That article from 2016 is not about the CSP project in Nevada (Crescent Dunes) but the one across the border in California (Ivanpah) that had the bird kills because it had no thermal energy storage and thus had to keep heliostats focused near the solar receiver, creating a hot spot nearby.
Crescent Dunes invented the algorithm for focus that prevents birdkills. And it had thermal energy storage, the first tower CSP at utility scale to do so, which removes the need to keep the heliostats always on standby focused together on one spot. Ivanpah was the last CSP built with no storage, and since then no bird kills. All 30 projects in China have been required to include storage.
Crescent Dunes (100 MW) had other problems as the first ever Tower CSP with storage at utility scale (Gemasolar had been built with storage a few years earlier in Spain, at 50 MW. Crescent Dunes had a major outage because a tank leaked, bankrupting the startup that developed it, but now its owned by a big Spanish outfit and has been back online for several years, supplying night solar to Las Vegas:
https://www.solarpaces.org/what-happened-with-crescent-dunes...
So the birdkill is actually from a separate focal spot near the absorber where standby heliostats are focused? Interesting, I did not know that! Makes me wonder why standby heliostats would need to be focused at all? Couldn't their aimpoints be randomized over a much larger volume near the receiver, while still being standby and able to quickly move back onto the receiver when needed?
By the way, I’m happy to find someone with CSP knowledge on HN. Are you working in the field?
It is rather ridiculous to fret about the very minor emissions of manufacturing wind turbines and solar panels compared to sticking with fossil fueled energy sources!
We don't see similarly breathless studies of the carbon emissions of all the other manufactured things we need to run our civilization.
Where's the emissions involved in making washing machines? Highways? Primary schools? Oh dear, let's not make those things!
But no, it is only the things that compete with the fossil industry that must be tallied up so NIMBYs can have some excuse to ditch these crucial solutions to our climate problem.
The goal of building washing machines, highways, etc. is not a cleaner environment. The point of windfarms is, but it defeats the purpose if producing them emits more carbon than they save.
It would defeat the purpose if windfarms made more pollution than they removed, but they don’t. By orders of magnitude. With current processes. They don’t.
Green energy sources like wind and solar don't remove emissions. They add less.
> Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass extinction. Sure, it could mitigate the CO2 threat (to modernity), but why does the fox care when its decline ultimately traces primarily to things like deforestation, habitat fragmentation, agricultural runoff, pollution, pesticides, mining, manufacturing, or in short: modernity. Pursuit of a giant energy infrastructure replacement requires tremendous material extraction—directly driving many of these ills—only to then provide the energetic means to keep doing all these same things that abundant evidence warns is a prescription for termination of the community of life.
Yeah, these objections are always obviously made in pure bad faith. But it's still worth taking the time to refute them, because not doing so just gives them ammunition.
if there were pylons already going to where the solar and wind farms are built then yes, this 'rarely used technique' of adding larger capacity wires to existing pylons would be the obvious answer, but the problem is these uninhabitably hot sunny deserts and windy plains ideal for new solar and wind energy do not have grid connections because people don't live there.
The earliest vaccines injected at tiny amount of the disease, from smallpox on. So she probably expected to feel like shit, and that's why she felt like shit.
However the covid vaccines did not have any covid in them. So there is no way she got a taste of covid shittyness.
Most traditional vaccines consist of either killed or weakened forms of a virus or bacterium. These provoke an immune response that allows the body to fight off the actual pathogen later on.
Instead of delivering a virus, RNA vaccines deliver genetic information that allows the body’s own cells to produce a viral protein which stimulate the immune system to mount a response, without posing any risk of infection.
“Well actually, your sick wife couldn’t have gotten sick when she got sick”
I know I said I wouldn’t respond to this but I can’t not. Do you understand how unkind you’re being? You don’t understand how postcovid works because nobody does. Maybe it’s not caused directly by the virus but by the immune response, or something else entirely, or a combination of 7 things, who knows. I’m telling you it started the day after her third jab. This is n=1 stuff, not generalizable science, but you’re suggesting that my wife is imagining things for 2 years and counting now, which you can apparently diagnose by reading an internet comment or two, and I’m saying it’s not nice to piss on people with real problems like that. Please try to be less dismissive.
Also cause great potential for autoimmune reaponse. Because spike proteins wont stay only in muscle where was mRNA vaccine injected. Thats why dedinition of vaccines was changed in 2020.
Good that Australia is not the only country in the world, indeed. In the US, there was a measurable change in death rates once Blue states (Democrats) got vaccinated by May of 2021. Red states, led by Trumpism, where right wing media trumpeted vaccine conspiracy theories, which lowered their vaccination rate, had higher death rates.
We are way way past that at this point. The renewable generation meeting the total demand is over most of the day. Because of solar PV, the cheapest generation now, the daytime electricity supply is actually more than we need in California. Solar farms (and also wind farms)get curtailed here due to supplying more than the grid can take at times; this is usually for several hours.
Source; reporter covering solar news through interviews with grid operators, solar developers and policymakers since 2008
Those graphs clearly say that the state is pulling from non-renewable sources (primarily natural gas and "imports") between the hours of 7PM and 7AM. As I look at the page, right now (3:30AM local time), California is producing less than it needs, and the deficit is about 15,000MW. It isn't even close.
It's fine to say that California is producing more than it needs on net, but adding up total production over 24h and subtracting total consumption over 24h and seeing a positive value isn't meaningful if you're actually dependent on conventional sources for 12 hours a day.
We are headed for 20 MW now, so a wind farm with five 20 MW turbines is a typical size for many gas power plants; 100 MW.
In the EU, there's testing facilities that are checking these at this 20 MW size now. Commercially at this point there's up to 17 MW operating in the North Sea.
Very different things. There is basically only one solar panel size on the market. Which starts at $100. Making large solar installations means just getting more panels. This is great for cost reduction, as that most of the times goes along with ramping up production numbers. The production of the single panel doesn't get more complex though.
Wind energy is also getting constantly cheaper, both due to cost reductions and due to making the wind generators larger and thus more efficient. Onshore wind energy is the cheapest in Middle Europe and if they could grow further, costs would go down accordingly.
But even if production can deliver, getting the blades gets more and more difficult, so here we area.
Wind is just different too. There are subtle advantages to scaling up wind: fixed costs increase but capacity factors do too (taller turbines means they’re turning more % due to more consistent wind speeds at higher altitudes).
Just remember gas plants run continuously at the rated capacity whereas wind capacity factor is 30-40%, so a like for like comparison probably involves storage.
Crescent Dunes invented the algorithm for focus that prevents birdkills. And it had thermal energy storage, the first tower CSP at utility scale to do so, which removes the need to keep the heliostats always on standby focused together on one spot. Ivanpah was the last CSP built with no storage, and since then no bird kills. All 30 projects in China have been required to include storage.
Crescent Dunes (100 MW) had other problems as the first ever Tower CSP with storage at utility scale (Gemasolar had been built with storage a few years earlier in Spain, at 50 MW. Crescent Dunes had a major outage because a tank leaked, bankrupting the startup that developed it, but now its owned by a big Spanish outfit and has been back online for several years, supplying night solar to Las Vegas: https://www.solarpaces.org/what-happened-with-crescent-dunes...