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Comments

1. #1
   On February 14th, 2012 at 5:02 pm, hawkeye54 said:

   We’ll continue to experience more of these government backed failures. Success would have been an accidental byproduct of the primary goal — pumping money into certain political coffers to encourage said politicians to divert taxpayer dollars toward financing speculative ventures while making select individuals richer for the effort.

2. #2
   On February 14th, 2012 at 5:03 pm, Hangfire said:

   Pre-Historic site.

   Some are of value, most aren’t. You can dig pretty much anywhere that is near water, or used to be, and find evidence of man.

   I fail to see construction projects, say, 500 years in the future, coming to a halt whilst anthropologists brush away sediment from Lite beer cans, used tires, and Pampers.

3. #3
   On February 14th, 2012 at 5:11 pm, Collateral Damage said:

   The Jackass-In-Chief’s abject corruption continues. When is somebody going to take away Obastard’s toys (our tax dollars)????? All of this waste based on a horrendous LIE called global warming!?! And you know what? There are still a massive amount of STUPID American people out there who still persist on propagating this horrible, horrific LIE!?!

4. #4
   On February 14th, 2012 at 5:17 pm, peteee said:

   i am going to have to save my posts from the other failed solar companies, so i can cut and paste faster!

5. #5
   On February 14th, 2012 at 5:22 pm, sb36695 said:

   We need new startups! How’s Obama going to keep the slush fund going?!

6. #6
   On February 14th, 2012 at 5:31 pm, Pasadena Phil said:

   You may have mixed this Doug while preparing with your showdown with Crowder but there was another solar company that went belly up and it is from Detroit.

   I love the official statement from the CEO:

   “We firmly believe there is a strong and sustainable commercial market for Uni-Solar products,” Julian Hawkins, ECD’s CEO and president, said in a statement. “However our current capital structure and legacy costs are preventing USO from making the investments necessary for the future of the business without restructuring through the bankruptcy process.”

   Yeah, “sustainable” if you give it away and charge it all the taxpayer.

7. #7
   On February 14th, 2012 at 5:31 pm, Pasadena Phil said:

   missed, not mixed

8. #8
   On February 14th, 2012 at 5:31 pm, J S Ragman said:

   How about one of you EE weenies helping me out here. Isn’t a major problem with electrical power transmission the loss of voltage over the length of the transmission lines? So, if this project in the middle of the desert can potentially power 187,500 homes, where do those home have to be located? And how many homes in Los Angeles, or Riverside, could be powered by this solar farm if they had to transmit the power a hundred miles? Excuse me for being skeptical, but I suppose there is a reason the prehistoric folks moved out.

9. #9
   On February 14th, 2012 at 5:34 pm, Pasadena Phil said:

   BTW, “restructuring through bankruptcy” to walk away from “legacy costs (aka union pensions)” is how we should have handled GM and Chrysler.

10. #10
    On February 14th, 2012 at 5:43 pm, Hangfire said:

    On February 14th, 2012 at 5:31 pm, J S Ragman said:

    Excuse me for being skeptical, but I suppose there is a reason the prehistoric folks moved out.

    Sam Kinison:

    “Yeah, we have deserts in America. WE DON”T LIVE IN THEM. AAAAAAAAAH!!! AAAAAAAH!!”

11. #11
    On February 14th, 2012 at 5:51 pm, DanMan said:

    True story: We bought a couple of hundred acres in lowlands prone to flooding. Had about 5 acres out of the floodway and flood plain. Got our wetlands stuff dealt with but hit a hicky with culturally sensitive stuff. We were told that evidence of “flaking” was found. They surmised the chips of flint rock in the quartz sand indicated Indians may have been present at some time in the past. They declared the 5 acres that were dry had “high potential” for having other evidence of native infestation. They didn’t find the evidence they referred to mind you.

    So we asked ‘What do you want us to do about it?’

    Answer ‘Cap it with 4″ of asphalt to preserve it for future generations that would have better technology to evaluate whatever may be found in the future’

12. #12
    On February 14th, 2012 at 6:04 pm, Marshall_Will said:

    Doug Powers said,

    DoE officials are worried that if the foxes keep delaying Genesis, construction won’t be completed in time for it to declare bankruptcy.

