power interruption from fickle clouds or weather.
as far as that migrating birds thing goes, pretty sure that has proven to be propaganda spearheaded by oil company funded environmental groups.
my counter argument to that is how many oil slicked birds have we seen from tanker spills & government/society is willing to accept that.
don't know if anyone remembers an oil tanker spill off the coast of Venezuela where thousands of penguins froze to death from the oil clinging their feathers together.
environmentalists tried to save them by fashioning a wool sweater to keep them warm but the penguins refused to keep them on & kept wriggling out of them.
that's because penquins would rather die than dress casual.
(old C. O'Brien jk)
as far as that migrating birds thing goes, pretty sure that has proven to be propaganda spearheaded by oil company funded environmental groups.
my counter argument to that is how many oil slicked birds have we seen from tanker spills & government/society is willing to accept that.
don't know if anyone remembers an oil tanker spill off the coast of Venezuela where thousands of penguins froze to death from the oil clinging their feathers together.
environmentalists tried to save them by fashioning a wool sweater to keep them warm but the penguins refused to keep them on & kept wriggling out of them.
that's because penquins would rather die than dress casual.
(old C. O'Brien jk)
voicecoils
1 MW
Toorbough ULL-Zeveigh said:
More then that, in space you have an air mass of zero. PV cells used in space have conversion efficiencies over 30% (up to ~40% in stacked configurations). All a bit of a moot point on earth though.
I wonder how many birds have hit coal power station cooling towers at night in storms... :wink:
dogman dan
1 PW
A few locations might be a problem with migrating birds, which do sort of follow a highway in the sky. That flyway might get skinny where a mountain pass makes a good location for wind gennies. So a few spots could be a problem, especially if it's used by a truly rare species. So avoid a place like that in the sierras or Colorado. But 99% of windmill locations would not affect birds any more that other structures, like power lines, radio towers etc.
Yesterdays Las Cruces Sun News had an article about the algea fuel production by Sapphire Energy. They are talking about spending a billion in NM over the next 5 years. 8) 
The 100 acre or so facility here in Las Cruces is mainly a R&D operation. They are looking at a 2000 acre site in Columbus NM, right on the borderline to Mexico. To my suprise, they are planning on open ponds, about 300 acres of surface area. Most of the others, like Valcent, are looking at poly tubes or such to keep the algea strains pure and produce more with less land. They (Sapphire) want to produce 1 million gallons of diesel fuel in 2011, 100 million a year by 2018 and a billion a year by 2025. Sounds cool to me, imagine an oil well field that keeps getting bigger, and producing more! 8) They are mostly aiming at the Jet fuel market, who will love a stable price. For water, the Columbus location is brilliant. There is abundant groundwater there, but it is not used much for farming since it is just a bit too salty and it ruined the land they tried it on post wwII. Near Deming, the water is sweeter in the aquifer and farms are still using the supply there. But the supply of brackish water is just about unlimited once you go deep enough. The mimbres river disapears into the sand in Deming, and put a lot of water in the sand there for millions of years in a basin with no outlet. For the ol west history buffs, Columbus is where the only other invasion of the United States by a foreign army occured when Panco Villa raided the town and shot some people up. The first invasion was 1812.
Yesterdays Las Cruces Sun News had an article about the algea fuel production by Sapphire Energy. They are talking about spending a billion in NM over the next 5 years.
8) The 100 acre or so facility here in Las Cruces is mainly a R&D operation. They are looking at a 2000 acre site in Columbus NM, right on the borderline to Mexico. To my suprise, they are planning on open ponds, about 300 acres of surface area. Most of the others, like Valcent, are looking at poly tubes or such to keep the algea strains pure and produce more with less land. They (Sapphire) want to produce 1 million gallons of diesel fuel in 2011, 100 million a year by 2018 and a billion a year by 2025. Sounds cool to me, imagine an oil well field that keeps getting bigger, and producing more! 8) They are mostly aiming at the Jet fuel market, who will love a stable price. For water, the Columbus location is brilliant. There is abundant groundwater there, but it is not used much for farming since it is just a bit too salty and it ruined the land they tried it on post wwII. Near Deming, the water is sweeter in the aquifer and farms are still using the supply there. But the supply of brackish water is just about unlimited once you go deep enough. The mimbres river disapears into the sand in Deming, and put a lot of water in the sand there for millions of years in a basin with no outlet. For the ol west history buffs, Columbus is where the only other invasion of the United States by a foreign army occured when Panco Villa raided the town and shot some people up. The first invasion was 1812.
