A few years ago a Los Angeles-based firm called SolarReserve had what they thought was a great alternative energy idea: A field of mirrors directs sunlight toward a tower filled with salt. The salt heats up to 1,050 degrees Fahrenheit and then flows down to a container where the heat is used to drive turbines that can power upwards of 50,000 homes.
Naturally such a device would need to be built where the sun shines a lot. And, ideally, it wouldn’t take up space in a populated area or harm wildlife.
Hey, how about the Nevada desert? At a glance that makes sense, except once you start to move on the idea you realize that “Nevada desert” is synonymous with “Nellis Air Force Base Range Complex.”
And among military ranges, Nellis is as mysterious as they come, even for the military aviators who’ve flown around there. (“The Box” — rumored to be where nuke testing goes on — notoriously lurks adjacent to regular operating areas. Troll into it and you’ll lose your first-born not to mention your wings.)
So it’s little surprise that after originally warming to the idea, the Air Force has balked at having the project on home turf. After all, who wants a bunch of green-minded brainiacs from LA (where they worship the devil — very un-USAF) arcing around your ‘hood, even if your ‘hood is in the middle of nowhere?
Read the entire article here.
(Photo: SolarReserve artist’s rendering photo)
– Ward
{ 22 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey, how about the Nevada desert?
lol.. well, do we see las-vegasians storming the desert for sun-devises?
almost forgot..
Germany has become a global leader in solar energy by building up a substantial industry at home. Can the country now repeat the feat in North Africa?
http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/european-solar-power-from-african-deserts/
aside that some dude did the math and told people they can make Hawaii completly green and sunny in a 5 years.
WTF, the air force should be ashamed of itself and I hope that the fed ignores them and allows the building of the plant.
How does this country ever expect to start becoming energy independent if ever single project that comes along to provide cheap clean renewable energy is just shot down for some idiot concern. Forget that energy independence is the greatest cause of National security concerns for the United States, the AF doesn’t like it now even after signing off on the plans years ago.
Reminds me of Murdering Ted Kennedy and his ‘I love wind power’ talk, followed by ‘I will be able to see the wind turbines from my house, well forget that then, I am going to fight it cause it’s evil’
Another good reason to dislike the USAF. I think we’re up to about a thousand now.
Whats real nifty is the missed point. The proposed location is pretty much the last acceptable locale for such a large scale solar power plant.
There are places with relatively the same weather perameters, but you can’t build on any of those sites due to environmentalists concerned with the local bird populations, residential neighbors concerned with their land values or scenic views,
existing power companies who are concerned with their bottom lines, or land values that are too high to make the initial acquisitin of the land totally unfeasible.
The project leaders found just about the only place on CONUS where they could build their plant without any major problems, and where it would actually function with a decent amount of efficiency. In spite of that, they still managed to bump into one nosy neighbor who has a problem with their power plant.
So let me get this straight; You are building the worlds largest and most high tech solar powerplant, you are pushing the technology to the extremes. IN spite of this you can’t find any decent place to put it that won’t result in years of bickering, protesting, and/or lawsuiting prior to initial construction. Your massive and high tech plant will have a max capacity of only 100 megawatts, which is about a fraction of the average power output compared to a more conventional (Hydroelectric, coal, fuel, nuclear)
plant.
This is the technology that is going to replace substantial portions of our dirtier legacy power generation system? Well, that or wind energy. Which unfortunately will, and already has, bumpted into the exact same problems in regards to scale, location, and lawsuit happy neighbors.
Call me skeptical, but something tells me that we’re going to be burning coal, oil, and atoms for a long long time.
I’m not sure coal, oil, etc. is a great source to be relying on. They will eventually run out, maybe not soon, but probably we will see severe shortages within this century.
Wouldn’t a great way to power a remote military base be building a hi-tech solar plant right next door. I’m sure they have nuclear, but another source is great, plus you don’t have to find a place for all the nuclear waste. There are security problems, but nothing that can’t be smoothed out, and we aren’t exactly talking about chernobyl-like radiation levels are we?
Surely nothing a radiation suit wouldn’t protect from.
Call me skeptical, but something tells me that we’re going to be burning coal, oil, and atoms catch the wind, sun, river and the sea energies for a long long time.–
fixed and out
Huh. I don’t think Dryden has a problem being so close to LA. :/
If they were so concerned about OPSEC around Nellis, they would assassinate the webmaster of every Area 51 page and delete all of Nevada off of Google Earth. But they don’t. I don’t see why they’re getting in such a hissy fit. Companies understand that playing with the government means playing nice, until you can bribe the generals and the congressmen.
If you look on Wikimapia the proposed site is next to Nellis. However, it’s also smackdab in a neighborhood and near a Pick-A-Part. How is OPSEC disrupted?
Grr, I wish posts coudl be edited.
The “rendering” is a picture of Solar One, the prototype near Barstow.
It is a pity that the air force has balked at having the project on home turf
Curtis – We have enough coal to power the US for at least a couple hundred years…thats if we got all our power from coal…which we of course dont.
We also have enough natural gas to power the US 100 years.
I think we should continue to build coal & natural gas plants.
However that said, we should also continue building renewable energy plants as well.
And we should be building more nuclear power plants…I’m a big supporter of these especially.
people biggest concern with them is nuclear waste…as far as I’m concerned, we can just seal it in containers until the day (a couple decades) that access to space is much much safer and cheaper. When that day comes we can launch all our waste at the sun…and presto, problem solved…and by that time, hopefully, nuclear fission will be getting phased out for nuclear fusion.
@murc
we can just seal it in containers until the day (a couple decades) that access to space is much much safer and cheaper—
WHAHAHAHAHAHA.. we should build a very bid circle and wait until aliens will came and drive it on! nice joke dude!