    Right, it must be completed post haste, otherwise the FBI Agents won’t have an address to raid.

13. #13
    On February 14th, 2012 at 6:04 pm, letget said:

    If bho doesn’t keep giving and giving taxypayers and borrowed china money to these companies, HOW IN THE WORLD will bho get funds to get him re-elected? bho has ticked off almost every company and human in the US and he has to keep doing his thing here to ‘sock it to us’ the American’s?
    L

14. #14
    On February 14th, 2012 at 6:07 pm, nail49 said:

    We were told that evidence of “flaking” was found.

    Yep, there were “flakes” everywhere and they all were gubmint officials.

    Best way to handle this sort of discovery is to never discover it in the first place, just ignore it and nobody will be the wiser, although you will be the better off for ignoring it.

15. #15
    On February 14th, 2012 at 6:23 pm, Truesoldier said:

    On February 14th, 2012 at 5:31 pm, Pasadena Phil said:
    another solar company that went belly up and it is from Detroit.

    I saw that earlier too. I also noted that the solar company in Detroit did not receive a DOE loan. They applied for one, but were denied. I guess they did not make a big enough donation to the DNC and Team Obama.

16. #16
    On February 14th, 2012 at 6:26 pm, gus said:

    Maybe if the excavate the site, they might find empty SOYLENT GREEN boxes and the occasional STATUE of LIBERTY.

    Just as long as the little SNAIL DARTER doesn’t have his habitat disturbed.

    For Cripes sake, it’s the feckin’ dessert, if they weren’t putting in the ridiculous solar panels, they wouldn’t know about the fox and such.

17. #17
    On February 14th, 2012 at 6:31 pm, sicoit said:

    On February 14th, 2012 at 5:02 pm, hawkeye54 said:

    We’ll continue to experience more of these government backed failures. Success would have been an accidental byproduct of the primary goal — pumping money into certain political coffers to encourage said politicians to divert taxpayer dollars toward financing speculative ventures while making select individuals richer for the effort.

    ~~T.H.I.S.~~

18. #18
    On February 14th, 2012 at 6:32 pm, Truesoldier said:

    HOW IN THE WORLD will bho get funds to get him re-elected? bho has ticked off almost every company and human in the US

    Just one more reason he has been pushing to speed up the Visa program to import voters…uh, I mean workers.

19. #19
    On February 14th, 2012 at 6:36 pm, Truesoldier said:

    Of course the irony of this whole situation is something to just shake your head at….One enviormental ideal being stopped by another enviormental ideal. It would be quite funny if taxpayer dollars were not involved.

20. #20
    On February 14th, 2012 at 6:54 pm, Pasadena Phil said:

    On February 14th, 2012 at 6:23 pm, Truesoldier said:

    I saw that earlier too. I also noted that the solar company in Detroit did not receive a DOE loan. They applied for one, but were denied. I guess they did not make a big enough donation to the DNC and Team Obama.

    I think they failed to qualify for a subsidy because of their balance sheet. They see bankruptcy as the only way to escape legacy costs which are costing them that subsidy. They are not going out of business. I’d like to see what those legacy costs consist of. Loans from early investors? These guys look for grants (free money), not loans.

21. #21
    On February 14th, 2012 at 7:23 pm, Marshall_Will said:

    Just another kick to the groin, courtesy of BammieCo. If in this unholy recession depression you weren’t feeling emasculated and insignificant ‘enough’..?

    Just for some perspective ( and Phil, chime in if you think I’m off base here? ) but in order to raise that kind of capital ( at the retail/qual. investor level ) you’d have to make about 16.8 mil. cold calls.

    No problem, I’ll get right on it! What a joke.

22. #22
    On February 14th, 2012 at 7:27 pm, AmericaFirst said:

    If I remember correctly, the Keystone XL pipeline received extensive environmental impact studies for over 14 routes and over many years. Yet it was still shut down by Barrack Hussein Obama.

