AG Lynch Testifies: Justice Dept. Has ‘Discussed’ Civil Legal Action Against Climate Change Deniers

[mamooth]

So, pie-in-the-sky fantasy reactors count, but the very real wind and solar sources don't.

Again, if these reactors are so wonderful, why isn't anyone building them anywhere in the world?

 

[Skull Pilot]

So, pie-in-the-sky fantasy reactors count, but the very real wind and solar sources don't.

Again, if these reactors are so wonderful, why isn't anyone building them anywhere in the world?

When you ignore the realities of intermittent power sources that will never be able to supply base load energy demands now never mind the increased demand in just a few years from now then yous you have pie in your eye.

 

[mamooth]

When you return to reality, you'll someday figure out the difference between your fantasy of "NUKES EVERYWHERE!", and the practicality of normal people saying that nukes have a place as one small piece of the puzzle.

 

[Skull Pilot]

When you return to reality, you'll someday figure out the difference between your fantasy of "NUKES EVERYWHERE!", and the practicality of normal people saying that nukes have a place as one small piece of the puzzle.

Sorry but its wind and solar that will be the minor players.

Environmentalists need to recognize that attempts to force all-renewable policies on all of the world will only assure that fossil fuels continue to reign for base-load electric power, making it unlikely that abundant affordable power will exist and implausible that fossil fuels will be phased out.

How Nuclear Power Can Stop Global Warming

 

[Skull Pilot]

Nuclear power is the greenest option, say top scientists

Nuclear power is one of the least damaging sources of energy for the environment, and the green movement must accept its expansion if the world is to avoid dangerous climate change, some of the world's leading conservation biologists have warned.

Rising demand for energy will place ever greater burdens on the natural world, threatening its rich biodiversity, unless societies accept nuclear power as a key part of the "energy mix", they said. And so the environmental movement and pressure groups such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace should drop their opposition to the building of nuclear power stations.

In an open letter published on the Brave New Climate blog, more than 65 biologists, including a former UK government chief scientist, support the call to build more nuclear power plants as a central part of a global strategy to protect wildlife and the environment.

More and more people are coming to their senses and are embracing nuclear power as our best option for abundant reliable emission free power

 

[Skull Pilot]

Nuclear Power Prevents More Deaths Than It Causes | Chemical & Engineering News

Using nuclear power in place of fossil-fuel energy sources, such as coal, has prevented some 1.8 million air pollution-related deaths globally and could save millions of more lives in coming decades, concludes a study. The researchers also find that nuclear energy prevents emissions of huge quantities of greenhouse gases. These estimates help make the case that policymakers should continue to rely on and expand nuclear power in place of fossil fuels to mitigate climate change, the authors say (Environ. Sci. Technol., DOI: 10.1021/es3051197).

In the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, critics of nuclear power have questioned how heavily the world should rely on the energy source, due to possible risks it poses to the environment and human health.

“I was very disturbed by all the negative and in many cases unfounded hysteria regarding nuclear power after the Fukushima accident,” says report coauthor Pushker A. Kharecha, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in New York.

Working with Goddard’s James E. Hansen, Kharecha set out to explore the benefits of nuclear power. The pair specifically wanted to look at nuclear power’s advantages over fossil fuels in terms of reducing air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

Kharecha was surprised to find no broad studies on preventable deaths that could be attributed to nuclear power’s pollution savings. But he did find data from a 2007 study on the average number of deaths per unit of energy generated with fossil fuels and nuclear power (Lancet, DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(07)61253-7). These estimates include deaths related to all aspects of each energy source from mining the necessary natural resources to power generation. For example, the data took into account chronic bronchitis among coal miners and air pollution-related conditions among the public, including lung cancer.

The NASA researchers combined this information with historical energy generation data to estimate how many deaths would have been caused if fossil-fuel burning was used instead of nuclear power generation from 1971 to 2009. They similarly estimated that the use of nuclear power over that time caused 5,000 or so deaths, such as cancer deaths from radiation fallout and worker accidents. Comparing those two estimates, Kharecha and Hansen came up with the 1.8 million figure.

They next estimated the total number of deaths that could be prevented through nuclear power over the next four decades using available estimates of future nuclear use. Replacing all forecasted nuclear power use until 2050 with natural gas would cause an additional 420,000 deaths, whereas swapping it with coal, which produces significantly more pollution than gas, would mean about 7 million additional deaths. The study focused strictly on deaths, not long-term health issues that might shorten lives, and the authors did not attempt to estimate potential deaths tied to climate change.

Finally the pair compared carbon emissions from nuclear power to fossil fuel sources. They calculated that if coal or natural gas power had replaced nuclear energy from 1971 to 2009, the equivalent of an additional 64 gigatons of carbon would have reached the atmosphere. Looking forward, switching out nuclear for coal or natural gas power would lead to the release of 80 to 240 gigatons of additional carbon by 2050.

By comparison, previous climate studies suggest that the total allowable emissions between now and 2050 are about 500 gigatons of carbon. This level of emissions would keep atmospheric CO2 concentrations around 350 ppm, which would avoid detrimental warming.

Because large-scale implementation of renewable energy options, such as wind or solar, faces significant challenges, the researchers say their results strongly support the case for nuclear as a critical energy source to help stabilize or reduce greenhouse gas concentrations.

Bas van Ruijven, an environmental economist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colo., says the estimates on prevented deaths seem reasonable. But he wonders if the conclusion that nuclear power saves hundreds of times more lives than it claims will convince ardent critics.

The nuclear power issue is “so polarized that people who oppose nuclear power will immediately dispute the numbers,” Van Ruijven says. Nonetheless, he agrees with the pair’s conclusions on the importance of nuclear power.

 

[RollingThunder]

So, pie-in-the-sky fantasy reactors count, but the very real wind and solar sources don't.

Again, if these reactors are so wonderful, why isn't anyone building them anywhere in the world?

When you ignore the realities of intermittent power sources that will never be able to supply base load energy demands now never mind the increased demand in just a few years from now then yous you have pie in your eye.

Wind and solar PLUS energy storage EQUALS no intermittency problem, moron, as was demonstrated by the Crescent Dunes solar plant discussed in post #99.

 

[HenryBHough]

They call themselves "protectors of the environment" yet they advocate:

1. Grinding up our innocent bird-friends with turbine blades whirling away sucking them out of the sky and turning them into bloody pulps.

2. Preventing nature's sunshine from gently falling on the earth where it might sustain the plants that are the basis of so much of our food chain of supply.

Alas, we must concede that their indoctrination was most effective.

 

[jc456]

So, pie-in-the-sky fantasy reactors count, but the very real wind and solar sources don't.

Again, if these reactors are so wonderful, why isn't anyone building them anywhere in the world?

When you ignore the realities of intermittent power sources that will never be able to supply base load energy demands now never mind the increased demand in just a few years from now then yous you have pie in your eye.

Wind and solar PLUS energy storage EQUALS no intermittency problem, moron, as was demonstrated by the Crescent Dunes solar plant discussed in post #99.

wow. Energy storage. So post up the success of the energy storage system. There isn't one to handle what is needed today as reliable to the grid. Just isn't and why they need natural gas generators (sorry) to get electrical needs started daily. come on man, can't you for once be factual about something?

 

[RollingThunder]

So, pie-in-the-sky fantasy reactors count, but the very real wind and solar sources don't.

Again, if these reactors are so wonderful, why isn't anyone building them anywhere in the world?

When you ignore the realities of intermittent power sources that will never be able to supply base load energy demands now never mind the increased demand in just a few years from now then yous you have pie in your eye.

Wind and solar PLUS energy storage EQUALS no intermittency problem, moron, as was demonstrated by the Crescent Dunes solar plant discussed in post #99.

wow. Energy storage. So post up the success of the energy storage system.