BTW, this is not the last good place in the country for this plant. There are hundreds of thosands of square miles of good space in the south west alone. There is a good working modle of this type of plant in Spain in a place that the weather conditions would not be much better than if they built it in VA. However this spot (Which if you RTFA you would know) clean, easy (Access to existing power lines), has no enviromental concearns (So they could skip that part), and isn’t in anyones way (even the airforce). So it’s not that it’s the only location, it’s just that it seemed like the easest and best at the moment.
I live in Richmond, VA and get about 95% of my power from PV on my roof. I have about 2 years left until it pays for itself, so don’t tell me you can’t do solar almost anywhere. (Hell they do it on Mars)
Considering it’s for testing, why set it up in the boonies, pay a bunch for infrastructure, only to discover that someone’s pulled the plug and you’re out for billions?
(Apparently the SolarOne project might not be related to SolarReserve’s project at all. And thus the picture displayed may not even be appropriate).
flying fart proudly joned – I wasn’t joking smart@ss.
The the provate industry finaly spending money on space, its only a matter of time before what I said will be a reality.
Big difference between powering your house on a solar or wind array and powering commerce and heavy industry. Slight issue of scale, which brings us back to the slight issue of location.
As far as the rarity of the location goes, I’m speaking specifically of CONUS. In CONUS, with our sue happy neighbors protecting their precious views and the environmentalists trying to protect every endangered slug and bug, this pretty much is the last viable place to stick such a large plant.
Speaking of scale, You’re building the worlds largest, state of the art array, and you’re still only getting 100MWe out of it. Your covering approximately 100 acres of land, and only getting enough juice to run to run a town that’s barely bigger then the array itself.
Solar is not “Ready right now” its still got a lot of development to go before it can take over any sizeable portion of our energy infrastructure. And by sizeable, I mean something on the order of 5-10 percent, by itself. all alternative energy systems combined only make up 6.8 percent.
Now, if I had the choice of placing solar arrays, I’d try to find some nice places in the middle east, northern Africa, and southern Mexico. I hear that “Equator” location is kind of big on sunshine. And those “lesser developed” nations don’t have near as high an energy demand as CONUS. We could build arrays in those nations now, and wait until the tech is further developed before building arrays in CONUS.
Wind faces the exact same challenges. Massive footprints, pissy neighbors, and all for an abysmally small output of energy.
As far as the “developed world” goes, I think our best hope is probably going to be Fusion. Shame its still almost a hundred years off, and its facing its greatest challenges from a bunch of environmentalists who want to use the money for wind and solar arrays.
WHAHAHAHAHAHA.. we should build a very bid circle and wait until aliens will came and drive it on! nice joke dude!
Posted by: flying fart proudly joned at June 21, 2009 03:58 AM
———————-
What exactly is so funny or unbelieveable about that?
There was once a man like you saying men would never fly and that theres no reason to try.
“rumored to be where the nuke testing goes on”
Nuke testing???!!
That’s a way bigger story than the solar power one. Nuke testing has been banned for years, if the US are doing any, well…
1) It’s not ready yet: So what we wait doing no work on it until magicly someone comes up with a solution that is good enough for you?
2) It’s to big: the 100 acres it takes up is less total space that is required to run a coal plant, including all of the external infustructure to run that plant.
3) it’s to big: It’s in the middle of the desert. Who cares?
4) it’s to expensive: It’s a private company. Why do you care?
5) it’s to expensive: Turns out they can generate power for around $.07 per kwh. Which is about the same price as other power.
6) Does generate enough power:100mwh is 100,000 kwh. With the average home using about .93kwh(California) thats 100,000+. Or about 1 in 1000 homes in the US.
7) We still have lots of coal: It’s true we do, but anyone that has driven skyline drive in VA knows, coal is not the greatest fuel around.
Listen I know that Solar as it stands now will not fix all our problems. But to just say, well screw it then we shouldn’t even try is just silly. It’s not costing us money, it’s not taking up land that we want, it’s increasing our domestic energy output (Even if only a little), and allows us to try and see what works.
I don’t understand why anyone would be against this unless they have some vested interest in keeping the status quo. It doesn’t hurt anything and might turn out to be just what we need. It’s like refusing to take a bet where if you win you get more money and if you loose you get your money back.
I am surprised no one has mentioned this. “The Box” is Groom Lake, the Air Force’s Special Projects Test Flight Squadron, Detachment 3 AFFTC. The name comes from the box-shaped no-fly area covering it on navigation charts for Red Flag, part of the R-4808 restricted area (it is, in fact, a restricted area inside a restricted area).
No nuke testing, sorry. Just aliens and special projects.
Old news indeed.
Some history.
In the 1960s there was the nuclear rocket and nuclear aircraft engine programs. That had a reactor that could fly a playne that was the size of a 55g drum. The engines were about the size of a small jet engine today. The work was done by Sandia and the likes of the lab troika – LASL, LLL, and Sandia. They built a facility right next to Mercury behind the NTS gate of Highway 95 from Remo to Vehas. $600,000,000 or thereabouts. They had dormitories, labs, offices, you name it.
All was mothballed in the early 70s – brand new. The engines were hung on hoop stands in the desert to cool for a thousand yers or so – they were very radioactive. You could drive the roads behind Mercury and see them hanging there by the big office buildings.
Sandia took over the site in the late 1970s and but up an alternative energy lab/site/government funded troth. All part of the first alternative energy go around that was killed by Reagan – because oil was cheap and the scaling issues with alternative energy were well known even then.
There were also big towers like the one you talk about further east in Cal-e-fornia – they are old hat too.
What goes around comes around again.
We need thie work now and the salt towers too. Uneless we want to keep paying our “frineds” the Saudis forever . . . and the Russians . . . and Hugo Cahvez . . . and Nigeria . . .