Lock
100 MW
Sorry about that... Mackinac is just such a cool place...dogman said:
lock
dogman dan
1 PW
Well, Villa had good reasons for being ticked at the US too. In a previous dispute over the border of Texas being the Brazos or the Rio Grande, we sorta took New Mexico, Arizona and California while we were at it. In a way, Villa was just visiting home. Over 150 years ago now, but far from forgotten in Mexico.
Invasions of the US have been pretty rare, usually we do the invading elsewhere after much hipocritical protesting about how we hate to do it.
I guess you could also consider several battles in the Civil War invasions, Lee at Gettysburg, The battles in New Mexico, etc.
Invasions of the US have been pretty rare, usually we do the invading elsewhere after much hipocritical protesting about how we hate to do it.
I guess you could also consider several battles in the Civil War invasions, Lee at Gettysburg, The battles in New Mexico, etc.
TylerDurden
100 GW
Hang in for the punchline.
A Grand Goal for More U.S. Manufacturing Jobs
Businessweek
By Jessie Scanlon – 1 hr 40 mins ago
When General Electric (NYSE:GE - News) Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt delivered a speech at the Detroit Economic Club in June, he sounded more like a Midwestern governor than the leader of a $143 billion company whose ultimate responsibility is to his shareholders.
"We should set a goal to have manufacturing jobs be no less than 20% of total employment, about twice what it is today," Immelt said. "This is a national imperative." According to Susan Helper, chair of the economics department at Case Western Reserve University's Weatherhead School of Management, the speech turned heads. "GE had been a leader of offshoring, saying it was just too expensive to manufacture in the U.S., so to hear Immelt arguing that we need to rebuild our industrial base is significant," she says.
For those workers and communities hardest hit by the disappearance of manufacturing jobs in the U.S., Immelt's words offered a glimmer of hope in an otherwise bleak picture. The July employment report released on Aug. 7 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while better than expected, showed that the sector had lost 52,000 jobs in July. That brings the total drop since December 2007 to 2 million jobs, or roughly 14.2% of that sector's employment. And even before the current recession, manufacturing faced immense challenges. The Alliance for American Manufacturing (which last month published a book, Manufacturing a Better Future for America, laying most of the blame for the current state of affairs on U.S. trade policy) estimates that more than 40,000 factories across the nation have closed in the past decade.
But how realistic is Immelt's claim that "good jobs can return to manufacturing centers across America," and what kinds of jobs would those be? What forces could reverse the decades-long trend of multinationals shipping low-value factory jobs, such as assembling circuit boards, to lower-wage regions? And if those jobs aren't coming back, will enough new ones be created in emerging sectors to realize his goal of manufacturing jobs making up 20% of all U.S. employment? Immelt thinks the bulk of new manufacturing jobs will be in clean energy and health care, not in more traditional, low-skill areas.
A Manufacturing Renaissance?
In the last six months, Wright Engineered Plastics, a small injection-molder in Santa Rosa, Calif., with clients in the medical and telecom industries, has signed three new clients that have decided to move production back to the U.S. "Their reasons ranged," says Wright President and CEO Barbara Roberts. "Higher transportation costs and rising wages in China are making it more cost-effective for some to manufacture here. Two, in particular, were having significant quality issues."
Some companies are moving production back to the U.S. simply to make their supply chains faster. "Companies these days want to keep their inventories lean, and they can't afford to let product sit for 30 days on a boat from China," says Richard Sinkin, a San Diego consultant who scouts manufacturing sites in the U.S., Mexico, and China for multinationals. "People used to talk about just-in-time manufacturing, but now we have just-in-time retailing and that changes the dynamics incredibly."