I just did (just one example out of many) in post #99, retard.

 

[Skull Pilot]

So, pie-in-the-sky fantasy reactors count, but the very real wind and solar sources don't.

Again, if these reactors are so wonderful, why isn't anyone building them anywhere in the world?

When you ignore the realities of intermittent power sources that will never be able to supply base load energy demands now never mind the increased demand in just a few years from now then yous you have pie in your eye.

Wind and solar PLUS energy storage EQUALS no intermittency problem, moron, as was demonstrated by the Crescent Dunes solar plant discussed in post #99.

So the solar plant works at night?

Solar and wind by definition are intermittent because the wind does not blow all the time sometimes it blows too much and turbines have to be braked and the sun does not shine at night


Oh and this is from you post 99

US company Solar Reserve is currently putting the finishing touches to the 110MW Crescent Dunes solar tower and storage plant in Tonopah, Nevada. With 10 hours of storage, it will deliver a block of power each day to service Las Vegas between noon and until 12am or 2am.

So it does not provide power between 12 AM and 12 PM or IOW it is interfuckingmittent

 

[RollingThunder]

So, pie-in-the-sky fantasy reactors count, but the very real wind and solar sources don't.

Again, if these reactors are so wonderful, why isn't anyone building them anywhere in the world?

When you ignore the realities of intermittent power sources that will never be able to supply base load energy demands now never mind the increased demand in just a few years from now then yous you have pie in your eye.

Wind and solar PLUS energy storage EQUALS no intermittency problem, moron, as was demonstrated by the Crescent Dunes solar plant discussed in post #99.

So the solar plant works at night?

Yup, that's right....the plant can produce a constant energy flow all night, even when the sun isn't shining, from the molten salt energy storage system that has been previously heated by the sun during the daytime.

Solar and wind by definition are intermittent because the wind does not blow all the time sometimes it blows too much and turbines have to be braked and the sun does not shine at night

More ignorant bullshit. First off, wind is stronger at night, so solar and wind tend to balance each other on the grid. Then, add energy storage of one kind or another, and the intermittency 'problem' disappears.

The new solar concentrating plants with molten salt storage can function as solar 'peaker plants' instead of needing to use natural gas fired power plants to maintain grid stability. These new solar plants HAVE NO INTERMITTENCY PROBLEM, bozo.

Oh and this is from you post 99
"US company Solar Reserve is currently putting the finishing touches to the 110MW Crescent Dunes solar tower and storage plant in Tonopah, Nevada. With 10 hours of storage, it will deliver a block of power each day to service Las Vegas between noon and until 12am or 2am."
So it does not provide power between 12 AM and 12 PM or IOW it is interfuckingmittent

Oh, dude....you are soooooo fucking stupid and incapable of understanding what you read. LOLOLOL....

Try harder on this one, dumbfuck....

Solar towers and storage – about to change the energy game?
RenewEconomy
By Giles Parkinson
4 July 2013
The 110MW Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Plant, a concentrated solar power project due to be completed in Nevada early next year, will not just be the largest solar power tower plant with fully integrated energy storage built – it could also challenge the way the world thinks about renewable energy. Or even energy sources in general.

The $1 billion Crescent Dunes project near Tonopah in the Central Nevada Desert, some 300kms north of Las Vegas, was developed by the Santa Monica-based SolarReserve and features the company’s market leading molten salt power tower technology with fully integrated energy storage.



What makes it unique and a potential game changer in the electricity industry is the flexibility and dispatchability of its power, meaning that it can deliver electricity whenever it is needed by customers; and its cost, which already beats diesel, is competitive with new build coal and gas generation.

The Crescent Dunes facility will have 10 hours of molten salt storage, which on average will allow it to deliver 110MW of baseload capacity to Las Vegas between the hours of 12 noon and midnight each day, when the city needs it most to power the lights and air conditioning of its casinos and entertainment palaces. It has signed a 25-year power contract with NV Energy, Nevada’s largest utility, to do that.

Tom Georgis, SolarReserve’s senior vice president of development, says the unique capabilities of the technology means that the plant could have been configured in any number of ways. With a 180MW turbine, for instance, it could have produced power for 10 hours each day, which was the original intention. With a smaller turbine, and more than 20 hours storage, it could have delivered 50MW of base-load power 24/7.

In the end, Nevada pitched for midday to midnight to suit its needs. In effect, the plant is providing baseload power for a fixed period each day – delivering the benefits of coal-fired power without the downsides, which is of course heavy pollution and an ability to be switched off at will or at regular intervals.

"You can’t do that with a coal fired facility,” Georgis says of the Nevada contract. But the technology also allows it to compete with gas-fired generation, both in the ability to provide baseload and as a peaking plant.

Next year, SolarReserve begins construction of the 150MW Rice Solar Energy Plant in Southern California, which will act more like a peaking power station to suit that state’s needs. Proposals the company will take to Chile, Australia and the Middle East will likely be for baseload power. (We will explain more about those plans in the next two days).

“This should be the winning technology. It has all the attributes you looking for to displace conventional generation,” Georgis says. “It’s not just fulfilling renewable energy targets, you are displacing any new build fossil plants – from nuclear, gas and coal. This is going to change the discussion in energy markets, certainly around the idea that renewables are variable.”

Georgis says there is a lot of confusion about storage and what it means. He says the way to think about it is in the amount of electricity produced by a solar tower plant over a year.

With the standard “S-Class” configuration of the plant, the design being built at Tonopah, the plant can produce over 500 GigaWatt/hours (500 Billion Watt/hours) of electricity a year in strong solar locations such as Western Australia and the Southwest USA. That can be sliced and diced whichever way a customer – be it a utility, industrial group or a miner – chooses. And that can be in 24/7 base-load, delivering electricity at specific times of the day as in Nevada, or as a peaking plant.

“We are not just a renewable energy generator, we can integrate and help firm and shape other variable energy sources,” Georgis says. ”It will run in summer for 16-18 hours a day. But I can turn down the turbine and run it 24/7 if the utility asks me to do so.“

To emphasise the point, Georgis points to the following graphics that show the output from a solar PV plant, and a solar tower plant without storage. The big square blocks – coloured green and yellow – are two output scenarios from the tower with storage, but it can be reshaped and timed to suit the customer’s needs. Grid operators and many customers like big square blocks.



See our explainer to see more about how the technology works.

The other key point, and this is the critical one, is in price.

The Nevada project has a publicly disclosed power purchase agreement of $US135/MWh with NV Energy. The project is supported by cheaper finance from the Department of Energy Loan Guarantee Program, and tax incentives, but Georgis says it is also the first of its kind to be built at this scale and has extra margins and contingencies typical of a first plant.

For this reason, Georgis says $135/MWh should be viewed as a reasonable estimate of costs, because by the time the fourth or fifth plant has been constructed, the capital costs will have come down dramatically.

Georgis says that even without incentives, the LCOE would be “well south” of $200/MWh. In Chile, where the excellent solar resources means that the output is 40 per cent greater (around 700GWh a year), the price is already at $135/MWh without any incentives.

“By 2020, we should be south of $100/MWh (in the US, Australia and elsewhere) and not reliant on any type of government subsidy or incentive program”, he says. That is key, because as Bloomberg New Energy Finance noted, new coal fired and gas fired plants are already more expensive, and will be well north of that figure by 2020.

And Georgis says the generation facility can participate in any kind of energy market. “If you have a flexible dispatch market, a storage market, or a capacity market, it can participate in all of those. It can even play in the merchant market with a robust price,” he says.



The Crescent Dunes plant will not be the first of its type, but it will be the biggest to date, and the first built to what Georgis describes as “utility scale”. The 18MW Gemasolar plant (pictured) has been operating in Spain for the last 18 months, and the 10MW Solar Two demonstration facility near Barstow in California’s Mojave Desert was operated by the Department of Energy in the 1990s.

