U.S. approves solar project in California desert

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-approves-massive-solar-project-california-desert-2021-05-03/

by awb • 5 years ago

76 74 5 years ago

WJW2• 5 years ago

What a peculiar caption on the image:

Arrays of photovoltaic solar panels are seen at the Tenaska Imperial Solar Energy Center South as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues in this aerial photo

There does not seem to a single person in the image and I don't think solar panels can catch COVID. How is the spread of COVID continuing "in this aerial photo" haha.

indemnity• 5 years ago

Perhaps there are 5G radios in the vicinity.

guerrilla• 5 years ago

Written by AI?

nathancahill• 5 years ago

Gaming SEO maybe?

vmception• 5 years ago

It’s like saying “in bed” after reading any fortune cookie

“As the spread of the coronavirus disease continues”, good for any sentence!

KirillPanov• 5 years ago

The news biz has its own version of SEO, keyed mainly off of article titles but also to a lesser extent off of image titles. Both of those are selected by the editor, not the reporter. The main difference is that they aren't optimizing for search engines.

There were tons of cases of this weird "article/photo title is trying way too hard to spin this story while the text is pretty neutral and unbiased" during election season.

It also shows up in the tendency to insert the prefix "Commentary:" in the title of any article noting any negative facts about a certain particular country. The WSJ is particularly hilarious in this respect.

shoto_io• 5 years ago

I guess it was the AI built on Rust and hosted on Lambda that wrote this caption

maxerickson• 5 years ago

The picture was taken and captioned last March: https://www.reuters.com/search/pictures?blob=Tenaska+Imperia...

This article just uses it without any changes.

The caption would have been somewhat less strange at that point (but still hard to contextualize).

Edit: Oops, the earliest date is June 2020. Doesn't really change the explanation any though.

indymike• 5 years ago

The caption is search spam. SEO is a thing for stock art.

sandworm101• 5 years ago

It looks like my latest Factorio biuld is bleeding into this reality again.

WJW2• 5 years ago

You're playing with a COVID mod for Factorio? :O

... that sounds pretty cool actually, though I'm not sure how it would work. The main character of the game is pretty good at social distancing already.

travisporter• 5 years ago

Where are the damn drones that install them onto my roof?!

hnedeotes• 5 years ago

Hopefully someone has some spare paracetamol tablets

peter_retief2• 5 years ago

Solar farms are an ecological disaster, deserts are complex ecosystems full of life.

oblio4• 5 years ago

How do they impact deserts? Are there some species that can only thrive in the searing sun?

Plus, to my untrained eye, what else, except for bacteria (and even that, in limited amounts) thrives in desert conditions?

Everything I know about biology tells me that deserts are relatively bereft of life compared to temperate or tropical climates.

Also, what alternative is less harmful to life, in general?

mcny2• 5 years ago

You raise a good question. I wonder, just a thought experiment, if providing shade in a desert might create refuge for plants that can't survive directly in the desert sun...

evgen2• 5 years ago

Yes, there are some species that require desert conditions in order to live. They have adapted to this particular harsh environment and the conditions in these places help keep out competition for the scarce available resources. You really should do some basic research or at least watch an Attenborough documentary because "everything you know about biology" is apparently quite limited. Yes, deserts have less life and far less obvious signs of it given the lack of resources, but that also means that the web of life between the various organisms is far more fragile and takes a lot longer to recover from any injury or intrusion.

A far better place to put solar panels are in places where we know the impact of people and machines will be barely noticed and where life will spring back quite quickly. Put them in the middle of farmland. We have far more arable land than we need to be using, taking it out of production for a decade or two will be good for the soil, and it will spring back to life within days of the construction machinery leaving.

dubyah2• 5 years ago

It's not like the area is straight up (coarse and rough and irritating) sand. Tortoises, foxes, lizards, snakes, rodents, bats, birds, etc.

Flora wise, it's going to be predominantly desert scrub bush and to a lesser degree, microphyll woodland. Even in the article photo, you can see desert scrub in the undeveloped portions.

I think environmentalists that care about the desert would much prefer solar development to occur on already disturbed land.

Symbiote3• 5 years ago

There's a brief overview of the flora and fauna in this desert here [1], and much more detail on the "See also" pages.

In particular, note the endemic flora — these species live _only_ in this desert.

I don't know what impact this development will have, so I won't comment on that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_Desert#Flora_and_faun...

ovi2562• 5 years ago

Deserts are complex ecosystems full of life

They are the least full of life of usual ecosystems, so if you want to minimize harm when building large infrastructure, they're the logical place to put the infrastructure.

