"If we cannot put solar power plants in the Mojave desert...

[boutons_deux]

I wonder how the mirrors do at surviving a direct hit by a bird as it falls from the sky?

even if a mirror was cracked, there's a lot redundancy in 1000s of mirrors. I suppose engineers have chosen glass strong enough to resist common hits

[Winehole23]

But for all its scale and beauty, in terms of the future of renewables, Ivanpah is already irrelevant.

Solar thermal creates electricity by using mirrors to direct intense amounts of heat at a centralized collector, which is used to heat a substance like water to create steam power. Solar photovoltaic, meanwhile, directly converts solar energy into electricity through semiconductors.


If solar thermal sounds unnecessarily complicated, you're right. Solar photovoltaic has seen explosive growth in the past few years thanks to plummeting material costs, state incentives, and eco-conscious homebuyers putting up panels on their roofs. But solar thermal growth has stalled, and is expected to continue to do so. Ivanpah cost $2.2 billion. Warren Buffett paid the same amount for the world's largest photovoltaic plant just up the road outside Bakersfield. That plant will generate 1.5-times as much power as Ivanpah.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/ivanp...#ixzz2ttRWvOZM

[boutons_deux]

Two solar projects approved on public lands in California and Nevada

http://touch.latimes.com/#section/17.../p2p-79368653/

[Winehole23]

“The whole world of electricity storage has been using metal ions in various charge states but there is a limited number that you can put into solution and use to store energy, and none of them can economically store massive amounts of renewable energy,” Gordon said. “With organic molecules, we introduce a vast new set of possibilities. Some of them will be terrible and some will be really good. With these quinones we have the first ones that look really good.”

http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/201...newable-energy

[boutons_deux]

MIT’s Liquid Metal Stores Solar Power Until After Sundown

A 40-foot trailer loaded with 25 tons of liquid metals may be the solution to the renewable-energy industry’s biggest challenge: making sure electricity is available whenever it’s needed.

A Boston-area startup founded by MIT researchers is working to turn this new concept into a commercially viable product, liquid-metal batteries that will store power for less than $500 a kilowatt-hour.

That’s less than a third the cost of some current battery technologies.

The technology promises an alternative to the massive pumped-water systems that make up 95 percent of U.S. energy-storage capacity. At that price, developers will be able to build wind and solar projects that can deliver power to the grid anytime, making renewable energy as reliable as natural gas and coal without the greenhouse-gas emissions.

“If we can get liquid-metal batteries down to $500 a kilowatt-hour, we’ll change the world,” Donald Sadoway, chief scientific adviser at Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Ambri Inc., said in an interview.
Power storage will compensate for the intermittent nature of renewable energy. Batteries can store energy when the wind blows at night, and then send electricity to the grid the next day when it’s needed.

First Prototypes

Ambri won a $250,000 grant Feb. 5 from New York state to develop and test a prototype battery with Con Edison Inc. The company, backed by investors including billionaires Bill Gates and Vinod Khosla, plans to install its first two prototypes by early 2015 at a Massachusetts military base and a wind farm in Hawaii. It opened its first manufacturing facility in November and is planning a larger one next year.

Ambri is the first company to pursue liquid-metal storage and the technology has the potential to reshape the battery industry, said Brian Warshay, an energy smart technologies analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance in New York.

“There’s nothing out there quite like it,” Warshay said. “If they can get under $500 a kilowatt-hour, that would be a really good price point.”

Sadoway, who is also the John F. Elliott professor of materials chemistry at Massachusetts Ins ute of Technology, wouldn’t say what goes into liquid-metal batteries. They use materials that are “abundant” and easy to harvest from the earth, which is key to making them cost effective.

‘Dirt Cheap’

“To make it dirt-cheap you have to make it out of dirt,” he said. Earlier versions used molten magnesium and antimony, separated by a layer of salt, to store and release electricity. Those materials only worked at temperatures that were too high to sustain and didn’t produce enough voltage. Sadoway and his team tested more than 1,000 cells with dozens of alloys and salts to find one that’s commercially viable.

