3 replies to this topic

[StevesWeb]

A new plan put in place by the Obama administration will "offer incentives" for solar power developers to group large solar installations in the typically sunny Mojave Desert in California, and the plan also creates Solar Power Zones in 6 Western US States.

Quote

The plan places 445 square miles of public land in play for utility-scale solar facilities. The program, announced Friday by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar at an event in Las Vegas, will apply to new projects only and not the 17 solar facilities already awarded permits or the 78 currently in the approval pipeline. "This historic initiative provides a road map for landscape-level planning that will lead to faster, smarter utility-scale solar development on public lands," Salazar said.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news...energy.html#jCp

A bit down the article contains this fundamental error:

Quote

But so far, the unprecedented urgency given to solar energy projects on public land has yielded only 50 megawatts of produced power, according to officials

I'd like to see a list of the names of these "officials", and a literal transcript of what they actually said, because this sentence makes no sense.


A megawatt is not a unit of power expressed over time.  Perhaps 50 megawatt hours? This too makes me exceptionally skeptical as my home has already produced 15.8MWh just since late May, and that's without smoke or mirrors.

It is fairly easy to complain about the low power output from a generating plant that has not been built yet, but I bet the complaints will drop off when everybody's air conditioning works at 5PM on a super hot climate change summer or winter day.

[still learning]

StevesWeb, on 16 October 2012 - 04:49 AM, said:

A bit down the article contains this fundamental error:.....

Unfortunately a far too common kind of mistake, not being clear about whether power or energy is being referred to.  Megawatts or megawatt-hours.  I'm pretty sure many journalists don't understand the distinction.  Or even understand that there is a distinction.

One problem is that in common everyday usage, in conversation,  many people kind of mix up the usage of the words "power" and "energy," especially when referring to electricity.  Usually it doesn't matter, usually you can figure out what is meant from the context.  Sometimes it does matter though, as in the sentence you quoted.  

Producing 50 megawatt-hours of energy on public lands so far is paltry.  50 megawatts of newly installed solar generation capacity isn't paltry, another 50 megawatt-hours of electricity produced every sunny hour.

Looks like the original article that phys.org was from the LA Times.  That a newspaper environmental reporter might be unclear wnen writing about power and energy isn't surprising, but phys,org should have cleared things up, not propagated the ambiguity.

[FamilyTreeClimber]

An example of how solar energy makes a difference happened in California this year.  We have several flex alert days each Summer.  This means that power usage due to air conditioning use is stretching the grid so much that the utility companies may have rolling blackouts.  They call a flex alert which reminds folks to stay off unnecessary equipment, appliances, etc., so that the grid can hold out.

This Summer we had no rolling blackouts.  Nor did the electricity usage ever peak.  The reason was because there are now so many solar installations selling back to the grid that they made up the difference.  There were several news stories about it because they were quite surprised by it.  This is the first Summer without rolling blackouts since the Enron fiasco.

[Dustoffer]

Line loss and materials are a big waste of any area source power.  The grid is a big mistake.  Houses and businesses should have independent emissions free power IMHO.  I suppose in some locales a small grid hooked up to a non-emissions power source is OK.