    This Genesis Solar Project was rushed through with no environmental impact study? No conservative organization tried to shut this project down with legal tactics successfully used by environmental groups? Not even the Sierra Club and their allies filed any type of concern???

    With auto gas climbing to $5 very soon, I am further stocking up on long term food storage and more ammo. Inflation is gonna hurt this year. I put a big chunk of change down on prepaid natural gas for the home. It’s at a very low price right now and the oil companies are capping off wells until the price goes up.

    If Obama realizes this is his last year in office, he will leave with a nuked earth policy instead of scorching it over four more years.

23. #23
    On February 14th, 2012 at 7:39 pm, AlohaGuy said:

    So, if this project in the middle of the desert

    Let me help you out there JS. It’s in the desert a zillion miles from anywhere because any Progressive worth their salt knows the sun only shines in the desert.

24. #24
    On February 14th, 2012 at 7:41 pm, AlohaGuy said:

    I’m having a little trouble working foxes into this. They are calling in sick, so the project is running behind? In bed with Distemper, or sitting around their foxholes drinking Margaritas, I would have thought you could work around them.

25. #25
    On February 14th, 2012 at 7:50 pm, Marshall_Will said:

    AmericaFirst said,

    Not even the Sierra Club and their allies filed any type of concern???

    Nope! ( Evidently not? ) Apparently they were hard at work serving up Margaritas to a very crabby family of foxes. Another 4 years of this and we’ll all be facing Mecca 5 X a day…

    Got Prayer rugs!?

26. #26
    On February 14th, 2012 at 8:03 pm, Marshall_Will said:

    More eco-lunacy from the PNW:

    OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) – The Washington state Senate has passed a bill to charge electric car owners a $100 annual fee to compensate for the lack of gas taxes they pay.

    Sen. Mary Margaret Haugen, the Camano Island Democrat who sponsored the bill, says while electric cars are good for the environment, they put the same wear and tear on the state’s roads that gas vehicles do.

    Really!? I’ll wager they’re less than half the weight of a luxury sedan, she offers no study or data and… just decided!

27. #27
    On February 14th, 2012 at 8:10 pm, MacEamonn said:

    If the Obama Administration thought Solar energy was causing unwanted pregnancies would they stop wasting our money?

28. #28
    On February 14th, 2012 at 8:40 pm, Misscheryl said:

    at 7:23 pm, Marshall_Will said:

    you crack me up!

29. #29
    On February 14th, 2012 at 8:50 pm, Rogue Cheddar said:

    The Genesis Project reanimated Spock, this company, not so much.

30. #30
    On February 14th, 2012 at 8:58 pm, rocketman said:

    ***
    HI J S RAGMAN–#8. EE Weenie reporting for duty. Moving 250 Megawatts of power a couple of hundred miles is pretty high efficiency stuff. However, the cost of any added transmission lines, right of way costs, transformer / circuit breaker / system control costs must be included in the total package.
    ***
    The really big failure is in the economics–not in the engineering. The power cost is still much higher that other conventional sources–hydro, coal, natural gas, and nuclear power costs. And the reality of the intermittent nature of solar (and wind) power sources is that another 250 megawatts of on line power reserve must be up and running so the whole system doesn’t crash when the sun goes behind a cloud, night falls, (or the wind stops blowing for wind power). A few seconds of drop in voltage and power will shut down parts of the network as the remote generators fall out of synchronism.
    ***
    If these “greenie” sources were as reliable and as cheap as the in service sources they would have been built 100 years ago. They can’t “compete” economically or from a reliability and total life cost analysis standpoint. They never should have built.
    ***
    Unless Comrade Obama and His “greenie” Ilk are forced to pay for all costs out of their (not our!) personal “stash” of money. The power company I worked for 5 decades ago would have fired any engineer or business person as being too dumb to understand the basics if they proposed buying into such stupidity.
    ***
    John Bibb
    ***

31. #31
    On February 14th, 2012 at 8:59 pm, AlohaGuy said:

    OT but interesting

    Media Matters, Drugs and Mental Illness it seems – oh yeah, and tight with the White House

32. #32
    On February 14th, 2012 at 9:06 pm, AlohaGuy said:

    The power company I worked for 5 decades ago would have fired any engineer or business person as being too dumb to understand the basics if they proposed buying into such stupidity.

