Freeze On US Solar Plant Applications Lifted 282
necro81 writes "Barely a month ago, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management announced a freeze on applications for solar power plants on federally managed land, pending a two-year comprehensive environmental review. After much hue and cry from the public, industry, and other parts of government, BLM has today announced that it will lift the freeze, but continue to study the possible environmental effects. To date, no solar project has yet been approved on BLM land."
Re:No Solar Projects Approved (Score:4, Informative)
I looked, but could only find old articles that ruled in favor of the oil/gas company drilling on Native American land for oil.
If you have more recent ones I'm all ears. :p
"Land Management Bureau, rejecting appeal by 10 American Indian tribes and environmentalists, rules Anschutz Exploration Corp may drill exploratory oil well in southern Montana near ancient rock art site Indians consider sacred
May 23, 2001"
Re:Germany has them (Score:3, Informative)
New Mexico Utilities RFP for New Solar Project (Score:4, Informative)
In the same week, a group of New Mexico utilities have announced a RFP for a new solar project [earth2tech.com]. This is interesting since a significant amount of land in rural New Mexico is Federally controlled, either by the BLM or military.
Re:No Solar Projects Approved (Score:5, Informative)
From the BLM web page:
http://www.blm.gov/wo/st/en/prog/energy/oil_and_gas.html [blm.gov]
It wasn't too hard to find. Being on the main blm web page and all. To answer the question, the BLM does have quite an investment in selling leases for exploiting natural resources. Although, it doesn't explain why they wouldn't be interested in selling leases to exploit sunlight. Of course, we might find out that this was a directive from someone higher up in the administration.
Re:Don't review it! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Solar plants are dangerous! (Score:3, Informative)
Last summer [sciam.com] for the most part, and there are some projections that it will melt completely by the end of this summer.
=Smidge=
Re:Government listening to the people?? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:FFS just go nuclear (Score:3, Informative)
and while they're at it perhaps they could invest the money needed to finally get fission working too.
I think you mean "fusion" [wikipedia.org]. Fission [wikipedia.org] is what the present nuclear plants use. As to fusion, I'm hopeful yet skeptical, as when I was a kid fission (nuclear power) was going to make electricity "too cheap to meter".
Re:No Solar Projects Approved (Score:5, Informative)
They're still going to do the studies, and from what I'm seeing they're not planning on approving any of the leases until that study is done:
FTA:
"The BLM in 2006 completed a similar study of the effects of wind farm development in the Midwest. The agency did not, however, halt applications during that process, which began in 2003. Resseguie said that was because wind resources were geographically dispersed and there were no multiple applications for any single location, as there are in California for solar plants."
So it sounds like they were just trying to close the queue so it wouldn't get clogged up while they waited on the results of the survey. It doesn't appear to in any way impact when they will start approving leases.
Re:Builders or speculators? (Score:5, Informative)
California has a mandate that 20% of its power must come from renewables (not including large hydropower plants) by 2012 and higher targets shortly after. The only cost-effective way to meet this requirement is by building massive thermal solar plants very quickly. Lots of the best land for such plants is controlled by the Federal government in one form or another. There are something like 10 500 MW solar farms planned for construction in in various parts of the Mojave desert over the next decade. So, the demand is real.
Re:ok (Score:1, Informative)
How about the fact that the plant and animal life near/under these panels is no longer getting the sunlight needed/required. Yes you could convert most of Arizona into a solar farm if the environmentalists can deal with killing off certain species that depend on the sunlight here. You could also cover most of Nebraska except for that pesky food production we would loose by converting crop fields to solar fields.
Re:ok (Score:5, Informative)
Solar cells are still made from industrial chemical processes, so they're not necessarily very land-fill friendly (obviously, this depends on the chemical makeup of the cell)....and yes, the cells will wear out and require replacement.
Also, as a joker pointed out earlier, since they don't work at night, you need batteries...our battery technology is also fairly heavy on the heavy metals right now. These also wear out, often faster than the cells do.
In the case that the BLM are talking about, there are a number of interesting possibilities:
* How to bees/other insects react to light reflected back off large banks of cells? Does it mess with their navigation?