But don't expect a sudden return of low-skill jobs to the U.S. "This has been going on for a century with no sign that it is going to let up," says Ken Goldstein, an economist at the Conference Board, a business research group. "Low-value activities move elsewhere, and you replace those jobs with higher value-added activities. Jobs in biotech, high tech, and the energy field." But even counting in those higher-skilled jobs, Goldstein called Immelt's 20% goal "unrealistic," saying "that would be almost 30 million jobs -- we didn't even have that many manufacturing jobs in 1960."
Immelt's speech was not a nostalgic call for a reincarnation of America's 20th century manufacturing landscape. But he did admit that, in some areas, GE had outsourced too much and that it planned to "insource" some higher-value activities such as aviation component production and manufacturing-related software development. To that end, he announced plans to build a Manufacturing Technology & Software Center to develop next-generation manufacturing technologies for GE's leading renewable energy, aircraft engine, gas turbine, and other high-technology products. The $100 million, 100,000-square-foot facility in Wayne County, 25 miles east of Detroit, would create 1,100 jobs.
Pennsylvania Factory Park
A similar renewal may be starting to happen in Fairless Hills, Pa., 22 miles east of Philadelphia, where a sprawling industrial site, once home to U.S. Steel (NYSE:X - News), is active again. In 2006, Gamesa Corporacin Tecnolgica, a Spanish manufacturer and one of the world's biggest suppliers of windmills, expanded the plant to make nacelles, the covers that house the moving parts of turbines. Blades and towers are produced at the company's plant in Ebensburg, Pa.
And Gamesa isn't the only company that has moved to the 2,400-acre site, which is still owned by USS Real Estate, the steel company's property management arm, and has been renamed Keystone Industrial Port Complex. Dominion Generation's Fairless Energy plant, which produces power from natural gas-fired generators, is also a tenant, as are AE Polysilicon, which produces a substance needed for solar cells, and biodiesel producer Biofuel Advanced Research & Development.
In total, 18 companies -- roughly one-third of which are in the clean energy or recycling business -- are now operating at the complex, lured by a combination of industrial amenities, such as access to two railroads and a deepwater port on the Delaware River, and tax incentives. Gamesa, for its part, negotiated a package of approximately $10 million in state and local grants, loans, and tax credits for its Fairless Hills operation.
The windmill maker hasn't been left untouched by the recession. With demand for turbines slowing and credit tight, Gamesa USA has cut 150 jobs in Pennsylvania, though it hopes those will be temporary layoffs. Still, it employs 850 people and indirectly created manufacturing jobs in Pennsylvania through its efforts to build a local network of suppliers to produce the nearly 8,000 components of its turbines, 75% of which are now made oversees. "We've been working with U.S. suppliers and have also convinced some of our European providers to come here and set up shop," says Michael Peck, a Gamesa USA spokesman.
Providing Incentives for Expansion
While it's too early to count Pennsylvania's $10 million Gamesa gambit a success, it offers a model for rebuilding manufacturing through a combination of public incentives, research-and-development tax credits, and corporate investments focused on a burgeoning area like clean energy -- along the lines Immelt laid out in his speech. It's worth noting, too, that GE's planned Manufacturing Technology center in Michigan reflects the same public/private approach. The state will provide more than $60 million in incentives to GE over the next 12 years to support the center. Spurred by up to $17 million in state and local incentives, and a temporary wage freeze negotiated with the union, GE also recently decided to expand an appliances plant in Louisville rather than manufacture its new hybrid water heaters in China. "The Louisville team has committed to quality and productivity standards that make them competitive, and we can make the same profit," Immelt told his Detroit audience.
"Solving the clean energy challenge will create broad economic opportunity in this country," said Immelt, and he urged business and government to work together to that end.
Pennsylvania and Michigan's incentives are smart, says Sinkin. "But we need dramatic policies at the federal level. Obama (requiring) that every government building had solar panels, for example," he says. "Now that would stimulate jobs."