    But, but, but, he’s a Harvard grad….

33. #33
    On February 14th, 2012 at 9:08 pm, dan708 said:

    Genesis Solar Project

    OK, then. For a moment, I was wondering, “What do Phil, Mike, Tony, Pete, and Steve have to do with politics?”

34. #34
    On February 14th, 2012 at 9:22 pm, Republicanvet said:

    ” dealing an embarrassing blow to the Obama administration’s solar initiative.”

    …if he ain’t embarrassed already given his other initiatives…

35. #35
    On February 14th, 2012 at 9:27 pm, Republicanvet said:

    On February 14, 2012 at 03:31 pm, J S Ragman said:
    

    How about one of you EE weenies helping me out here. Isn’t a major problem with electrical power transmission the loss of voltage over the length of the transmission lines? So, if this project in the middle of the desert can potentially power 187,500 homes, where do those home have to be located? And how many homes in Los Angeles, or Riverside, could be powered by this solar farm if they had to transmit the power a hundred miles? Excuse me for being skeptical, but I suppose there is a reason the prehistoric folks moved out.

    …maybe the expansion plans called for couple Chevy Dolt outlets to be installed on site.

36. #36
    On February 14th, 2012 at 9:27 pm, Marshall_Will said:

    rocketman said,

    Unless Comrade Obama and His “greenie” Ilk are forced to pay for all costs out of their (not our!) personal “stash” of money.

    Please, everyone, keep beating that like a rented mule! These backdoor deals have absolutely -nothing- to do w/ the avg. taxpayer.

    We in no way benefited, approved nor personally profited. Any debt/liabilities incurred are to be placed directly at the feet of the Dimocratic Party. Have a nice life fellas!

37. #37
    On February 14th, 2012 at 11:11 pm, ChapBix said:

    #18. On February 14th, 2012 at 6:32 pm, Truesoldier said:

    There are reports that as many as two million dead people across the country are still on voter rolls (probably 500k of them are in Chicago). Depending on where those two million dead people are located, the electoral college could swing to Obama. There are countless other people, still living, who are on voter rolls in more than one state. I think we may be getting a clearer picture of Obama’s strategy for winning.

38. #38
    On February 14th, 2012 at 11:18 pm, ChapBix said:

    #31. On February 14th, 2012 at 8:59 pm, AlohaGuy said:

    OT but interesting

    Media Matters, Drugs and Mental Illness it seems – oh yeah, and tight with the White House

    I see this as an exploding story although I know that the usual traditional prog media outlets will whistle through the graveyard on this.

39. #39
    On February 14th, 2012 at 11:24 pm, Republicanvet said:

    On February 14, 2012 at 09:18 pm, ChapBix said:
    

    #31. On February 14th, 2012 at 8:59 pm, AlohaGuy said:

    OT but interesting

    Media Matters, Drugs and Mental Illness it seems – oh yeah, and tight with the White House

    I see this as an exploding story although I know that the usual traditional prog media outlets will whistle through the graveyard on this.

    Like JournOlist.

40. #40
    On February 15th, 2012 at 8:39 am, stillontheroad said:

    As a gesture of peace towards the Chinese, and a possible promise from the Chinese to buy more US debt or else they will dump the whole lot, Fearless Leader has spoken and his edict is to find a way reduce the United States of Americas Nuclear deterrence weapons by 80%. And people say Sock Puppet does not care about our country

41. #41
    On February 15th, 2012 at 9:46 am, BayouKiki said:

    As for the prehistoric human settlement, unreliable sources tell me that pictographs found at the site seem to depict an entire civilization getting crushed under the weight of what appears to be a giant solar panel next to dollar signs flying out a window, which appears above a caption that translates to “don’t make the same mistake we did.”