SolarReserve has the exclusive worldwide license to the technology which was developed by Rocketdyne, a subsidiary of Aerojet, and perfected during various space programs. These include the algorithms for the solar trackers that move the heliostats, and the receiver, which uses proprietary metallurgy technology that allows it to expand and contract, and to resist melting.

The company currently has 7 projects in various stages of development the US, two of which have power purchase agreements (Crescent Dunes and Rice), and six projects in Spain, including one (the 50MW Cinco Casas project) with a PPA, although the Spanish projects are not progressing at the moment because financing is difficult to obtain in the current market. SolarReserve is pursuing contracts in Chile, South Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, China and Australia.

 

[Skull Pilot]

So, pie-in-the-sky fantasy reactors count, but the very real wind and solar sources don't.

Again, if these reactors are so wonderful, why isn't anyone building them anywhere in the world?

When you ignore the realities of intermittent power sources that will never be able to supply base load energy demands now never mind the increased demand in just a few years from now then yous you have pie in your eye.

Wind and solar PLUS energy storage EQUALS no intermittency problem, moron, as was demonstrated by the Crescent Dunes solar plant discussed in post #99.

So the solar plant works at night?

Yup, that's right....the plant can produce a constant energy flow all night, even when the sun isn't shining, from the molten salt energy storage system that has been previously heated by the sun during the daytime.

Solar and wind by definition are intermittent because the wind does not blow all the time sometimes it blows too much and turbines have to be braked and the sun does not shine at night

More ignorant bullshit. First off, wind is stronger at night, so solar and wind tend to balance each other on the grid. Then, add energy storage of one kind or another, and the intermittency 'problem' disappears.

The new solar concentrating plants with molten salt storage can function as solar 'peaker plants' instead of needing to use natural gas fired power plants to maintain grid stability. These new solar plants HAVE NO INTERMITTENCY PROBLEM, bozo.

Oh and this is from you post 99
"US company Solar Reserve is currently putting the finishing touches to the 110MW Crescent Dunes solar tower and storage plant in Tonopah, Nevada. With 10 hours of storage, it will deliver a block of power each day to service Las Vegas between noon and until 12am or 2am."
So it does not provide power between 12 AM and 12 PM or IOW it is interfuckingmittent

Oh, dude....you are soooooo fucking stupid and incapable of understanding what you read. LOLOLOL....

Try harder on this one, dumbfuck....

Solar towers and storage – about to change the energy game?
RenewEconomy
By Giles Parkinson
4 July 2013
The 110MW Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Plant, a concentrated solar power project due to be completed in Nevada early next year, will not just be the largest solar power tower plant with fully integrated energy storage built – it could also challenge the way the world thinks about renewable energy. Or even energy sources in general.

The $1 billion Crescent Dunes project near Tonopah in the Central Nevada Desert, some 300kms north of Las Vegas, was developed by the Santa Monica-based SolarReserve and features the company’s market leading molten salt power tower technology with fully integrated energy storage.



What makes it unique and a potential game changer in the electricity industry is the flexibility and dispatchability of its power, meaning that it can deliver electricity whenever it is needed by customers; and its cost, which already beats diesel, is competitive with new build coal and gas generation.

The Crescent Dunes facility will have 10 hours of molten salt storage, which on average will allow it to deliver 110MW of baseload capacity to Las Vegas between the hours of 12 noon and midnight each day, when the city needs it most to power the lights and air conditioning of its casinos and entertainment palaces. It has signed a 25-year power contract with NV Energy, Nevada’s largest utility, to do that.

Tom Georgis, SolarReserve’s senior vice president of development, says the unique capabilities of the technology means that the plant could have been configured in any number of ways. With a 180MW turbine, for instance, it could have produced power for 10 hours each day, which was the original intention. With a smaller turbine, and more than 20 hours storage, it could have delivered 50MW of base-load power 24/7.

In the end, Nevada pitched for midday to midnight to suit its needs. In effect, the plant is providing baseload power for a fixed period each day – delivering the benefits of coal-fired power without the downsides, which is of course heavy pollution and an ability to be switched off at will or at regular intervals.

"You can’t do that with a coal fired facility,” Georgis says of the Nevada contract. But the technology also allows it to compete with gas-fired generation, both in the ability to provide baseload and as a peaking plant.

Next year, SolarReserve begins construction of the 150MW Rice Solar Energy Plant in Southern California, which will act more like a peaking power station to suit that state’s needs. Proposals the company will take to Chile, Australia and the Middle East will likely be for baseload power. (We will explain more about those plans in the next two days).

“This should be the winning technology. It has all the attributes you looking for to displace conventional generation,” Georgis says. “It’s not just fulfilling renewable energy targets, you are displacing any new build fossil plants – from nuclear, gas and coal. This is going to change the discussion in energy markets, certainly around the idea that renewables are variable.”

Georgis says there is a lot of confusion about storage and what it means. He says the way to think about it is in the amount of electricity produced by a solar tower plant over a year.

With the standard “S-Class” configuration of the plant, the design being built at Tonopah, the plant can produce over 500 GigaWatt/hours (500 Billion Watt/hours) of electricity a year in strong solar locations such as Western Australia and the Southwest USA. That can be sliced and diced whichever way a customer – be it a utility, industrial group or a miner – chooses. And that can be in 24/7 base-load, delivering electricity at specific times of the day as in Nevada, or as a peaking plant.

“We are not just a renewable energy generator, we can integrate and help firm and shape other variable energy sources,” Georgis says. ”It will run in summer for 16-18 hours a day. But I can turn down the turbine and run it 24/7 if the utility asks me to do so.“

To emphasise the point, Georgis points to the following graphics that show the output from a solar PV plant, and a solar tower plant without storage. The big square blocks – coloured green and yellow – are two output scenarios from the tower with storage, but it can be reshaped and timed to suit the customer’s needs. Grid operators and many customers like big square blocks.



See our explainer to see more about how the technology works.

The other key point, and this is the critical one, is in price.

The Nevada project has a publicly disclosed power purchase agreement of $US135/MWh with NV Energy. The project is supported by cheaper finance from the Department of Energy Loan Guarantee Program, and tax incentives, but Georgis says it is also the first of its kind to be built at this scale and has extra margins and contingencies typical of a first plant.

For this reason, Georgis says $135/MWh should be viewed as a reasonable estimate of costs, because by the time the fourth or fifth plant has been constructed, the capital costs will have come down dramatically.

Georgis says that even without incentives, the LCOE would be “well south” of $200/MWh. In Chile, where the excellent solar resources means that the output is 40 per cent greater (around 700GWh a year), the price is already at $135/MWh without any incentives.

“By 2020, we should be south of $100/MWh (in the US, Australia and elsewhere) and not reliant on any type of government subsidy or incentive program”, he says. That is key, because as Bloomberg New Energy Finance noted, new coal fired and gas fired plants are already more expensive, and will be well north of that figure by 2020.

And Georgis says the generation facility can participate in any kind of energy market. “If you have a flexible dispatch market, a storage market, or a capacity market, it can participate in all of those. It can even play in the merchant market with a robust price,” he says.



The Crescent Dunes plant will not be the first of its type, but it will be the biggest to date, and the first built to what Georgis describes as “utility scale”. The 18MW Gemasolar plant (pictured) has been operating in Spain for the last 18 months, and the 10MW Solar Two demonstration facility near Barstow in California’s Mojave Desert was operated by the Department of Energy in the 1990s.

SolarReserve has the exclusive worldwide license to the technology which was developed by Rocketdyne, a subsidiary of Aerojet, and perfected during various space programs. These include the algorithms for the solar trackers that move the heliostats, and the receiver, which uses proprietary metallurgy technology that allows it to expand and contract, and to resist melting.