A Grand Goal for More U.S. Manufacturing Jobs
Businessweek
By Jessie Scanlon – 1 hr 40 mins ago
When General Electric (NYSE:GE - News) Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt delivered a speech at the Detroit Economic Club in June, he sounded more like a Midwestern governor than the leader of a $143 billion company whose ultimate responsibility is to his shareholders.
"We should set a goal to have manufacturing jobs be no less than 20% of total employment, about twice what it is today," Immelt said. "This is a national imperative." According to Susan Helper, chair of the economics department at Case Western Reserve University's Weatherhead School of Management, the speech turned heads. "GE had been a leader of offshoring, saying it was just too expensive to manufacture in the U.S., so to hear Immelt arguing that we need to rebuild our industrial base is significant," she says.
For those workers and communities hardest hit by the disappearance of manufacturing jobs in the U.S., Immelt's words offered a glimmer of hope in an otherwise bleak picture. The July employment report released on Aug. 7 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while better than expected, showed that the sector had lost 52,000 jobs in July. That brings the total drop since December 2007 to 2 million jobs, or roughly 14.2% of that sector's employment. And even before the current recession, manufacturing faced immense challenges. The Alliance for American Manufacturing (which last month published a book, Manufacturing a Better Future for America, laying most of the blame for the current state of affairs on U.S. trade policy) estimates that more than 40,000 factories across the nation have closed in the past decade.
But how realistic is Immelt's claim that "good jobs can return to manufacturing centers across America," and what kinds of jobs would those be? What forces could reverse the decades-long trend of multinationals shipping low-value factory jobs, such as assembling circuit boards, to lower-wage regions? And if those jobs aren't coming back, will enough new ones be created in emerging sectors to realize his goal of manufacturing jobs making up 20% of all U.S. employment? Immelt thinks the bulk of new manufacturing jobs will be in clean energy and health care, not in more traditional, low-skill areas.
A Manufacturing Renaissance?
In the last six months, Wright Engineered Plastics, a small injection-molder in Santa Rosa, Calif., with clients in the medical and telecom industries, has signed three new clients that have decided to move production back to the U.S. "Their reasons ranged," says Wright President and CEO Barbara Roberts. "Higher transportation costs and rising wages in China are making it more cost-effective for some to manufacture here. Two, in particular, were having significant quality issues."
Some companies are moving production back to the U.S. simply to make their supply chains faster. "Companies these days want to keep their inventories lean, and they can't afford to let product sit for 30 days on a boat from China," says Richard Sinkin, a San Diego consultant who scouts manufacturing sites in the U.S., Mexico, and China for multinationals. "People used to talk about just-in-time manufacturing, but now we have just-in-time retailing and that changes the dynamics incredibly."
But don't expect a sudden return of low-skill jobs to the U.S. "This has been going on for a century with no sign that it is going to let up," says Ken Goldstein, an economist at the Conference Board, a business research group. "Low-value activities move elsewhere, and you replace those jobs with higher value-added activities. Jobs in biotech, high tech, and the energy field." But even counting in those higher-skilled jobs, Goldstein called Immelt's 20% goal "unrealistic," saying "that would be almost 30 million jobs -- we didn't even have that many manufacturing jobs in 1960."
Immelt's speech was not a nostalgic call for a reincarnation of America's 20th century manufacturing landscape. But he did admit that, in some areas, GE had outsourced too much and that it planned to "insource" some higher-value activities such as aviation component production and manufacturing-related software development. To that end, he announced plans to build a Manufacturing Technology & Software Center to develop next-generation manufacturing technologies for GE's leading renewable energy, aircraft engine, gas turbine, and other high-technology products. The $100 million, 100,000-square-foot facility in Wayne County, 25 miles east of Detroit, would create 1,100 jobs.
Pennsylvania Factory Park
A similar renewal may be starting to happen in Fairless Hills, Pa., 22 miles east of Philadelphia, where a sprawling industrial site, once home to U.S. Steel (NYSE:X - News), is active again. In 2006, Gamesa Corporacin Tecnolgica, a Spanish manufacturer and one of the world's biggest suppliers of windmills, expanded the plant to make nacelles, the covers that house the moving parts of turbines. Blades and towers are produced at the company's plant in Ebensburg, Pa.
