Solar Plant Sets Birds On Fire As They Fly Overhead 521
Elledan writes: Federal investigators in California have requested that BrightSource — owner of thermal solar plants — halt the construction of more (and bigger) plants until their impact on wildlife has been further investigated. "Unlike many other solar plants, the Ivanpah plant does not generate energy using photovoltaic solar panels. Instead, it has more than 300,000 mirrors, each the size of a garage door. Together, they cover 1,416 hectares. Each mirror collects and reflects solar rays, focusing and concentrating solar energy from their entire surfaces upward onto three boiler towers, each looming up to 40 stories high. The solar energy heats the water inside the towers to produce steam, which turns turbines that generate enough electricity for 140,000 homes." The concentrated solar energy chars and incinerates the feathers of passing birds. BrightSource estimates about a thousand bird die this way every year, but an environmental group claims the real number is much higher.
god dammit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Number of birds killed by oil spills?
Number of birds killed by air pollution?
Thanks California. Human impact of using coal fired plants? Nope, think of the children has been replaced by "think of the birds".
Re:god dammit. (Score:5, Informative)
~3 birds each day seems like a lot of KFC for a power plant....
anyway, seems like the environmental impact is quite less than mining of coal etc etc, and more easily solved....audible chirps, clicks, etc to scare the birds away? Or maybe a little metal eagle or hawk statue on the roof..
Re:god dammit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:god dammit. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but those eco-nazis are all cat ladies, they don't care that cats kill billions of birds
Re:god dammit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Decreasing the number of birds killed in high population areas does not compensate for killing birds in a low population desert area. For example, raptors are attracted and killed because prey birds are attracted to the bugs which are attracted to the light. Very few raptors are killed by cats. Raptors are much more endangered than the song birds generally killed by cats. All birds are not equal.
Re:god dammit. (Score:5, Interesting)
That all being said, the environmental impact of these supposed "green" energy sources is significant. The production of biofuels like ethanol has decimated habitat, the dangers of wind power to raptors are well known, and now this. There needs to be more study beforehand rather than after the fact. And green energy apologists need to concede that their industry is just as hypocritical about the environment as any other energy producer.
Re:god dammit. (Score:5, Informative)
Well, trying [nbcnewyork.com] at least [cbsnews.com]
Re:god dammit. (Score:5, Insightful)
That 1416 ha. is the total size of the mirror fields, not the small focus area that kills birds. These top ten airports by area:
http://www.toptenstip.com/top-... [toptenstip.com]
are not only all much larger than the kill area at Ivanpah, but are located in heavily populated areas where there is a lot of water and birds. Ivanpah is located in the most featureless, unpopulated, wildlife-free area in the US.
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most featureless, unpopulated, wildlife-free area in the US
I see a flaw in your logic. If it is a wildlife free area then there would be no birds to kill. Since there are birds being killed the area, while unpopulated by people, is not "wildlife free". A better description is "wildlife sparse" which makes killing a relatively small number of birds even more significant.
What I was trying to point out about airports was that the techniques target a different issue and may not work at the solar sites.
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None of which are in desert conditions. The fact that there are more eagles in the North West does not mitigate the fact the there are fewer other raptors of other species in the desert. By your logic because there are millions of Spring Salmon we should be able to catch as many King Salmon (an endanger species) we want. Sorry but different species and populations.
Re:god dammit. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:god dammit. (Score:4, Informative)
FWIW, windmills and skyscrapers kill a lot of birds too.
And automobiles, for that matter.
Re:god dammit. (Score:5, Interesting)
But think of the jet engines!
Also, according to his study, windmills 'save' birds, because they replace other, more harmful ways to generate electricity.
http://reneweconomy.com.au/201... [reneweconomy.com.au]
Re:god dammit. (Score:5, Informative)
FWIW, windmills and skyscrapers kill a lot of birds too.
Lots of things kill birds, and actually wind turbines are pretty low on the scale. Even nuclear plants kill more by some estimates:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... [wikipedia.org]
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Lots of things kill birds, and actually wind turbines are pretty low on the scale. Even nuclear plants kill more by some estimates:
Nuclear power is still likely bird-safer.
I don't want aggregate stats on total number of birds killed by different technologies.