    Classic

42. #42
    On February 15th, 2012 at 10:25 am, hawkeye54 said:

    But, but, but, he’s a Harvard grad….

    Yes, he was awarded a degree from Harvard. We have absolutely no evidence that he actually earned it, academically that is.

43. #43
    On February 15th, 2012 at 1:03 pm, American1791 said:

    J.S.Ragman – You are correct. Solar Power to the grid will never ever be efficient due to the “Second Law of Thermodynamics”. I’m sure if you checked under the hood of any CSP plant you will find the real source of heat is not the sun but that hidden Natural Gas Generator. A 250mw CSP Solar Plant should more accurately be stated as a 42mw Solar Plant as they are something less than 18 % efficient. Also, this plant would be lucky to supply power for a third of the stated homes.

44. #44
    On February 15th, 2012 at 1:19 pm, paulie said:

    Hillarious!

    As for the prehistoric human settlement, unreliable sources tell me that pictographs found at the site seem to depict an entire civilization getting crushed under the weight of what appears to be a giant solar panel next to dollar signs flying out a window, which appears above a caption that translates to “don’t make the same mistake we did.” Administration officials are still trying to decipher the meaning of that while moving forward with the Genesis Project at any and all costs.

45. #45
    On February 15th, 2012 at 1:41 pm, farmboy said:

    I wonder how much of that power generated will be needed to clean the dust off of the panels?

46. #46
    On February 15th, 2012 at 2:35 pm, rotarymunkey said:

    Blythe is my hometown currently. I can assure you that 25 miles west of Blythe there lies nothing but scrub brush and desert. Ford Dry Lake bed is out there, and while it still occasionally has a thin skim of water if a desert monsoon happens to wander across it, generally the phrase “dry-as-a-bone” was invented just to describe this place. As far as kit foxes go, they live anywhere from northern Mexico to north of Las Vegas (probably) judging how all of this area looks entirely like the same sort of desert to me. Same food source for them (mice and rabbits) so same predators (foxes and coyotes). The plant sits on a few acres of land out of probably couple hundred thousand square miles of kit fox territory.

    As for the hot oil/recurved mirror idea. I saw the structure at the county fair last year and spoke to one of the guys from the company. 700 degree oil can do a pretty good job of spinning two turbines (first stage and second stage) before it cools enough to go back into the system. There’s already a natural gas fired plant here, added a few years back, because it was deemed needed due to the rolling brown-outs caused by the energy trading fiasco. Transmission lines were installed for that, so the proposed solar facility only needs to tap into those lines. That saves them a bundle of money. This plant isn’t planned stupidly and should actually allow the natural gas plant to throttle back during the days. I don’t mind the idea of less polution.

    As far as cleaning the panels, they swing on a cradle to follow the sun, and can swing over to 90 degrees from horizontal so that a mobile truck with a water sprayer can just drive by and hose them off. Clever really. Miles and miles of panels to spray, but requires little energy to do it.

    Considering we’re at 30% unemployment out here, anything at all which will add a few jobs is a good thing.

47. #47
    On February 15th, 2012 at 4:36 pm, Hiraghm said:

    I’ve heard of this nonsense before…

    Oh, yeah… Dr Carol Marcus

48. #48
    On February 15th, 2012 at 4:45 pm, Hiraghm said:

    I don’t mind the idea of less pollution. As pollution is an invented fiction, there’s no reason to mind it.

    By “invented fiction” I mean what they call “pollution”. Our atmosphere is nothing but pollution; it sure as hell doesn’t resemble the atmosphere of 4 billion years ago, or of even 300 million years ago.

    There’s already a natural gas fired plant here, added a few years back, because it was deemed needed due to the rolling brown-outs caused by the energy trading fiasco.

    So, the solar energy plant is redundant and unnecessary.