And Gamesa isn't the only company that has moved to the 2,400-acre site, which is still owned by USS Real Estate, the steel company's property management arm, and has been renamed Keystone Industrial Port Complex. Dominion Generation's Fairless Energy plant, which produces power from natural gas-fired generators, is also a tenant, as are AE Polysilicon, which produces a substance needed for solar cells, and biodiesel producer Biofuel Advanced Research & Development.
In total, 18 companies -- roughly one-third of which are in the clean energy or recycling business -- are now operating at the complex, lured by a combination of industrial amenities, such as access to two railroads and a deepwater port on the Delaware River, and tax incentives. Gamesa, for its part, negotiated a package of approximately $10 million in state and local grants, loans, and tax credits for its Fairless Hills operation.
The windmill maker hasn't been left untouched by the recession. With demand for turbines slowing and credit tight, Gamesa USA has cut 150 jobs in Pennsylvania, though it hopes those will be temporary layoffs. Still, it employs 850 people and indirectly created manufacturing jobs in Pennsylvania through its efforts to build a local network of suppliers to produce the nearly 8,000 components of its turbines, 75% of which are now made oversees. "We've been working with U.S. suppliers and have also convinced some of our European providers to come here and set up shop," says Michael Peck, a Gamesa USA spokesman.
Providing Incentives for Expansion
While it's too early to count Pennsylvania's $10 million Gamesa gambit a success, it offers a model for rebuilding manufacturing through a combination of public incentives, research-and-development tax credits, and corporate investments focused on a burgeoning area like clean energy -- along the lines Immelt laid out in his speech. It's worth noting, too, that GE's planned Manufacturing Technology center in Michigan reflects the same public/private approach. The state will provide more than $60 million in incentives to GE over the next 12 years to support the center. Spurred by up to $17 million in state and local incentives, and a temporary wage freeze negotiated with the union, GE also recently decided to expand an appliances plant in Louisville rather than manufacture its new hybrid water heaters in China. "The Louisville team has committed to quality and productivity standards that make them competitive, and we can make the same profit," Immelt told his Detroit audience.
"Solving the clean energy challenge will create broad economic opportunity in this country," said Immelt, and he urged business and government to work together to that end.
Pennsylvania and Michigan's incentives are smart, says Sinkin. "But we need dramatic policies at the federal level. Obama (requiring) that every government building had solar panels, for example," he says. "Now that would stimulate jobs."
317537
10 kW
- Joined
- Oct 19, 2008
- Messages
- 939
dogman said:imagine an oil well field that keeps getting bigger, and producing more! 8)
Sounds very scary. Like the blob form the black lagoon. ahhhrg
The solar panel things looks awesome. Does that include powering e-vehicles instead of fossil vehicles (f-vehicles)? I guess not.
I agree with home solar power but I am a big supporter of 100% off grid too. I ask how much a power poles cost to erect, maintain every 3 or four houses and how much the power cable costs and the main towers etc. It appears to be a bigger deal than they make out it is.
dogman dan
1 PW
I'm just stoked to see southern NM getting something going that povides sustainable economic activity. Previously the main jobs were picking chile for a few months a year for slave wages, and building a few houses for people who chose to come here to die. Some science jobs in the space industry, but taken by much smarter people from all over the world.