The company currently has 7 projects in various stages of development the US, two of which have power purchase agreements (Crescent Dunes and Rice), and six projects in Spain, including one (the 50MW Cinco Casas project) with a PPA, although the Spanish projects are not progressing at the moment because financing is difficult to obtain in the current market. SolarReserve is pursuing contracts in Chile, South Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, China and Australia.

Sorry but in your post where you quoted the info it said that plant will only provide power between noon and midnight

So that means it doesn't produce power for half of every day

Last time I checked something that only works 12 out of every 24 hours is intermittent by definition

 

[RollingThunder]

So, pie-in-the-sky fantasy reactors count, but the very real wind and solar sources don't.

Again, if these reactors are so wonderful, why isn't anyone building them anywhere in the world?

When you ignore the realities of intermittent power sources that will never be able to supply base load energy demands now never mind the increased demand in just a few years from now then yous you have pie in your eye.

Wind and solar PLUS energy storage EQUALS no intermittency problem, moron, as was demonstrated by the Crescent Dunes solar plant discussed in post #99.

So the solar plant works at night?

Yup, that's right....the plant can produce a constant energy flow all night, even when the sun isn't shining, from the molten salt energy storage system that has been previously heated by the sun during the daytime.

Solar and wind by definition are intermittent because the wind does not blow all the time sometimes it blows too much and turbines have to be braked and the sun does not shine at night

More ignorant bullshit. First off, wind is stronger at night, so solar and wind tend to balance each other on the grid. Then, add energy storage of one kind or another, and the intermittency 'problem' disappears.

The new solar concentrating plants with molten salt storage can function as solar 'peaker plants' instead of needing to use natural gas fired power plants to maintain grid stability. These new solar plants HAVE NO INTERMITTENCY PROBLEM, bozo.

Oh and this is from you post 99
"US company Solar Reserve is currently putting the finishing touches to the 110MW Crescent Dunes solar tower and storage plant in Tonopah, Nevada. With 10 hours of storage, it will deliver a block of power each day to service Las Vegas between noon and until 12am or 2am."
So it does not provide power between 12 AM and 12 PM or IOW it is interfuckingmittent

Oh, dude....you are soooooo fucking stupid and incapable of understanding what you read. LOLOLOL....

Try harder on this one, dumbfuck....

Solar towers and storage – about to change the energy game?
RenewEconomy
By Giles Parkinson
4 July 2013
The 110MW Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Plant, a concentrated solar power project due to be completed in Nevada early next year, will not just be the largest solar power tower plant with fully integrated energy storage built – it could also challenge the way the world thinks about renewable energy. Or even energy sources in general.

The $1 billion Crescent Dunes project near Tonopah in the Central Nevada Desert, some 300kms north of Las Vegas, was developed by the Santa Monica-based SolarReserve and features the company’s market leading molten salt power tower technology with fully integrated energy storage.



What makes it unique and a potential game changer in the electricity industry is the flexibility and dispatchability of its power, meaning that it can deliver electricity whenever it is needed by customers; and its cost, which already beats diesel, is competitive with new build coal and gas generation.

The Crescent Dunes facility will have 10 hours of molten salt storage, which on average will allow it to deliver 110MW of baseload capacity to Las Vegas between the hours of 12 noon and midnight each day, when the city needs it most to power the lights and air conditioning of its casinos and entertainment palaces. It has signed a 25-year power contract with NV Energy, Nevada’s largest utility, to do that.

Tom Georgis, SolarReserve’s senior vice president of development, says the unique capabilities of the technology means that the plant could have been configured in any number of ways. With a 180MW turbine, for instance, it could have produced power for 10 hours each day, which was the original intention. With a smaller turbine, and more than 20 hours storage, it could have delivered 50MW of base-load power 24/7.

In the end, Nevada pitched for midday to midnight to suit its needs. In effect, the plant is providing baseload power for a fixed period each day – delivering the benefits of coal-fired power without the downsides, which is of course heavy pollution and an ability to be switched off at will or at regular intervals.

"You can’t do that with a coal fired facility,” Georgis says of the Nevada contract. But the technology also allows it to compete with gas-fired generation, both in the ability to provide baseload and as a peaking plant.

Next year, SolarReserve begins construction of the 150MW Rice Solar Energy Plant in Southern California, which will act more like a peaking power station to suit that state’s needs. Proposals the company will take to Chile, Australia and the Middle East will likely be for baseload power. (We will explain more about those plans in the next two days).

“This should be the winning technology. It has all the attributes you looking for to displace conventional generation,” Georgis says. “It’s not just fulfilling renewable energy targets, you are displacing any new build fossil plants – from nuclear, gas and coal. This is going to change the discussion in energy markets, certainly around the idea that renewables are variable.”

Georgis says there is a lot of confusion about storage and what it means. He says the way to think about it is in the amount of electricity produced by a solar tower plant over a year.

With the standard “S-Class” configuration of the plant, the design being built at Tonopah, the plant can produce over 500 GigaWatt/hours (500 Billion Watt/hours) of electricity a year in strong solar locations such as Western Australia and the Southwest USA. That can be sliced and diced whichever way a customer – be it a utility, industrial group or a miner – chooses. And that can be in 24/7 base-load, delivering electricity at specific times of the day as in Nevada, or as a peaking plant.

“We are not just a renewable energy generator, we can integrate and help firm and shape other variable energy sources,” Georgis says. ”It will run in summer for 16-18 hours a day. But I can turn down the turbine and run it 24/7 if the utility asks me to do so.“

To emphasise the point, Georgis points to the following graphics that show the output from a solar PV plant, and a solar tower plant without storage. The big square blocks – coloured green and yellow – are two output scenarios from the tower with storage, but it can be reshaped and timed to suit the customer’s needs. Grid operators and many customers like big square blocks.



See our explainer to see more about how the technology works.

The other key point, and this is the critical one, is in price.

The Nevada project has a publicly disclosed power purchase agreement of $US135/MWh with NV Energy. The project is supported by cheaper finance from the Department of Energy Loan Guarantee Program, and tax incentives, but Georgis says it is also the first of its kind to be built at this scale and has extra margins and contingencies typical of a first plant.

For this reason, Georgis says $135/MWh should be viewed as a reasonable estimate of costs, because by the time the fourth or fifth plant has been constructed, the capital costs will have come down dramatically.

Georgis says that even without incentives, the LCOE would be “well south” of $200/MWh. In Chile, where the excellent solar resources means that the output is 40 per cent greater (around 700GWh a year), the price is already at $135/MWh without any incentives.

“By 2020, we should be south of $100/MWh (in the US, Australia and elsewhere) and not reliant on any type of government subsidy or incentive program”, he says. That is key, because as Bloomberg New Energy Finance noted, new coal fired and gas fired plants are already more expensive, and will be well north of that figure by 2020.

And Georgis says the generation facility can participate in any kind of energy market. “If you have a flexible dispatch market, a storage market, or a capacity market, it can participate in all of those. It can even play in the merchant market with a robust price,” he says.



The Crescent Dunes plant will not be the first of its type, but it will be the biggest to date, and the first built to what Georgis describes as “utility scale”. The 18MW Gemasolar plant (pictured) has been operating in Spain for the last 18 months, and the 10MW Solar Two demonstration facility near Barstow in California’s Mojave Desert was operated by the Department of Energy in the 1990s.

SolarReserve has the exclusive worldwide license to the technology which was developed by Rocketdyne, a subsidiary of Aerojet, and perfected during various space programs. These include the algorithms for the solar trackers that move the heliostats, and the receiver, which uses proprietary metallurgy technology that allows it to expand and contract, and to resist melting.

