True that solar thermal is fairly easy to implement and cost effective at home for certain apps, but pigeon holing corporations certainly isn't a reasonable approach to anything. Like individuals, groups of individuals can be bad or good or whatever in between.smallpoxgirl wrote:Corporate types love big these monster projects that they can make big bank off of, but smaller personal systems make way better sense.
Professor Membrane wrote: Not now son, I'm making ... TOAST!
The_Virginian wrote:SPG,
Keep in mind not everyone owns their own property...and not everyone has the gumption and brains to start a project like that and make sure the contractor doesn't "rip them a new one."
smallpoxgirl wrote:The_Virginian wrote:SPG,
Keep in mind not everyone owns their own property...and not everyone has the gumption and brains to start a project like that and make sure the contractor doesn't "rip them a new one."
Obviously. But if you're looking for societal solutions to energy requirements, it's a really dumb approach to build inefficient homes and monster solar energy plants. Intelligently designing housing is a far more sustainable solution than building monster solar plants all over the place. Makes no sense to be wasting all the sun that falls on your house and then trying to collect sunshine 200 miles away and pipe it through wires to your house.
IslandCrow wrote:Myths about Solar Energy
"Solar energy only works in the daytime, and it can't provide the reliable power we need."
Solar thermal power plants can store energy during daylight hours and generate power when it's needed. Ausra's power plants collect the sun's energy as heat; Ausra is developing thermal energy storage systems which can store enough heat to run the power plant for up to 20 hours during dark or cloudy periods....
This and other myths according to the company behind the technology
What is there to back up?The_Virginian wrote:IslandCrow wrote:Myths about Solar Energy
"Solar energy only works in the daytime, and it can't provide the reliable power we need."
Solar thermal power plants can store energy during daylight hours and generate power when it's needed. Ausra's power plants collect the sun's energy as heat; Ausra is developing thermal energy storage systems which can store enough heat to run the power plant for up to 20 hours during dark or cloudy periods....
This and other myths according to the company behind the technology
I saw N O T H I N G on their site to back up what they said...
It was a Joke...
Professor Membrane wrote: Not now son, I'm making ... TOAST!
The_Virginian wrote:I saw N O T H I N G on their site to back up what they said...It was a Joke...IslandCrow wrote:This and other myths according to the company behind the technologyMyths about Solar Energy"Solar energy only works in the daytime, and it can't provide the reliable power we need."
Solar thermal power plants can store energy during daylight hours and generate power when it's needed. Ausra's power plants collect the sun's energy as heat; Ausra is developing thermal energy storage systems which can store enough heat to run the power plant for up to 20 hours during dark or cloudy periods....
The energy storage aspect is where it doesn't compete w/o including externalized costs since it has to go up against nuclear/coal baseload when there isn't much if any demand, but as for daytime use it's getting close even w/o including externalized costs since it's competing w/ NG peaker plants and alla that.TheDude wrote:Mega Solar : the World’s 13 Biggest Solar Thermal Energy Projects. Some of these are in the 500 MW range so it is proven tech, just isn't cost-competitive with FFs quite yet. The energy storage aspect is attractive, but most grand schemes for solar power I've seen go down the route of massive buildup of PV and huge storage systems - or global grids.
Professor Membrane wrote: Not now son, I'm making ... TOAST!
[...]
That's putting it mildly. A solar land rush is rolling across the desert Southwest. Goldman Sachs, utilities PG&E and FPL, Silicon Valley startups, Israeli and German solar firms, Chevron, speculators - all are scrambling to lock up hundreds of thousands of acres of long-worthless land now coveted as sites for solar power plants.
The race has barely begun - finished plants are years away - but it's blazing fastest in the Mojave, where the federal government controls immense stretches of some of the world's best solar real estate right next to the nation's biggest electricity markets. Just 20 months ago only five applications for solar sites had been filed with the BLM in the California Mojave. Today 104 claims have been received for nearly a million acres of land, representing a theoretical 60 gigawatts of electricity. (The entire state of California currently consumes 33 gigawatts annually.)
[...]
DoomWarrior wrote:Some buyers "are paying upwards of $10,000 an acre for desert dirt that a few years ago would have sold for $500."
Stunning ......
It depends on what CA does w/ Carbon credits/incentives.KingM wrote:I don't care if you're a doomer or a cornucopian, this has bad investment written all over it.
Professor Membrane wrote: Not now son, I'm making ... TOAST!
frankthetank wrote:Wouldn't it make more sense to put panels on the roof of houses and tie it into the grid? Also wouldn't solar hot water even make more sense considering how much heat is produced each day by hot water heaters that currently run on gas or electricity?
frankthetank wrote:Wouldn't it make more sense to put panels on the roof of houses and tie it into the grid? Also wouldn't solar hot water even make more sense considering how much heat is produced each day by hot water heaters that currently run on gas or electricity?
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