Pages

Jump to bottom

5 comments

1 lostlakehiker  Feb 19, 2015 5:48:07pm

Put pictures of cats and hawks on skyscraper windows and you’ve offset the bird kill from those solar projects ten times over.

Or put a drone hawk, solar powered of course, to soaring just outside the kill zone. Or just inside it, if it can take the heat.

Serious problems, such as climate change, demand serious, sober responses. We can’t let ourselves get derailed by fundamentally trivial problems such as bird no-fly zones. Given the habitat, to offset bird kills, all that is necessary is that the remaining nesters come through in the clutch.
///

2 goddamnedfrank  Feb 19, 2015 8:48:30pm

Heliostats are falling out of favor anyway, because photovoltaics keeps getting cheaper and cheaper as economy of scale and better technology kicks in. Photovoltaics are also distributed, and will end up incorporated into residential roofing designs. Heliostats are a dying tech at this point, they were a reasonable looking option about five to ten years ago but advancements in PV efficiency mean that concentrators just can’t compete on a cost per kilowatt basis anymore.

For one thing concentrators like this are comparatively a very complicated technology. That might seem counterintuitive, but the article fails to mention that the plant doesn’t heat the water directly. Instead it melts about 70 million pounds of salt in a closed loop, which acts as a gigantic heat reservoir. The molten salt is then cycled through a secondary stage, which is where the water gets boiled and the steam drives the turbines. The advantage of course is that you can boil the water at night. The disadvantage is all that apparatus has to be maintained, which costs money. Also it takes two months to melt all that salt, that’s a lot of unproductive wind up time for a project, meaning the plant can’t just shut down for routine repairs to the primary loop and then restart quickly. All of the inertia problems of a nuclear plant with none of the benefits.

If you need it you can get all of the energy storage by simply pumping water uphill during the day and running traditional hydro turbines at night, without the wastage or the need for expensive condensers to minimize wastage.

Anyway, point being there probably won’t be too many projects like this built. I’m not aware of any new ones under review in the US, the one’s coming online were planned many years ago, and they’re only coming online at all because of sunk costs, to try and recoup some of their investor’s money. Otherwise time has pretty much passed this idea by.

3 lostlakehiker  Feb 19, 2015 9:51:20pm

Agreed. I am so heartened by the trend in photovoltaics. I expect that we’ll end up with both distributed PV’s on a bunch of roofs, and some PV farms out in the desert. And quite a bit of wind power—-poor birds, there go a few more. And even some new-tech nuclear plants, for when it absolutely positively has to be on day and night wind or calm.

There will need to be some regulatory reforms. We’ll need some high-voltage DC power lines, and the NV nuclear waste repository will have to be made operational. Also, we need an end to NIMBY suits blocking offshore wind power and other environmentally sound but perhaps vexing-to-the-rich measures. Or at least, an end to successful NIMBY suits.

4 Jack Burton  Feb 20, 2015 12:19:24am

I posted this story to Facebook (with some Fallout: New Vegas references of course) and one of my friends pointed out that the “related news” links that showed up under it in his feed was this:

sciencenews.org

So the threat to birds this represents is statistically zero.

5 Varek Raith  Feb 20, 2015 3:58:29am

I chuckled.
How bad a person does this make me?
/


This page has been archived.
Comments are closed.

Jump to top

Create a PageThis is the LGF Pages posting bookmarklet. To use it, drag this button to your browser's bookmark bar, and title it 'LGF Pages' (or whatever you like). Then browse to a site you want to post, select some text on the page to use for a quote, click the bookmarklet, and the Pages posting window will appear with the title, text, and any embedded video or audio files already filled in, ready to go.
Or... you can just click this button to open the Pages posting window right away.
Last updated: 2023-04-04 11:11 am PDT
LGF User's Guide RSS Feeds

Help support Little Green Footballs!

Subscribe now for ad-free access!Register and sign in to a free LGF account before subscribing, and your ad-free access will be automatically enabled.

Donate with
PayPal
Cash.app
Recent PagesClick to refresh