Becoming the naitons energy producer sounds a lot better for the future generations here. All my live we've been either number one or number two competing with Louisiana for things like. Highest dropout rate, lowest per capita income, highest teen pregnancy rates, highest percentage of people living with no running water or sewer. All a result of no jobs unless daddy happens to own a few thousand acres of farmland. Plus a population of poor that just arrived that keeps growing from being on the border. Things have improved here in the last 15 years though, the number of people who come here to die really increased. 8)
Becoming the naitons energy producer sounds a lot better for the future generations here. All my live we've been either number one or number two competing with Louisiana for things like. Highest dropout rate, lowest per capita income, highest teen pregnancy rates, highest percentage of people living with no running water or sewer. All a result of no jobs unless daddy happens to own a few thousand acres of farmland. Plus a population of poor that just arrived that keeps growing from being on the border. Things have improved here in the last 15 years though, the number of people who come here to die really increased. 8)
Lock
100 MW
I kinda worry about papering over a lot of deserts with solar installations
...`cause you know deserts aren't really "dead" things... kinda hoping we get our geothermal act together instead... still plenty of opportunity for NM etc in the west:
tks
loc
...`cause you know deserts aren't really "dead" things... kinda hoping we get our geothermal act together instead... still plenty of opportunity for NM etc in the west:
tks
loc
dogman dan
1 PW
Yeah, that's true, the deserts aren't dead. They are full of living, exotic shrub species that the spanish brought in on the camino real. Mesquite, Creosote, plus the noxious weeds that are poisonous to cows, and after a few centuries of overgrazing, are all that grows between the non native shrubs. Other places do have valuable desert ecosystems, especially in more mountainous terrain. But the places I'm talking about are pretty trashed by the ranching practices of the 1800's and failed attempts to dryland farm the desert.
One of my fanatsies is a creosote harvesting machine that poops out heating stove pellets. Till that comes along, there's just about nothing that can graze on it. Mesquite is actually grazable, but only really grows in the "riparian" areas in dry gullies. It takes more water than we get in rain. The huge areas of flatland that used to support antelope, javalina, quail , etc are now huge areas with nothing much but creosote and sand.
I'm sure born and raised in this desert makes me no expert on what it's worthwhile to do with it. But I doubt we're going to miss a few million creosote bushes. There's desert and there's desert. 12 inches a year rain desert can be very productive. 8 inches or less, like here, is another story. A 6 inch rain year is not unusual. When we do get 12, the place gets unbeliveably lush compared to normal.
On the other hand, the rain that runs off the mirrors will tend to water the space between the mirrors twice as much. With no hunting allowed, and a bit of range grass seed to keep the dust on the mirrors down, the place could turn out to be a wildlife refuge in a way. The owners might even have to introduce thier own wolf packs to keep the dang critters back to a tolerable level. ...... Nahhh, just drill a few more gas wells in Hobbs instead and burn baby burn.
New Mexico geothermal, unfortunately, is a bust. The water from that deep is so corrosive that well casings last less than 6 months. It would work though, with gold plated drill pipe. ( or other too expensive drill pipe and stuff) They tried pretty hard for aobut a decade to solve the problem economicly, but for here, it can't be done without new technology. Mabye in the future they'll have plastic well casing that would work
One of my fanatsies is a creosote harvesting machine that poops out heating stove pellets. Till that comes along, there's just about nothing that can graze on it. Mesquite is actually grazable, but only really grows in the "riparian" areas in dry gullies. It takes more water than we get in rain. The huge areas of flatland that used to support antelope, javalina, quail , etc are now huge areas with nothing much but creosote and sand.
I'm sure born and raised in this desert makes me no expert on what it's worthwhile to do with it. But I doubt we're going to miss a few million creosote bushes. There's desert and there's desert. 12 inches a year rain desert can be very productive. 8 inches or less, like here, is another story. A 6 inch rain year is not unusual. When we do get 12, the place gets unbeliveably lush compared to normal.
On the other hand, the rain that runs off the mirrors will tend to water the space between the mirrors twice as much. With no hunting allowed, and a bit of range grass seed to keep the dust on the mirrors down, the place could turn out to be a wildlife refuge in a way. The owners might even have to introduce thier own wolf packs to keep the dang critters back to a tolerable level. ...... Nahhh, just drill a few more gas wells in Hobbs instead and burn baby burn.