OTOH, you may be interested by the fact that nuclear plants have the best energy density per occupied land surface, if you care about reducing ecosystem impact. That allows minimizing used land.

trhway• 5 years ago

nuclear plants have the best energy density per occupied land surface, if you care about reducing ecosystem impact. That allows minimizing used land.

and when it blows it naturally provides for a huge blossoming ecosystem refuge guaranteed to be free of development for the centuries to come like the Chernobyl zone.

Edit in response to the comment below: the false dichotomy. Basically the same old Big Energy tries to blackmail our civilization into nuclear using the threat of coal. No pasaran.

peter_retief2• 5 years ago

That is simply not true. Large destruction of natural ecosystems is a disaster for the planet we need to use less resources not more.

Symbiote3• 5 years ago

They are the least full of life of usual ecosystems, so if you want to minimize harm when building large infrastructure, they're the logical place to put the infrastructure.

I don't think that necessarily follows — desert ecosystems are often relatively fragile. Small changes to conditions can have a disproportionate, negative effect on the plants and animals that live there. (Or a positive effect on some species, which often means a negative effect on others — i.e. things thrown out of balance.)

adrianN• 5 years ago

Almost every human activity is an ecological disaster. You need to provide less disastrous alternatives, ideally some that cost a comparable amount of money to implement.

swiley• 5 years ago

Probably less of a disaster than coal but it is good to acknowledge the environmental impacts of solar, I lot of people ignore them.

ovi2562• 5 years ago

Why does the federal government even need to approve a new power plant, solar or otherwise ? As long as it is done to code, legalize building!

I see that they provided 800ha of federal land, that may be why.

pulse7• 5 years ago

The project "will be sited on 2,000 acres of federal land": you need owner's approval if you want to do something on his piece of land...

glutamate2• 5 years ago

Do I have this right: 90,000 homes each pay $1400 [1] in electricity, so $550M is paid back in 4.3 years. Makes the economics look pretty good, assuming distribution costs are not much higher than 50%

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46276

samwillis• 5 years ago

It’s slightly more complex than that I think, the development doesn’t appear to include any sort of energy storage for overnight workloads.

glutamate2• 5 years ago

FTA

The project will include a battery storage system

jcims5• 5 years ago

If generation is 50% of the bill then ~$700 per home per year, so probably closer to 10-15 years payoff. Still a great deal IMHO. I'm thinking about a ground-mount system in Ohio, payoff in ~15y, I was pretty shocked to see how little solar there was between Vegas and San Diego (aside from the Ivanpah spectacle lol)

Bombthecat• 5 years ago

Does this already include maintenance, repair and replacement?

bongobingo3• 5 years ago

I find that most of these payoff periods are generous on one side, but lax on the other. For example, does the payoff calculator include the opportunity costs? I doubt it, because it would likely be impossible to ever achieve break even.

citrin_ru• 5 years ago

For me 90,000 homes sound like not very useful and potentially misleading number. What would be useful to know: peak power output (MW), annual generation (GW·h) if the grid will accept energy whenever it is available, and annual generation expectation given typical energy demand (which will be lower given that midday is likely not a peak hour).

jcims5• 5 years ago

Meanwhile Ohio has about 7GW/71,000 acres of solar projects in the application, construction or operational state with the Ohio Power Siting board.

PDF warning - https://opsb.ohio.gov/wps/wcm/connect/gov/b504e379-a4ba-49e4...

drchickensalad• 5 years ago

I got a 404

jcims5• 5 years ago

Thanks for the heads up, i think i fixed it.

mbreese• 5 years ago

Of which only one site is operational and two are in construction. Given the amount of coal power due to be shutdown in Ohio in the next few years, it will be important to have these projects up and running quickly.

To put it into context, the approved solar projects (not yet operational or under construction) is ~ 2200 MW of power covering 23,000 acres. There are two major coal plants outside of Cincinnati that are due to be shutdown by 2027. Combined, they produce 2300 MW by themselves [1]. And that is just those two plants.

It is nice to see the shift, but we still have a way to go.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Ohio

jcims5• 5 years ago

Given the stakes, timelines and all of the possibilities for these projects to get sidelined or stalled, I’m surprised the development firms involved with these projects have done almost nothing to appeal to individuals that will be affected by them.

tlb2• 5 years ago

Can you explain what might happen if the solar projects aren't up and running in time?

Delays in constructing power plants are pretty common, but I'm not sure what the practical consequences are.

slaw• 5 years ago

23,000 acres is 93km^2

splithalf• 5 years ago

I want to be excited by this but 500 million dollars to create 10 jobs doesn’t sound efficient. Maybe there’s more to this than just job creation?

birdyrooster• 5 years ago

Ah yes 90,000 homes or 0.065% of total homes in the US. So why is this news?

vesrah• 5 years ago

I'm in this area pretty often due to Chuckwalla Valley Raceway in Desert Center, Ca. There is already quite a bit of solar west of Blythe.

U.S. approves solar project in California desert

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