They will compete against lithium-ion batteries, the same technology used in laptop computers and electric cars, which are becoming more common for grid-storage. AES Corp., the largest operator of power-storage systems, said yesterday it’s now selling them to utilities and renewable-energy developers, for about $1,000 a kilowatt.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-0...r-sundown.html

[RandomGuy]

http://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/201...newable-energy

spuru-Guzik noted that the project is very well aligned with the White House Materials Genome Initiative. “This project illustrates what the synergy of high-throughput quantum chemistry and experimental insight can do,” he said. “In a very quick time period, our team honed in to the right molecule. Computational screening, together with experimentation, can lead to discovery of new materials in many application domains.”
Quinones are abundant in crude oil as well as in green plants. The molecule that the Harvard team used in its first quinone-based flow battery is almost identical to one found in rhubarb. The quinones are dissolved in water, which prevents them from catching fire.

Nifty.

Billions of years of evolution are bound to have hit on a few optimal solutions for various problems, and a few decades of advances in computing power has helped comb through those for our purposes.

Mmmm singularity anyone?

[FuzzyLumpkins]

Nifty.

Billions of years of evolution are bound to have hit on a few optimal solutions for various problems, and a few decades of advances in computing power has helped comb through those for our purposes.

Mmmm singularity anyone?

I will pass on ideology and wholistic fatalism regarding scientific principles and theory. You like to romanticize science.

[boutons_deux]

Nifty.

Billions of years of evolution are bound to have hit on a few optimal solutions for various problems, and a few decades of advances in computing power has helped comb through those for our purposes.

Mmmm singularity anyone?

many (taxpayer) $100Ms going into research of "artificial photosynthesis", eg

Artificial Photosynthesis for Splitting Water Reaches One-Volt Milestone

http://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/g...volt-milestone

Large scale, distributed artificial photosynthesis could produce hydrogen for (automotive) fuel cells without the need for an extensive, nation-spanning hydrogen distribution network, like we now have for oil, eg XL.

[CosmicCowboy]

In an almost nationwide water shortage does it really make sense to produce energy from fresh water?

[Wild Cobra]

In an almost nationwide water shortage does it really make sense to produce energy from fresh water?

Or grow fuel...

[RandomGuy]

I will pass on ideology and wholistic fatalism regarding scientific principles and theory. You like to romanticize science.

Guilty as charged. I am curious and enthusiastic about learning new stuff.

[FuzzyLumpkins]

Guilty as charged. I am curious and enthusiastic about learning new stuff.

Curious is an interesting word choice.

[boutons_deux]

In an almost nationwide water shortage does it really make sense to produce energy from fresh water?

your BigCarbon fracking buddies are destroying 30% of TX water, and NOW your worried about fresh water for the rest of us?

[Winehole23]

impact on biomass, soil moisture and water efficiency:

Areas under PV solar panels maintained higher soil moisture throughout the period of observation. A significant increase in late season biomass was also observed for areas under the PV panels (90% more biomass), and areas under PV panels were significantly more water efficient (328% more efficient).

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ar...l.pone.0203256

[Winehole23]

commercial incentives provided by the State of Texas:

Commercial solar projects, which include operations such as businesses, non-profits, government buildings and schools, will be eligible for the full 30% Solar Investment Tax Credit if the projects are under construction by December 2019. The credit falls to 26% for projects starting construction in 2020 and 22% for projects starting construction in 2021.

https://www.solarpowerworldonline.co...n-north-texas/

[Winehole23]

zero marginal cost generation lowered prices:

Rhodes’ modeling found that found that wind and solar have reduced wholesale power prices by an average of between $1 and $2.50 per megawatt-hour each year from 2010 through 2017, resulting in prices that were between 2.8% and 8.2% lower than they would have been without these resources.

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/11/...lion-in-texas/

[Winehole23]

Over the course of these eight years, Rhodes estimates that reduced wholesale power prices by $5.7 billion – or about $700 million annually, or ~$25 for every resident of Texas each year. He also found that the effect is greater during years when gas prices are higher, and that as such wind and solar are not only making wholesale power cheaper, but also dampening price volatility.

[RandomGuy]

zero marginal cost generation lowered prices:

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/11/...lion-in-texas/

This is just the beginning. Texas continues to add more wind every year, and ERCOT has estimated that the state could put online 13 GW of solar by 2030. This will ultimately mean more hours where coal and gas plants are not operating, and more retirements of conventional generation.

Meaning less demand for coal, and for natgas, which means we can sell into global markets cheaply. the LNG terminals that we and the Europeans are building will start pressing Russian dominance, something Russia seems ill prepared to deal with.