The company currently has 7 projects in various stages of development the US, two of which have power purchase agreements (Crescent Dunes and Rice), and six projects in Spain, including one (the 50MW Cinco Casas project) with a PPA, although the Spanish projects are not progressing at the moment because financing is difficult to obtain in the current market. SolarReserve is pursuing contracts in Chile, South Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, China and Australia.

Sorry but in your post where you quoted the info it said that plant will only provide power between noon and midnight

So that means it doesn't produce power for half of every day

Last time I checked something that only works 12 out of every 24 hours is intermittent by definition

See, there it is again, EmptySkull....this is exactly why I said in my last post: "you are soooooo fucking stupid and incapable of understanding what you read."

And, of course, you were too lazy and stupid to read the second article in my last post that clearly explained all this, you flaming retard.

You got it completely wrong, moron.

This is what it said in the original article about the Crescent Dunes Solar Plant...

"US company Solar Reserve is currently putting the finishing touches to the 110MW Crescent Dunes solar tower and storage plant in Tonopah, Nevada. With 10 hours of storage, it will deliver a block of power each day to service Las Vegas between noon and until 12am or 2am."

This is the further explanation in the second article that you obviously ignored, like the clueless dumbfuck that you obviously are...

The Crescent Dunes facility will have 10 hours of molten salt storage, which on average will allow it to deliver 110MW of baseload capacity to Las Vegas between the hours of 12 noon and midnight each day, when the city needs it most to power the lights and air conditioning of its casinos and entertainment palaces. It has signed a 25-year power contract with NV Energy, Nevada’s largest utility, to do that.

Tom Georgis, SolarReserve’s senior vice president of development, says the unique capabilities of the technology means that the plant could have been configured in any number of ways. With a 180MW turbine, for instance, it could have produced power for 10 hours each day, which was the original intention. With a smaller turbine, and more than 20 hours storage, it could have delivered 50MW of base-load power 24/7.

In the end, Nevada pitched for midday to midnight to suit its needs. In effect, the plant is providing baseload power for a fixed period each day – delivering the benefits of coal-fired power without the downsides, which is of course heavy pollution and an ability to be switched off at will or at regular intervals.

"You can’t do that with a coal fired facility,” Georgis says of the Nevada contract. But the technology also allows it to compete with gas-fired generation, both in the ability to provide baseload and as a peaking plant.

Next year, SolarReserve begins construction of the 150MW Rice Solar Energy Plant in Southern California, which will act more like a peaking power station to suit that state’s needs.

“This should be the winning technology. It has all the attributes you looking for to displace conventional generation,” Georgis says. “It’s not just fulfilling renewable energy targets, you are displacing any new build fossil plants – from nuclear, gas and coal. This is going to change the discussion in energy markets, certainly around the idea that renewables are variable.”

Georgis says there is a lot of confusion about storage and what it means. He says the way to think about it is in the amount of electricity produced by a solar tower plant over a year.

With the standard “S-Class” configuration of the plant, the design being built at Tonopah, the plant can produce over 500 GigaWatt/hours (500 Billion Watt/hours) of electricity a year in strong solar locations such as Western Australia and the Southwest USA. That can be sliced and diced whichever way a customer – be it a utility, industrial group or a miner – chooses. And that can be in 24/7 base-load, or delivering electricity at specific times of the day as in Nevada, or as a peaking plant.

“We are not just a renewable energy generator, we can integrate and help firm and shape other variable energy sources,” Georgis says. ”It will run in summer for 16-18 hours a day. But I can turn down the turbine and run it 24/7 if the utility asks me to do so.“

 

[Old Rocks]

So, pie-in-the-sky fantasy reactors count, but the very real wind and solar sources don't.

Again, if these reactors are so wonderful, why isn't anyone building them anywhere in the world?

When you ignore the realities of intermittent power sources that will never be able to supply base load energy demands now never mind the increased demand in just a few years from now then yous you have pie in your eye.

Wind and solar PLUS energy storage EQUALS no intermittency problem, moron, as was demonstrated by the Crescent Dunes solar plant discussed in post #99.

So the solar plant works at night?

Yup, that's right....the plant can produce a constant energy flow all night, even when the sun isn't shining, from the molten salt energy storage system that has been previously heated by the sun during the daytime.

Solar and wind by definition are intermittent because the wind does not blow all the time sometimes it blows too much and turbines have to be braked and the sun does not shine at night

More ignorant bullshit. First off, wind is stronger at night, so solar and wind tend to balance each other on the grid. Then, add energy storage of one kind or another, and the intermittency 'problem' disappears.

The new solar concentrating plants with molten salt storage can function as solar 'peaker plants' instead of needing to use natural gas fired power plants to maintain grid stability. These new solar plants HAVE NO INTERMITTENCY PROBLEM, bozo.

Oh and this is from you post 99
"US company Solar Reserve is currently putting the finishing touches to the 110MW Crescent Dunes solar tower and storage plant in Tonopah, Nevada. With 10 hours of storage, it will deliver a block of power each day to service Las Vegas between noon and until 12am or 2am."
So it does not provide power between 12 AM and 12 PM or IOW it is interfuckingmittent

Oh, dude....you are soooooo fucking stupid and incapable of understanding what you read. LOLOLOL....

Try harder on this one, dumbfuck....

Solar towers and storage – about to change the energy game?
RenewEconomy
By Giles Parkinson
4 July 2013
The 110MW Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Plant, a concentrated solar power project due to be completed in Nevada early next year, will not just be the largest solar power tower plant with fully integrated energy storage built – it could also challenge the way the world thinks about renewable energy. Or even energy sources in general.

The $1 billion Crescent Dunes project near Tonopah in the Central Nevada Desert, some 300kms north of Las Vegas, was developed by the Santa Monica-based SolarReserve and features the company’s market leading molten salt power tower technology with fully integrated energy storage.



What makes it unique and a potential game changer in the electricity industry is the flexibility and dispatchability of its power, meaning that it can deliver electricity whenever it is needed by customers; and its cost, which already beats diesel, is competitive with new build coal and gas generation.

The Crescent Dunes facility will have 10 hours of molten salt storage, which on average will allow it to deliver 110MW of baseload capacity to Las Vegas between the hours of 12 noon and midnight each day, when the city needs it most to power the lights and air conditioning of its casinos and entertainment palaces. It has signed a 25-year power contract with NV Energy, Nevada’s largest utility, to do that.

Tom Georgis, SolarReserve’s senior vice president of development, says the unique capabilities of the technology means that the plant could have been configured in any number of ways. With a 180MW turbine, for instance, it could have produced power for 10 hours each day, which was the original intention. With a smaller turbine, and more than 20 hours storage, it could have delivered 50MW of base-load power 24/7.

In the end, Nevada pitched for midday to midnight to suit its needs. In effect, the plant is providing baseload power for a fixed period each day – delivering the benefits of coal-fired power without the downsides, which is of course heavy pollution and an ability to be switched off at will or at regular intervals.

"You can’t do that with a coal fired facility,” Georgis says of the Nevada contract. But the technology also allows it to compete with gas-fired generation, both in the ability to provide baseload and as a peaking plant.

Next year, SolarReserve begins construction of the 150MW Rice Solar Energy Plant in Southern California, which will act more like a peaking power station to suit that state’s needs. Proposals the company will take to Chile, Australia and the Middle East will likely be for baseload power. (We will explain more about those plans in the next two days).

“This should be the winning technology. It has all the attributes you looking for to displace conventional generation,” Georgis says. “It’s not just fulfilling renewable energy targets, you are displacing any new build fossil plants – from nuclear, gas and coal. This is going to change the discussion in energy markets, certainly around the idea that renewables are variable.”

Georgis says there is a lot of confusion about storage and what it means. He says the way to think about it is in the amount of electricity produced by a solar tower plant over a year.