    Green is the New Stupid
    Green is as Stupid Does

49. #49
    On February 15th, 2012 at 4:48 pm, Hiraghm said:

    On February 15th, 2012 at 8:39 am, stillontheroad said:

    As a gesture of peace towards the Chinese, and a possible promise from the Chinese to buy more US debt or else they will dump the whole lot, Fearless Leader has spoken and his edict is to find a way reduce the United States of Americas Nuclear deterrence weapons by 80%. And people say Sock Puppet does not care about our country

    He has a knife poised at America’s genitals. At a time when we need our nuclear stockpile more than since the cold war ended, this jackass wants to emasculate us.

    I don’t blame him; I blame the majority of voters who voted for the piece of crap. I don’t blame a rattlesnake for being deadly. I blame the sonofab* who tosses it in my bed.

50. #50
    On February 15th, 2012 at 7:48 pm, thejim said:

    Another episode of Fleece the Nation.

51. #51
    On February 15th, 2012 at 9:46 pm, rocketman said:

    ***
    HI ROTARY_MUNKEY–#46. Good comments on the design and location of the Genesis solar cylinder reflector / gas fired turbine plant system. Maybe this will be the first plant to actually pass the Economics 101 test and will run at a profit. If so–then the taxpayer “investment” in the project should be paid back over a 10 year period from the profits. Like real free market companies do all the time.
    ***
    Maybe the Kit Foxes and other artificial problems are just the “greenie” approach to killing any real engineering projects in their back yards.
    ***
    Hoover Dam paid off it’s construction costs a decade or so after it’s completion. And still pays off bigtime with power, reliable water for agricultural use, and in flood prevention. Win-Win all over the place.
    ***
    John Bibb
    ***

52. #52
    On February 16th, 2012 at 1:37 am, rotarymunkey said:

    #48 “redundant and unnecessary”
    No, not with the west side of Phoenix still growing like a weed. When I lived in Phoenix 14 years ago, the west side of town pretty much had ended by the time you got to Avondale. Now they are stretching new housing subdivisions nearly to Tonopah, and there’s a Wal-Mart and major shopping center at Watson Road. Since new gas-fired power plants are hard to get approved and new nuclear plants are damn near impossible to get improved, the extra megawattage is increasingly necessary, just to allow maintenance and downtime on the existing megawattage.

    For example, do you own one car or two? Do you drive both cars simultaneously, every day, or do you sometimes take one instead of the other, even with your spouse or legal-aged child available to drive the other? This plant falls into that category, and if all it takes to run it is some hot sunlight, hot oil, and a couple of turbines then why not? Remember, liberals fear global warming, and need electricity to run their air conditioners 24/7 from April until October out here.

    BTW-it isn’t real “oil” in the hot side piping, but that’s what they call it. It has a higher expansion rate than water, and its the expansion rate which drives the turbines. My only disappointment with the system was that the mirrors were not also solar cell arrays. My thinking was, if you were going through the trouble of creating miles of curved mirrored panels, why not make them translucent and grab enough megawattage to run the low-energy geared systems which control the angled arrays and the pump for the hot oil? Presumably, it was because of the added weight the solar panels would place on the framing.

    Yes,#51, the kit fox issue is a “red herring”. I have lived in Blythe for 14 years and I have seen a fox only once in that entire time. I’ve seen the uber-rare desert tortoise only in captivity, and never in the wild, in spite of that endangered critter’s habitat preservation being the sole reason that BLM closed off all of the desert to 4x4ing and quads. There used to be a festival every year out at the dry lake bed where they’d run “sand drags”. Brought in money and visitors who would fill the local hotels. No more. Also, they cut back on dove hunting permits, so very little dove hunting business now each fall. They sold a ton of the valley’s water rights to LA, so in the summer time, the mighty Colorado is sucked down to the size of what we used to call “a fine creek” in the Ohio of my youth. Now the boaters go up river to Lake Havasu City and Parker, Arizona, where the dammed up water remains deep enough to boat without sucking gravel into the jet boat pumps. We’re left with drunken jet ski afficionados who have just enough money to drunkenly ski around the shallows, but not enough to drive the extra distance up Highway 95 to the deep water. With the water rights long gone and never to return, more of the land is fallow most of the year, so the dust in town is ferocious and the migrant farm worker population has moved on. Dekens Farm Implements was forced to close last year, the spur rail line through town which used to deliver fertilizer in bulk has been shut down and tore out so that its steel can be scavenged. Small business throughout the town are barely scraping by. The “money” in this town is now held by prison correctional officers (we have two medium security prisons near where the solar plant is being built), Riverside Co. Sheriff’s department employees, Blythe PD employees, Palo Verde Unified School district employees, Blythe and Riverside Co fire department employees, and Border Patrol officers. The largest tax-generating business in town is Albertson’s grocery. The Larry Green Auto Center, where I worked for years, was a distant #2, on less than 30 cars sold per month. Big ticket items do generate decent tax revenue.

