Go Solar

[Maia Gabrial]

Here's a tidbit of news maybe no one has heard about yet. It's from ECETI News:


The Solar thing just got a little more interesting.......REALLY!
The Tonopah Solar company in Harry Reid's Nevada is getting a $737 million loan from Obama's DOE.
The project will produce a 110 megawatt power system and employ 45 permanent workers.
That's costing us just $16 million per job.
One of the investment partners in this endeavor is Pacific Corporate Group (PCG).
The PCG executive director is Ron Pelosi who is the brother to Nancy's husband.
Just move along folks.....nuthin goin on here.


Isn't this just great news? :tsk:

[Lazlo]

A couple of points need to be made:

This project is not conventional PV (photovoltaics), it is CSP(concentrating solar power). It will heat a medium that powers a traditional spinning turbine. The medium holds heat so the plant can deliver power for several hours after the sun goes down.
The math on how much per job is entirely disingenuous.
The loan is not a give away, It is a term loan that is repaid through electricity sales. It is not like the Solyndra deal at all.

Pelosi or not, this is good technology that is proven.

[ghostrider]

what happened the last time over a half a billion was given to an energy company ? I am tired of them giving MY money to companies that do nothing but give me the shaft in return for them getting My money...

[Lazlo]

what happened the last time over a half a billion was given to an energy company ? I am tired of them giving MY money to companies that do nothing but give me the shaft in return for them getting My money...


Like I said, this is NOT Solyndra. The Solyndra loan was to expand manufacturing so that they could sell solar panels to others. This was like giving money to a TV manufacturer so that they could make a new brand to sell at Walmart.

Tonopah already has a power purchase agreement to sell the electricity. We are talking apples and oranges. The Tonopah loan is to build a power plant that has a long term agreement to deliver electricity into the grid.

Would you prefer that we spent more money on mountaintop removal coal mining or hydrofracturing? How about "next generation" nuclear? Traditional power gets subsidies that make this $765,000,000 look like chump change and you have been paying your tax dollars into that your entire life.

[sygh]

A couple of points need to be made:

This project is not conventional PV (photovoltaics), it is CSP(concentrating solar power). It will heat a medium that powers a traditional spinning turbine. The medium holds heat so the plant can deliver power for several hours after the sun goes down.
The math on how much per job is entirely disingenuous.
The loan is not a give away, It is a term loan that is repaid through electricity sales. It is not like the Solyndra deal at all.

Pelosi or not, this is good technology that is proven.

I agree with you, this consentrating plant is feasible and will work to offset over-taxing the baseline grid. What I don't like is inbred cronyism. There are many, many other companies who are probably better equipt to handle this, although insider trading probably bought, or rented a bunch of land in Nevada to do this. That is the problem!!!!! Who can go any further than these insiders? While I applaude doing something, which is better than wishing your life away, I don't go for blatant moves made by insiders like this. This is how bad it really is here, in America. LOok at it, and see it for what it really is. Favoritism. Whose beer guzzling brother was nickmaned Billy and used the oval office to sell Billy Beer?

[ghostrider]

THEY already have free energy, since 1900, tesla built it. GE bought the pattent. buried it. they all chose money over freedom .

[Lazlo]

sygh,

Agreed on the cronyism, but forgive me if I play devil's advocate for just a moment.

There aren't that many companies that can pull this off, and to my understanding, Pelosi was involved in the development-PPA phase and won't be getting any long term kickbacks from this.

These deals are incredibly complex and often, a phone call from the right person is all the difference.

I am in the midst of a solar project that is quite a bit larger than this right now. If a phone call from someone with the right connections could get it across the finish line, everyone (including the world at large) would be better off for it.

At the end of the day, it's a group of people sitting around a table hashing out the details and trying to work past the sticking points.

[TWINCANS]

what happened the last time over a half a billion was given to an energy company ? I am tired of them giving MY money to companies that do nothing but give me the shaft in return for them getting My money...


Like I said, this is NOT Solyndra. The Solyndra loan was to expand manufacturing so that they could sell solar panels to others. This was like giving money to a TV manufacturer so that they could make a new brand to sell at Walmart.

Tonopah already has a power purchase agreement to sell the electricity. We are talking apples and oranges. The Tonopah loan is to build a power plant that has a long term agreement to deliver electricity into the grid.

Would you prefer that we spent more money on mountaintop removal coal mining or hydrofracturing? How about "next generation" nuclear? Traditional power gets subsidies that make this $765,000,000 look like chump change and you have been paying your tax dollars into that your entire life.

No I would rather that solar be given back to us. Since when is the only economic model the big energy companies? I want solar to be developed that homeowners can purchase and put on their own private property and heat their own home. The only reason solar is so long in coming is that every step of the way has been carefully mapped out to keep it from our own ownership.

[Lazlo]

what happened the last time over a half a billion was given to an energy company ? I am tired of them giving MY money to companies that do nothing but give me the shaft in return for them getting My money...


Like I said, this is NOT Solyndra. The Solyndra loan was to expand manufacturing so that they could sell solar panels to others. This was like giving money to a TV manufacturer so that they could make a new brand to sell at Walmart.

