Robert Lynn <robert.gulliver.l...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 1/ The power source is too diffuse, and the sun doesn't shine at night > meaning you need a huge plant to produce significant power. > This is 110 MW on 1,600 acres. That is excellent power density. Better than uranium fission or coal, when you take into account the land needed for the mines and railroads to transport the fuel. > 2/ You have to build mirrors heavy to survive weather/environment. Hail, > snow, rain, salt, wind, dust and UV all mean that the construction needs to > be reasonably heavy if you want it to survive decades even if the bad > weather is infrequent. > That has not been a problem with existing installations. The LUZ installations have lasted for 30 years in a harsh environment. > 3/ The plants are a relatively long distance from consumers and existing > grid infrastructure - expensive grid connections. > That is a problem with some wind installations, but not a problem with solar PV or CSP. The PV installations are being built right on the grounds of gas turbine generators, giving the overall installation about 10% more peak power. The Crescent Dunes installation is right next to a major high voltage line so it will not cost any more than a conventional generator to hook up. That's why they put it there. Solar is more flexible than wind. Most solar power in Japan is a couple of meters away from the people who will use it, right on the roof. In southern Japan -- which resembles the U.S. southwest only with lots more rain -- solar roofs are everywhere these days. They do not generate much power on rainy days, but people do not need much power on rainy days. > 4/ There will be alternative extremely cheap sources of intense heat > energy available for foreseeable future (fossil fuels + nuclear, probably > LENR, maybe hot fusion). > Nuclear is not cheap! Not after Fukushima. Fossil fuels are only cheap because the power companies do not pay for the 20,000 they murder every year, and they will not pay for the cost of global warming. Add in those costs and coal or natural gas would cost FAR more than CSP. > Given massive availability of shale gas produced electricity at > $0.04-0.06/kWh (currently <$0.04/kWh in USA due to extremely low gas price) > . . . > That price does not include the cost of the land that is destroyed by fraking. Add that in and we are paying a fortune and destroying our living space, our wildlife and our future. If you burn the furniture in your house in winter to keep warm, you can live cheaply for a month. Then what do you do? After we destroy large parts of New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, where will we live? What will we eat? > and the best CSP running along at $0.2-0.3/kWh, there is just no > foreseeable technology path that can bring the CSP cost down by a factor of > 4 to compete with gas and (eventually) nuclear. > That's absurd. What is so expensive about making mirrors? Do you think they cost far more than gas turbines? And what do you think coal electricity would cost if 20,000 families every years successfully sued them for murdering their fathers and mothers? As I said here before, if the airlines killed 20,000 people in one year, the entire aviation industry would be closed down, and we would soon have high speed trains instead. The only reason that does not happen with coal fired electricity is because the victims are poor people living downwind of the generators. They do not vote and they cannot afford to file suits, so you can kill them off with impunity. No one but his family gives a damn when a poor person dies at age 60 instead of 70 or 80. This is not because power companies are particularly evil. If Delta Airlines could get away with murdering 20,000 passengers to make the same kind of money the power companies do, I am sure they would do it. The tobacco companies kill of hundreds of thousands of people with impunity. As long as society lets corporations or individuals massacre people for profit, they will do it. - Jed