    Were it not so dang far from LA to Phoenix, with a stop for gas needed in the middle, and some beds to sleep in, this town would have long ago died off. As such, it is ideally suited for the placement of not just one, but a crap load of solar generating facilities. We sit ON a major El Paso Gas natural gas pipeline so the placement of the gas-fired generating plant was well-chosen, and because of that, made it easier to choose for the solar plant too. We sit on the I-10 freeway, so transporting huge fabricated metal mirror panels here is a cinch.

    As far as the desert intaglios go, that’s a difficult point. There are a couple “protected sites” along the river where ancient peoples laid out massive desert pictures of animals and people crudely fashioned out of rocks laid on the ground. I believe they are protected both federally and by the state. If something like this was also found 25 miles west, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least BUT… it should be remembered that during WWII, virtually everything from Blythe to Chiraco Summit to the west, and north to Barstow was one masive US Army training facility. Soldiers for the North African campaign trained here under Patton I believe. The airport here, if it can be called such, had two runways long enough to land the 747 which carried the Space Shuttle! They actually did land it here once and I’ve seen the photos which prove it. Even the highway system here (I-10) was laid out so that in a time of war, it would be possible to land troop planes on the freeway straights (Eisenhower decreed that little factoid).

    So, if it is possible to fill this desert valley with enough solar plants to light LA, I say go for it. President Numnuts in the White House ain’t gonna allow nobody to drill for new oil or gas, and all of our energy costs will skyrocket as a result. If this plant can stretch our carbon-based megawattage out farther into the future by idling it during the daytime, so much the better.

    And I’m willing to bet those sick little kit foxes will probably appreciate the shade from the scorching desert sun! Animals adapt, as I have witnessed from the small hawks and other predatory birds who now hunt from telephone wires and poles alongside newly watered fields. They ain’t dumb. They’ve learned the easiest way to a quick meal is to wait for the dumb field mice to be flooded out of their homes by irrigation. Swoop! Snack! I am sure the foxes will adapt too.

    It is the liberals and green conservationists who won’t.

53. #53
    On February 16th, 2012 at 9:51 am, Blackstone said:

    My only disappointment with the system was that the mirrors were not also solar cell arrays. My thinking was, if you were going through the trouble of creating miles of curved mirrored panels, why not make them translucent and grab enough megawattage to run the low-energy geared systems which control the angled arrays and the pump for the hot oil?

    Has anyone ever yet come up with a photoelectric panel that can generate enough energy over its lifetime to justify the cost of building it?

54. #54
    On February 16th, 2012 at 1:18 pm, rocketman said:

    ***
    HI BLACKSTONE–#53. So far solar panels only work well for small isolated systems that are far from conventional power line power. Small radio repeaters on top of mountains, low power water level monitoring instruments on flood control cache basins, etc.
    ***
    And I think that the idea of combining the high temperature Genesys mirror arrays with solar panels would be a non starter due to the high 700 degree heat present at the focal point of the mirrors. It would probably burn up the panels.
    ***
    John Bibb
    ***

55. #55
    On February 16th, 2012 at 7:16 pm, Hiraghm said:

    #48 “redundant and unnecessary”
    No, not with the west side of Phoenix still growing like a weed.

    I repeat, redundant and unnecessary. Simply build more natural gas powered plants.

    Wind and Solar are not renewable energies. Coal, natural gas, and perhaps oil, are.