Tonopah already has a power purchase agreement to sell the electricity. We are talking apples and oranges. The Tonopah loan is to build a power plant that has a long term agreement to deliver electricity into the grid.

Would you prefer that we spent more money on mountaintop removal coal mining or hydrofracturing? How about "next generation" nuclear? Traditional power gets subsidies that make this $765,000,000 look like chump change and you have been paying your tax dollars into that your entire life.

No I would rather that solar be given back to us. Since when is the only economic model the big energy companies? I want solar to be developed that homeowners can purchase and put on their own private property and heat their own home. The only reason solar is so long in coming is that every step of the way has been carefully mapped out to keep it from our own ownership.

This is a common misconception. There are fundamental limits to the amount of any intermittent resource that can be placed on the grid. This conversation is very complex and would take pages and pages to lay out. Short story is that utilities are mandated to provide reliable power, and renewables can destabilize the grid above certain percentages, roughly 20%. Iowa has so much wind energy on line that a couple of years ago, there was a freak gust followed by a lull that came within a hair's breadth of putting most of North America in the dark.

Homeowners CAN purchase their own, but the bottom line is that it really is terribly inefficient and costs twice as much per kilowatt/hour as centralized production. VERY few private residences are situated so that solar can be an economic option. I see it all too often that a company sells a small PV system to a homeowner with big promises as to how much the system will produce. Solar module efficiency is low enough that a shadow from a vent pipe, the neighbor's tree, or a nearby utility pole lowers production so that the system never pays for itself. They never tell you that the inverters are only designed to last 10 years and that this is not included in the payback calculations. Never mind the environmental problems with batteries.

Try this on for size: Phoenix is an area that has great solar resources. Using the best available battery technology, you would have to have enough batteries to fill up Cardinal stadium to the brim, like a swimming pool, in order to have enough electircity stored from solar panels to keep the lights on between sunset and midnight. Unless we have a breakthrough as fundamental as Maxwell's (Tesla/zpg energy is a moot point if the bad guys aren't going to let it go, if they do solar is about as useful as a horse and buggy to modern society), solar is never going to fill even a sizable portion of our energy needs.

Hospitals and server farms, etc on down the line need a stable supply of baseload energy 24/7. Do you want that baseload to come from renewables or carbon based technologies? Solar is a tiny slice of the energy pie. However, the energy pie is colossal, and I have met very few people who are even able to grasp just how big it is. The little slice that can go to solar is enormous in itself, and we are decades away from filling up that slice, even if we build these big projects at a breakneck pace.

One company went belly up on a federal loan guarantee. Don't use it as an excuse to smear the industry. Solyndra had some poor management and some difficult timing issues, but the technology is good. We put some of their pre-production modules on one of our projects. Solyndra was the best option for solar on buildings with white mebrane roofing. It was good because you didn't have to make a bunch of penetrations in the roofing. You didn't have to add ballast to hold the modules down. It was light enough that you didn't get into loading issues on value engineered roofs (No one makes a roof twice as strong as necessary because they like spending money).

For every 500 roofs that we look at, only a handful are actually even suitable for installing solar. With Solyndra gone, that number dropped by half. I honestly hope that someone else can buy the Solyndra patents and get a similar product back on the market.

I am a believer in solar energy. It is what I do for a living. I want it to succeed as much as anyone else. If we are really going to solve the big energy puzzle, it is going to take small residential solar, and big centralized solar, and wind, and hydro, and wave, and efficiency, and clean coal, and biofuels, and cold fusion, and natural gas, and smart grid, and, and, and...

[Maia Gabrial]

Re: Go Solar
Posted by ghostrider (here)
what happened the last time over a half a billion was given to an energy company ? I am tired of them giving MY money to companies that do nothing but give me the shaft in return for them getting My money...

Like I said, this is NOT Solyndra. The Solyndra loan was to expand manufacturing so that they could sell solar panels to others. This was like giving money to a TV manufacturer so that they could make a new brand to sell at Walmart.

Tonopah already has a power purchase agreement to sell the electricity. We are talking apples and oranges. The Tonopah loan is to build a power plant that has a long term agreement to deliver electricity into the grid.

Would you prefer that we spent more money on mountaintop removal coal mining or hydrofracturing? How about "next generation" nuclear? Traditional power gets subsidies that make this $765,000,000 look like chump change and you have been paying your tax dollars into that your entire life.

I don't know if their technology is better. Don't care. But I do believe that this is just to kee us dependent on technologies that are controlled by them, outdate for this century, polluting our lives, expensive for us, all the while continuing to make them richer. The free technologies exist, but not for us, it seems. I guess it'll have to pried out of their dead hands before they release it to us. The point is that they all seem to be scratching each others backs at our expense. I believe it's called "nepotism"....

[TWINCANS]

The idea being demanded here is the 'off grid' option. Obviously.

[Lazlo]

The idea being demanded here is the 'off grid' option. Obviously.

Yes, off the grid is another discussion entirely. The first house I built (a cabin really) was off the grid and built 90% with locally harvested or recycled materials. It was a great lifestlyle for me and the dog, but starting a family changed the situation ;)