New Mexico geothermal, unfortunately, is a bust. The water from that deep is so corrosive that well casings last less than 6 months. It would work though, with gold plated drill pipe. ( or other too expensive drill pipe and stuff) They tried pretty hard for aobut a decade to solve the problem economicly, but for here, it can't be done without new technology. Mabye in the future they'll have plastic well casing that would work
MitchJi
10 MW
Hi,
As a percent of the total deserts in the SW only a small area is required. See below or look at the original photo
(url plus brief excerpts):
http://www.grist.org/article/a-hundred-miles-of-mirrors
Lock said:
As a percent of the total deserts in the SW only a small area is required. See below or look at the original photo
(url plus brief excerpts):http://www.grist.org/article/a-hundred-miles-of-mirrors
dogman dan
1 PW
Ever been to Fort Stockton Texas? There's another place a 10 mile by 10 mile square would not be missed, ecologically speaking. And Dateland Arizona comes to mind too. Of course, locations nearer to large cities like the El Paso - Juarez complex of a million people would be better, like where they are building a mirror generator in the near future. Currently the area is occupied only by coyotes. Not the furry kind, the kind that smuggle people , guns, and drugs.
Back east, where land is more productive, PV on rooftops may be a better way to go than huge mirror arrays. But the scar left by a coal mine might be a location to put a few mirror generators.
Anyway, for those that haven't been here, ( maybe you have Lock) it's kinda hard to believe just how much open land we have here. Once off the interstate, there are lots of places with 50 mile by 50 mile areas without so much as a ranch house. It takes just about a square mile to support a cow, that is, if it ever rains on that particular spot. In sustainable terms, more like 25 square miles to a cow for some parts of it. Go and google earth the borderline between El Paso and Columbus NM and you'll see what I mean. In a Square between El Paso and Las Cruces and Deming and Columbus there is virtually nothing. Like 40 miles by 70 miles. Past Deming, going west, then it starts to get less congested. This is why Goddard came here to shoot missiles. And the military still does. Soon we'll have space tourisim, with the Rutan ships.
Back east, where land is more productive, PV on rooftops may be a better way to go than huge mirror arrays. But the scar left by a coal mine might be a location to put a few mirror generators.
Anyway, for those that haven't been here, ( maybe you have Lock) it's kinda hard to believe just how much open land we have here. Once off the interstate, there are lots of places with 50 mile by 50 mile areas without so much as a ranch house. It takes just about a square mile to support a cow, that is, if it ever rains on that particular spot. In sustainable terms, more like 25 square miles to a cow for some parts of it. Go and google earth the borderline between El Paso and Columbus NM and you'll see what I mean. In a Square between El Paso and Las Cruces and Deming and Columbus there is virtually nothing. Like 40 miles by 70 miles. Past Deming, going west, then it starts to get less congested. This is why Goddard came here to shoot missiles. And the military still does. Soon we'll have space tourisim, with the Rutan ships.
TylerDurden
100 GW
news:
US firm wins huge solar power project in China
by P. Parameswaran – Wed Sep 9, 3:47 am ET
WASHINGTON (AFP) – US energy giant First Solar won a deal with China to build the world's largest solar power plant in the Mongolian desert which officials say could mitigate climate change concerns.
First Solar will construct the two-gigawatt plant in Ordos City, Inner Mongolia, under a memorandum of understanding (MOU) inked Tuesday with Chinese officials at the company's headquarters in Tempe, Arizona.
The solar facility is to be built in four phases over a decade and supply power to three million Chinese homes, the company said in a statement. "We're proud to be announcing this precedent-setting project today," First Solar chief executive Mike Ahearn said in the statement.
The United States and China, he said, could work together to reduce the cost of solar electricity to "grid parity" -- where it is competitive with traditional energy sources -- and "create the blueprint for accelerated mass-scale deployment of solar power worldwide to mitigate climate change."
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed but First Solar said that if a similar plant were to be built in the United States, the cost would be about five to six billion dollars. "In China, due to lower labor costs and other factors, we expect the plant cost would likely be lower," Lisa Morse, First Solar spokeswoman, told AFP. "We are not speculating on what the actual cost of a plant might be in China since details of the project still have to be determined," she said.
China's chief legislator, Wu Bangguo, the second-most powerful leader in the ruling Communist Party after President Hu Jintao, witnessed the signing of the MOU. Wu is expected to meet with US congressional leaders and officials in President Barack Obama's administration in Washington on a variety of energy, trade and business initiatives. Wu and other Chinese officials discussed with First Solar executives the "significant potential" for the two nations to address global climate change through markets that took advantage of their solar resources, the US company said.