* Do any of the plans to get cables out to the banks of cells mess with the wildlife they're trying to protect?
* Do the cells have any (potentially) toxic runoff when hit with heavy rains/hail/etc?
* will any residual heat from the cells mess with the local flora/fauna? (if it's an area that's normally snow-covered in winter, what happens if the heat from the cells keeps it snow-free? Does that mess with any of the local plants cycles?)
Re:ok (Score:3, Informative)
It isn't so much the solar energy itself, it is the stuff that is necessary to collect the solar energy and then get it to people's houses.
If somebody wants to build a large solar collecting station out in the middle of nowhere* there are some questions that need to be answered. I'm kind of disappointed that they don't already know most of this stuff since people have been building on BLM land for 200 years, but hey that's the government for you.
[*The BLM manages land in New Mexico, Arizona, California, Wyoming, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska. There probably are not a lot of requests for solar plants in Alaska though.]
I don't pretend to be at all knowledgeable on the subject, but I would guess that before the BLM lets somebody start a project, they would want to know stuff like:
Re:ok (Score:5, Informative)
Thermal solar power works by heating something like liquid sodium and then using that to heat steam to 1000F, which is a very efficient temperature to run a steam turbine. As such, they work at night, for between 2-20 hours after sundown (can even out a partially cloudy day, for example).
Thermal solar doesn't need batteries, and you don't use batteries for a grid intertie solar plant. Most energy is needed during the day, when the sun is brightest, so honestly, the big point is taking peak needs off the coal plants -- which is how you have to size them and where you pay most of your money. Photovoltaics can feed into the grid and provide this peak pretty well, although it's yet to be seen if thermal solar can beat them for efficiency.
Re:ok (Score:3, Informative)
Imagine! Clueless comments on Slashdot. (Score:4, Informative)
The most interesting thing about this whole debacle has been seeing how many people have so little clue about solar thermal. When the story first broke you could see all these Republican apologists ranting about the horrors of photovoltaic production just as we see in this thread here on Slashdot on the other end of the story.
And then if it wasn't the atrocity of silane gas and photovoltaics then it was about how they were going to have to install all these new power lines. Again, we're seeing this same ignorant idiot trash spewed all over Slashdot.
The truth is, this is about solar thermal and this has been throughly vetted in public documents that are freely available to anyone with the slightest interest in the topic. Such far-left comunist hippies as Arnold Schwarzenegger drafted the document which explains in great detail that they have planned the solar thermal projects in question specifically to intersect with existing grid-interties.
No! Gasp, you mean somebody already thought of it?
Yes, read it yourself. Extra! Extra! Read all about it!
It's the Western Governorsâ(TM) Association. Clean and Diversified Energy Initiative. Solar Task Force Report. Get it while it's hot kids.
http://cleantechlawandbusiness.com/cleanbeta/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/solar-full.pdf [cleantechl...siness.com].
But what I really like about this whole story, yeah I have enjoyed this story from beginning to end, is that it raised the prominence of solar thermal in the mass media. All the long-haired dope smoking hippies bloggers in the world couldn't have achieved what the Bush BLM managed in a single month.
Thanks BLM!
Re:Germany has them (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Good! (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry when the facts bother you, but solar only recently made it past the "break even" point in regards to energy produced over energy put in during production.
Today on slashdot, lying liars and the lies they tell.
The truth is that we have known for over thirty years that Solar Cells recoup the energy invested in their production in under seven years and may actually do it in less than one year [csudh.edu].
Now, a nuclear plant however ...
...could be safe and efficient, but none of the designs we are using now are particularly deserving of either description (although they are not spectacularly unsafe and are probably safer than many of the coal and oil plants operating in the USA.) And the plants which have been proposed to be built any time in the near future are just more of the same shit.
We would need to start using breeder reactors to reprocess nuclear fuel in order to make building more nuclear make any kind of sense. This is not impossible.
On the issue of solar passing the break even point, however, you are like Bush talking about WMDs in Iraq. Full of fucking shit and with no possible defense other than being misled. Too bad you got modded up (obviously by big oil! heh heh)