With the standard “S-Class” configuration of the plant, the design being built at Tonopah, the plant can produce over 500 GigaWatt/hours (500 Billion Watt/hours) of electricity a year in strong solar locations such as Western Australia and the Southwest USA. That can be sliced and diced whichever way a customer – be it a utility, industrial group or a miner – chooses. And that can be in 24/7 base-load, delivering electricity at specific times of the day as in Nevada, or as a peaking plant.

“We are not just a renewable energy generator, we can integrate and help firm and shape other variable energy sources,” Georgis says. ”It will run in summer for 16-18 hours a day. But I can turn down the turbine and run it 24/7 if the utility asks me to do so.“

To emphasise the point, Georgis points to the following graphics that show the output from a solar PV plant, and a solar tower plant without storage. The big square blocks – coloured green and yellow – are two output scenarios from the tower with storage, but it can be reshaped and timed to suit the customer’s needs. Grid operators and many customers like big square blocks.



See our explainer to see more about how the technology works.

The other key point, and this is the critical one, is in price.

The Nevada project has a publicly disclosed power purchase agreement of $US135/MWh with NV Energy. The project is supported by cheaper finance from the Department of Energy Loan Guarantee Program, and tax incentives, but Georgis says it is also the first of its kind to be built at this scale and has extra margins and contingencies typical of a first plant.

For this reason, Georgis says $135/MWh should be viewed as a reasonable estimate of costs, because by the time the fourth or fifth plant has been constructed, the capital costs will have come down dramatically.

Georgis says that even without incentives, the LCOE would be “well south” of $200/MWh. In Chile, where the excellent solar resources means that the output is 40 per cent greater (around 700GWh a year), the price is already at $135/MWh without any incentives.

“By 2020, we should be south of $100/MWh (in the US, Australia and elsewhere) and not reliant on any type of government subsidy or incentive program”, he says. That is key, because as Bloomberg New Energy Finance noted, new coal fired and gas fired plants are already more expensive, and will be well north of that figure by 2020.

And Georgis says the generation facility can participate in any kind of energy market. “If you have a flexible dispatch market, a storage market, or a capacity market, it can participate in all of those. It can even play in the merchant market with a robust price,” he says.



The Crescent Dunes plant will not be the first of its type, but it will be the biggest to date, and the first built to what Georgis describes as “utility scale”. The 18MW Gemasolar plant (pictured) has been operating in Spain for the last 18 months, and the 10MW Solar Two demonstration facility near Barstow in California’s Mojave Desert was operated by the Department of Energy in the 1990s.

SolarReserve has the exclusive worldwide license to the technology which was developed by Rocketdyne, a subsidiary of Aerojet, and perfected during various space programs. These include the algorithms for the solar trackers that move the heliostats, and the receiver, which uses proprietary metallurgy technology that allows it to expand and contract, and to resist melting.

The company currently has 7 projects in various stages of development the US, two of which have power purchase agreements (Crescent Dunes and Rice), and six projects in Spain, including one (the 50MW Cinco Casas project) with a PPA, although the Spanish projects are not progressing at the moment because financing is difficult to obtain in the current market. SolarReserve is pursuing contracts in Chile, South Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, China and Australia.

Sorry but in your post where you quoted the info it said that plant will only provide power between noon and midnight

So that means it doesn't produce power for half of every day

Last time I checked something that only works 12 out of every 24 hours is intermittent by definition

Skull, are you being purposely obtuse? They are delivering the power in the manner the customer requested it. They have the capability of delivering a constant rate of power 24/7, but that is not what the customer requested. And the storage capacity gives them the ability to adjust their delivery times with short notice. A win-win for all.

 

[Skull Pilot]

So, pie-in-the-sky fantasy reactors count, but the very real wind and solar sources don't.

Again, if these reactors are so wonderful, why isn't anyone building them anywhere in the world?

When you ignore the realities of intermittent power sources that will never be able to supply base load energy demands now never mind the increased demand in just a few years from now then yous you have pie in your eye.

Wind and solar PLUS energy storage EQUALS no intermittency problem, moron, as was demonstrated by the Crescent Dunes solar plant discussed in post #99.

So the solar plant works at night?

Yup, that's right....the plant can produce a constant energy flow all night, even when the sun isn't shining, from the molten salt energy storage system that has been previously heated by the sun during the daytime.

Solar and wind by definition are intermittent because the wind does not blow all the time sometimes it blows too much and turbines have to be braked and the sun does not shine at night

More ignorant bullshit. First off, wind is stronger at night, so solar and wind tend to balance each other on the grid. Then, add energy storage of one kind or another, and the intermittency 'problem' disappears.

The new solar concentrating plants with molten salt storage can function as solar 'peaker plants' instead of needing to use natural gas fired power plants to maintain grid stability. These new solar plants HAVE NO INTERMITTENCY PROBLEM, bozo.

Oh and this is from you post 99
"US company Solar Reserve is currently putting the finishing touches to the 110MW Crescent Dunes solar tower and storage plant in Tonopah, Nevada. With 10 hours of storage, it will deliver a block of power each day to service Las Vegas between noon and until 12am or 2am."
So it does not provide power between 12 AM and 12 PM or IOW it is interfuckingmittent

Oh, dude....you are soooooo fucking stupid and incapable of understanding what you read. LOLOLOL....

Try harder on this one, dumbfuck....

Solar towers and storage – about to change the energy game?
RenewEconomy
By Giles Parkinson
4 July 2013
The 110MW Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Plant, a concentrated solar power project due to be completed in Nevada early next year, will not just be the largest solar power tower plant with fully integrated energy storage built – it could also challenge the way the world thinks about renewable energy. Or even energy sources in general.

The $1 billion Crescent Dunes project near Tonopah in the Central Nevada Desert, some 300kms north of Las Vegas, was developed by the Santa Monica-based SolarReserve and features the company’s market leading molten salt power tower technology with fully integrated energy storage.



What makes it unique and a potential game changer in the electricity industry is the flexibility and dispatchability of its power, meaning that it can deliver electricity whenever it is needed by customers; and its cost, which already beats diesel, is competitive with new build coal and gas generation.

The Crescent Dunes facility will have 10 hours of molten salt storage, which on average will allow it to deliver 110MW of baseload capacity to Las Vegas between the hours of 12 noon and midnight each day, when the city needs it most to power the lights and air conditioning of its casinos and entertainment palaces. It has signed a 25-year power contract with NV Energy, Nevada’s largest utility, to do that.

Tom Georgis, SolarReserve’s senior vice president of development, says the unique capabilities of the technology means that the plant could have been configured in any number of ways. With a 180MW turbine, for instance, it could have produced power for 10 hours each day, which was the original intention. With a smaller turbine, and more than 20 hours storage, it could have delivered 50MW of base-load power 24/7.

In the end, Nevada pitched for midday to midnight to suit its needs. In effect, the plant is providing baseload power for a fixed period each day – delivering the benefits of coal-fired power without the downsides, which is of course heavy pollution and an ability to be switched off at will or at regular intervals.

"You can’t do that with a coal fired facility,” Georgis says of the Nevada contract. But the technology also allows it to compete with gas-fired generation, both in the ability to provide baseload and as a peaking plant.

Next year, SolarReserve begins construction of the 150MW Rice Solar Energy Plant in Southern California, which will act more like a peaking power station to suit that state’s needs. Proposals the company will take to Chile, Australia and the Middle East will likely be for baseload power. (We will explain more about those plans in the next two days).

“This should be the winning technology. It has all the attributes you looking for to displace conventional generation,” Georgis says. “It’s not just fulfilling renewable energy targets, you are displacing any new build fossil plants – from nuclear, gas and coal. This is going to change the discussion in energy markets, certainly around the idea that renewables are variable.”

Georgis says there is a lot of confusion about storage and what it means. He says the way to think about it is in the amount of electricity produced by a solar tower plant over a year.