The MOU outlined a long-term "strategic partnership" between First Solar and Ordos City, where the US firm could consider establishing a solar panel manufacturing investment. "Discussions with First Solar about building a factory in China demonstrate to investors in China that they can confidently invest in the most advanced technologies available," said Cao Zhichen, vice mayor of Ordos municipal government.
China has expressed plans to provide 10 percent of its energy from renewable resources by 2010 and 15 percent by 2020, including from wind, hydro, biomass and solar. Various state incentives are being introduced for such growth.
While current Chinese solar installations total about 90 megawatts, Beijing has boosted its previous solar capacity goal of 1.8 gigawatts by 2020 to two gigawatts by 2011, and 10-20 gigawatts by 2020, according to a statement issued in conjunction with the MOU signing.
The first phase of the Ordos solar power plant will be a 30-megawatt "demonstration" project that will see construction begin by June 1, 2010, officials said. The second and third phases will be 100-megawatt and 870-megawatt projects, expected to be completed by the end of 2014, while the fourth phase will be a 1,000-megawatt facility tipped to be completed by end 2019.
US firm wins huge solar power project in China
by P. Parameswaran – Wed Sep 9, 3:47 am ET
WASHINGTON (AFP) – US energy giant First Solar won a deal with China to build the world's largest solar power plant in the Mongolian desert which officials say could mitigate climate change concerns.
First Solar will construct the two-gigawatt plant in Ordos City, Inner Mongolia, under a memorandum of understanding (MOU) inked Tuesday with Chinese officials at the company's headquarters in Tempe, Arizona.
The solar facility is to be built in four phases over a decade and supply power to three million Chinese homes, the company said in a statement. "We're proud to be announcing this precedent-setting project today," First Solar chief executive Mike Ahearn said in the statement.
The United States and China, he said, could work together to reduce the cost of solar electricity to "grid parity" -- where it is competitive with traditional energy sources -- and "create the blueprint for accelerated mass-scale deployment of solar power worldwide to mitigate climate change."
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed but First Solar said that if a similar plant were to be built in the United States, the cost would be about five to six billion dollars. "In China, due to lower labor costs and other factors, we expect the plant cost would likely be lower," Lisa Morse, First Solar spokeswoman, told AFP. "We are not speculating on what the actual cost of a plant might be in China since details of the project still have to be determined," she said.
China's chief legislator, Wu Bangguo, the second-most powerful leader in the ruling Communist Party after President Hu Jintao, witnessed the signing of the MOU. Wu is expected to meet with US congressional leaders and officials in President Barack Obama's administration in Washington on a variety of energy, trade and business initiatives. Wu and other Chinese officials discussed with First Solar executives the "significant potential" for the two nations to address global climate change through markets that took advantage of their solar resources, the US company said.
The MOU outlined a long-term "strategic partnership" between First Solar and Ordos City, where the US firm could consider establishing a solar panel manufacturing investment. "Discussions with First Solar about building a factory in China demonstrate to investors in China that they can confidently invest in the most advanced technologies available," said Cao Zhichen, vice mayor of Ordos municipal government.
China has expressed plans to provide 10 percent of its energy from renewable resources by 2010 and 15 percent by 2020, including from wind, hydro, biomass and solar. Various state incentives are being introduced for such growth.
While current Chinese solar installations total about 90 megawatts, Beijing has boosted its previous solar capacity goal of 1.8 gigawatts by 2020 to two gigawatts by 2011, and 10-20 gigawatts by 2020, according to a statement issued in conjunction with the MOU signing.
The first phase of the Ordos solar power plant will be a 30-megawatt "demonstration" project that will see construction begin by June 1, 2010, officials said. The second and third phases will be 100-megawatt and 870-megawatt projects, expected to be completed by the end of 2014, while the fourth phase will be a 1,000-megawatt facility tipped to be completed by end 2019.
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