With the standard “S-Class” configuration of the plant, the design being built at Tonopah, the plant can produce over 500 GigaWatt/hours (500 Billion Watt/hours) of electricity a year in strong solar locations such as Western Australia and the Southwest USA. That can be sliced and diced whichever way a customer – be it a utility, industrial group or a miner – chooses. And that can be in 24/7 base-load, delivering electricity at specific times of the day as in Nevada, or as a peaking plant.

“We are not just a renewable energy generator, we can integrate and help firm and shape other variable energy sources,” Georgis says. ”It will run in summer for 16-18 hours a day. But I can turn down the turbine and run it 24/7 if the utility asks me to do so.“

To emphasise the point, Georgis points to the following graphics that show the output from a solar PV plant, and a solar tower plant without storage. The big square blocks – coloured green and yellow – are two output scenarios from the tower with storage, but it can be reshaped and timed to suit the customer’s needs. Grid operators and many customers like big square blocks.



See our explainer to see more about how the technology works.

The other key point, and this is the critical one, is in price.

The Nevada project has a publicly disclosed power purchase agreement of $US135/MWh with NV Energy. The project is supported by cheaper finance from the Department of Energy Loan Guarantee Program, and tax incentives, but Georgis says it is also the first of its kind to be built at this scale and has extra margins and contingencies typical of a first plant.

For this reason, Georgis says $135/MWh should be viewed as a reasonable estimate of costs, because by the time the fourth or fifth plant has been constructed, the capital costs will have come down dramatically.

Georgis says that even without incentives, the LCOE would be “well south” of $200/MWh. In Chile, where the excellent solar resources means that the output is 40 per cent greater (around 700GWh a year), the price is already at $135/MWh without any incentives.

“By 2020, we should be south of $100/MWh (in the US, Australia and elsewhere) and not reliant on any type of government subsidy or incentive program”, he says. That is key, because as Bloomberg New Energy Finance noted, new coal fired and gas fired plants are already more expensive, and will be well north of that figure by 2020.

And Georgis says the generation facility can participate in any kind of energy market. “If you have a flexible dispatch market, a storage market, or a capacity market, it can participate in all of those. It can even play in the merchant market with a robust price,” he says.



The Crescent Dunes plant will not be the first of its type, but it will be the biggest to date, and the first built to what Georgis describes as “utility scale”. The 18MW Gemasolar plant (pictured) has been operating in Spain for the last 18 months, and the 10MW Solar Two demonstration facility near Barstow in California’s Mojave Desert was operated by the Department of Energy in the 1990s.

SolarReserve has the exclusive worldwide license to the technology which was developed by Rocketdyne, a subsidiary of Aerojet, and perfected during various space programs. These include the algorithms for the solar trackers that move the heliostats, and the receiver, which uses proprietary metallurgy technology that allows it to expand and contract, and to resist melting.

The company currently has 7 projects in various stages of development the US, two of which have power purchase agreements (Crescent Dunes and Rice), and six projects in Spain, including one (the 50MW Cinco Casas project) with a PPA, although the Spanish projects are not progressing at the moment because financing is difficult to obtain in the current market. SolarReserve is pursuing contracts in Chile, South Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, China and Australia.

Sorry but in your post where you quoted the info it said that plant will only provide power between noon and midnight

So that means it doesn't produce power for half of every day

Last time I checked something that only works 12 out of every 24 hours is intermittent by definition

See, there it is again, EmptySkull....this is exactly why I said in my last post: "you are soooooo fucking stupid and incapable of understanding what you read."

And, of course, you were too lazy and stupid to read the second article in my last post that clearly explained all this, you flaming retard.

You got it completely wrong, moron.

This is what it said in the original article about the Crescent Dunes Solar Plant...

"US company Solar Reserve is currently putting the finishing touches to the 110MW Crescent Dunes solar tower and storage plant in Tonopah, Nevada. With 10 hours of storage, it will deliver a block of power each day to service Las Vegas between noon and until 12am or 2am."

This is the further explanation in the second article that you obviously ignored, like the clueless dumbfuck that you obviously are...

The Crescent Dunes facility will have 10 hours of molten salt storage, which on average will allow it to deliver 110MW of baseload capacity to Las Vegas between the hours of 12 noon and midnight each day, when the city needs it most to power the lights and air conditioning of its casinos and entertainment palaces. It has signed a 25-year power contract with NV Energy, Nevada’s largest utility, to do that.

Tom Georgis, SolarReserve’s senior vice president of development, says the unique capabilities of the technology means that the plant could have been configured in any number of ways. With a 180MW turbine, for instance, it could have produced power for 10 hours each day, which was the original intention. With a smaller turbine, and more than 20 hours storage, it could have delivered 50MW of base-load power 24/7.

In the end, Nevada pitched for midday to midnight to suit its needs. In effect, the plant is providing baseload power for a fixed period each day – delivering the benefits of coal-fired power without the downsides, which is of course heavy pollution and an ability to be switched off at will or at regular intervals.

"You can’t do that with a coal fired facility,” Georgis says of the Nevada contract. But the technology also allows it to compete with gas-fired generation, both in the ability to provide baseload and as a peaking plant.

Next year, SolarReserve begins construction of the 150MW Rice Solar Energy Plant in Southern California, which will act more like a peaking power station to suit that state’s needs.

“This should be the winning technology. It has all the attributes you looking for to displace conventional generation,” Georgis says. “It’s not just fulfilling renewable energy targets, you are displacing any new build fossil plants – from nuclear, gas and coal. This is going to change the discussion in energy markets, certainly around the idea that renewables are variable.”

Georgis says there is a lot of confusion about storage and what it means. He says the way to think about it is in the amount of electricity produced by a solar tower plant over a year.

With the standard “S-Class” configuration of the plant, the design being built at Tonopah, the plant can produce over 500 GigaWatt/hours (500 Billion Watt/hours) of electricity a year in strong solar locations such as Western Australia and the Southwest USA. That can be sliced and diced whichever way a customer – be it a utility, industrial group or a miner – chooses. And that can be in 24/7 base-load, or delivering electricity at specific times of the day as in Nevada, or as a peaking plant.

“We are not just a renewable energy generator, we can integrate and help firm and shape other variable energy sources,” Georgis says. ”It will run in summer for 16-18 hours a day. But I can turn down the turbine and run it 24/7 if the utility asks me to do so.“

So it provides base load by reducing output ( turning down the turbine)

None of that shit you quote is proven it's all hypothetical

Let's see what happens in reality because every single wind and solar plant under performs its stated output by a significant margin

Solar cannot provide base load power for the country today and estimates are that we will double our power usage by 2050 and triple it by 2100 then factor in that transmission of electricity over distance is not cost effective so the power never really get to where it's needed most

Not to mention solar is one of the dirtiest technologies to produce far more so than nuclear in fact

All of your fears of nuclear power are irrational. And 4th generation reactors which we so shortsightedly dismiss thanks to idiots like Kerry and Clinton
Will do more for the environment that any of your wind and solar fantasies

 

[Skull Pilot]

So, pie-in-the-sky fantasy reactors count, but the very real wind and solar sources don't.

Again, if these reactors are so wonderful, why isn't anyone building them anywhere in the world?

When you ignore the realities of intermittent power sources that will never be able to supply base load energy demands now never mind the increased demand in just a few years from now then yous you have pie in your eye.

Wind and solar PLUS energy storage EQUALS no intermittency problem, moron, as was demonstrated by the Crescent Dunes solar plant discussed in post #99.

So the solar plant works at night?

Yup, that's right....the plant can produce a constant energy flow all night, even when the sun isn't shining, from the molten salt energy storage system that has been previously heated by the sun during the daytime.

Solar and wind by definition are intermittent because the wind does not blow all the time sometimes it blows too much and turbines have to be braked and the sun does not shine at night

More ignorant bullshit. First off, wind is stronger at night, so solar and wind tend to balance each other on the grid. Then, add energy storage of one kind or another, and the intermittency 'problem' disappears.

The new solar concentrating plants with molten salt storage can function as solar 'peaker plants' instead of needing to use natural gas fired power plants to maintain grid stability. These new solar plants HAVE NO INTERMITTENCY PROBLEM, bozo.

Oh and this is from you post 99
"US company Solar Reserve is currently putting the finishing touches to the 110MW Crescent Dunes solar tower and storage plant in Tonopah, Nevada. With 10 hours of storage, it will deliver a block of power each day to service Las Vegas between noon and until 12am or 2am."
So it does not provide power between 12 AM and 12 PM or IOW it is interfuckingmittent

Oh, dude....you are soooooo fucking stupid and incapable of understanding what you read. LOLOLOL....

Try harder on this one, dumbfuck....

Solar towers and storage – about to change the energy game?
RenewEconomy
By Giles Parkinson
4 July 2013
The 110MW Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Plant, a concentrated solar power project due to be completed in Nevada early next year, will not just be the largest solar power tower plant with fully integrated energy storage built – it could also challenge the way the world thinks about renewable energy. Or even energy sources in general.

The $1 billion Crescent Dunes project near Tonopah in the Central Nevada Desert, some 300kms north of Las Vegas, was developed by the Santa Monica-based SolarReserve and features the company’s market leading molten salt power tower technology with fully integrated energy storage.



What makes it unique and a potential game changer in the electricity industry is the flexibility and dispatchability of its power, meaning that it can deliver electricity whenever it is needed by customers; and its cost, which already beats diesel, is competitive with new build coal and gas generation.

The Crescent Dunes facility will have 10 hours of molten salt storage, which on average will allow it to deliver 110MW of baseload capacity to Las Vegas between the hours of 12 noon and midnight each day, when the city needs it most to power the lights and air conditioning of its casinos and entertainment palaces. It has signed a 25-year power contract with NV Energy, Nevada’s largest utility, to do that.

Tom Georgis, SolarReserve’s senior vice president of development, says the unique capabilities of the technology means that the plant could have been configured in any number of ways. With a 180MW turbine, for instance, it could have produced power for 10 hours each day, which was the original intention. With a smaller turbine, and more than 20 hours storage, it could have delivered 50MW of base-load power 24/7.

In the end, Nevada pitched for midday to midnight to suit its needs. In effect, the plant is providing baseload power for a fixed period each day – delivering the benefits of coal-fired power without the downsides, which is of course heavy pollution and an ability to be switched off at will or at regular intervals.

"You can’t do that with a coal fired facility,” Georgis says of the Nevada contract. But the technology also allows it to compete with gas-fired generation, both in the ability to provide baseload and as a peaking plant.

Next year, SolarReserve begins construction of the 150MW Rice Solar Energy Plant in Southern California, which will act more like a peaking power station to suit that state’s needs. Proposals the company will take to Chile, Australia and the Middle East will likely be for baseload power. (We will explain more about those plans in the next two days).

“This should be the winning technology. It has all the attributes you looking for to displace conventional generation,” Georgis says. “It’s not just fulfilling renewable energy targets, you are displacing any new build fossil plants – from nuclear, gas and coal. This is going to change the discussion in energy markets, certainly around the idea that renewables are variable.”

Georgis says there is a lot of confusion about storage and what it means. He says the way to think about it is in the amount of electricity produced by a solar tower plant over a year.

With the standard “S-Class” configuration of the plant, the design being built at Tonopah, the plant can produce over 500 GigaWatt/hours (500 Billion Watt/hours) of electricity a year in strong solar locations such as Western Australia and the Southwest USA. That can be sliced and diced whichever way a customer – be it a utility, industrial group or a miner – chooses. And that can be in 24/7 base-load, delivering electricity at specific times of the day as in Nevada, or as a peaking plant.

“We are not just a renewable energy generator, we can integrate and help firm and shape other variable energy sources,” Georgis says. ”It will run in summer for 16-18 hours a day. But I can turn down the turbine and run it 24/7 if the utility asks me to do so.“

To emphasise the point, Georgis points to the following graphics that show the output from a solar PV plant, and a solar tower plant without storage. The big square blocks – coloured green and yellow – are two output scenarios from the tower with storage, but it can be reshaped and timed to suit the customer’s needs. Grid operators and many customers like big square blocks.



See our explainer to see more about how the technology works.

The other key point, and this is the critical one, is in price.

The Nevada project has a publicly disclosed power purchase agreement of $US135/MWh with NV Energy. The project is supported by cheaper finance from the Department of Energy Loan Guarantee Program, and tax incentives, but Georgis says it is also the first of its kind to be built at this scale and has extra margins and contingencies typical of a first plant.

For this reason, Georgis says $135/MWh should be viewed as a reasonable estimate of costs, because by the time the fourth or fifth plant has been constructed, the capital costs will have come down dramatically.

Georgis says that even without incentives, the LCOE would be “well south” of $200/MWh. In Chile, where the excellent solar resources means that the output is 40 per cent greater (around 700GWh a year), the price is already at $135/MWh without any incentives.

“By 2020, we should be south of $100/MWh (in the US, Australia and elsewhere) and not reliant on any type of government subsidy or incentive program”, he says. That is key, because as Bloomberg New Energy Finance noted, new coal fired and gas fired plants are already more expensive, and will be well north of that figure by 2020.

And Georgis says the generation facility can participate in any kind of energy market. “If you have a flexible dispatch market, a storage market, or a capacity market, it can participate in all of those. It can even play in the merchant market with a robust price,” he says.



The Crescent Dunes plant will not be the first of its type, but it will be the biggest to date, and the first built to what Georgis describes as “utility scale”. The 18MW Gemasolar plant (pictured) has been operating in Spain for the last 18 months, and the 10MW Solar Two demonstration facility near Barstow in California’s Mojave Desert was operated by the Department of Energy in the 1990s.

SolarReserve has the exclusive worldwide license to the technology which was developed by Rocketdyne, a subsidiary of Aerojet, and perfected during various space programs. These include the algorithms for the solar trackers that move the heliostats, and the receiver, which uses proprietary metallurgy technology that allows it to expand and contract, and to resist melting.

The company currently has 7 projects in various stages of development the US, two of which have power purchase agreements (Crescent Dunes and Rice), and six projects in Spain, including one (the 50MW Cinco Casas project) with a PPA, although the Spanish projects are not progressing at the moment because financing is difficult to obtain in the current market. SolarReserve is pursuing contracts in Chile, South Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, China and Australia.

Sorry but in your post where you quoted the info it said that plant will only provide power between noon and midnight

So that means it doesn't produce power for half of every day

Last time I checked something that only works 12 out of every 24 hours is intermittent by definition

Skull, are you being purposely obtuse? They are delivering the power in the manner the customer requested it. They have the capability of delivering a constant rate of power 24/7, but that is not what the customer requested. And the storage capacity gives them the ability to adjust their delivery times with short notice. A win-win for all.

It might work on a small regional scale it will never work for the entire country.

A 4th generation nuclear station would provide all that power with less land waste and run at 90% capacity 24/7 for 60 years or more

 

[Skull Pilot]

The Fantasy of 100% Renewable Energy | Opinion | The Harvard Crimson

 

[skookerasbil]

Its not even debatable anymore that wind and solar will forever be a fantasy of the left......they've been touting both for 20 years and its still a joke. Will be for decades too......

I am no nuclear advocate though that's for sure........the devastation from Fukishima will be effecting us all for years to come.

 

[Old Rocks]

Except no one has built a fourth generation nuke. And there is a good chance that no one will. Economics will decide that, and right now, economics favor renewables.