I want Number of birds killed per hundred thousands of watts generated. If all power plants were nuclear, then 100% of the birds killed in power generation would be by nuclear. That doesn't mean that Nuclear plants are safer for birds than wind tur
best and worst for wildlife are (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't have figures for birds specifically handy, but I can tell you the best and worst for wildlife generally. Ignoring minor things like tidal power, the two best are geothermal and nuclear. It's too bad that geothermal is limited to certain geological areas, because it's pretty good on all measures. It releases some greenhouse gases and often requires fracking, but it's pretty safe for wildlife and generally a good idea. Nuclear is quite clean, except of course on the two instances of a major accident.
The worst for wildlife are coal and hydroelectric dams. Hydro surprises some people, but in the best case a dam starts outby destroying a large swath of habitat, then permanently disrupts fish migration and the ecosystems dependant on the waterway. In the worst case, Banqiao. The Banqiao hydroelectric dam disaster was far, far worse than any nuclear accident ever has been.
International Rivers for more information (Score:3)
Ps, International Rivers is a good place to start if you want to know more about the environmental damage done by dams, particularly large dams as used for hydroelectric power. They are advocates of course ; just as the ASPCA isn't objective about animals, International Rivers isn't objective about rivers. They advocate for what they believe is right, but each is a good source of information about their side of the side of the issue.
Re:god dammit. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Chernobyl IS an operating plant. But the "operating" part is not what affected local animal life.
But what mdsolar and his type forget is, Chernobyle is 1 incident. Fukushima 2. Over the life of all the nuclear plants, even taking those 2 horrible accidents (preventable they may have been) the track record world wide for Nuclear energy is better than most other types of energy.
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Re:god dammit. (Score:4, Funny)
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The obvious answer for this environmental and philosophical conundrum is for you to start breakfasting from your bird feeder.
Re:god dammit. (Score:4, Funny)
Household cats and their escaped feral counterparts kill like a 1 billion birds and small animals in the US every year...
"Fuck them." -- my cat
Re:god dammit. (Score:5, Funny)
I find that hard to believe - very few automobiles get killed by skyscrapers in my experience.
Re:god dammit. (Score:4, Funny)
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The number of birds killed by windmills is actually quite low: apparently the woosh-woosh sound of the blades cutting through the wind is enough to scare most birds away.
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"Birds can fly into the rotors. Then they have to send the janitor Steve out to clean the thing, and it just ruins his day. Then he goes home and beats his kids. So if you support wind energy, you support domestic violence [bash.org]."
Re:god dammit. (Score:5, Insightful)
Note to self: Birds are fucking stupid.
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Add KFC next to solar powerplant... problem fixed!
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Re:god dammit. (Score:5, Funny)
That's what the catapults are for.
Re:god dammit. (Score:5, Funny)
chickens can't fly that high
What do chickens have to do with KFC?
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Or worst case scenario they could set up some sort of bird house program (away from the site) to encourage breeding to offset the numbers lost.
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How about just building these things out in the deserts?
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http://www.kcet.org/news/redef... [kcet.org]
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Last of the bald eagles? I wish. Come up to Alaska. They're basically giant rats that make more noise than rats ever did and poop in places that rats can only dream of. We have an buttload of the them. You're welcome to any and all.
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You need to dig (pun intended) into the subject a bit more. The subduction zone of a tectonic plate might be 50 kilometers down, not 50 meters. People have suggested putting nuclear waste in some of the deeper ocean trenches formed by subduction zones where the plate boundary is thin ( 1 - 10 km). Problem is it would take tens of thousands of years for the material to subduct appreciably below the surface. In the meantime it would be actively falling apart just like everything else in a marine environme
Re:god dammit. (Score:5, Informative)
I think it's funny that BrightSource's bird kill numbers are being trusted when they say 1,000 per year. This story [abc22now.com] says that "federal wildlife investigators" are estimating one "streamer" every two minutes on average. That would be 240 per day assuming 8 hours of operation. The Center for Biological Diversity estimates 28,000 per year. That's only about 76 per day.
The Exxon Valdez spill killed (from my quick search) an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 birds, about what this would kill in 10 years or so at mid-20k birds killed per year. So, build 10 of these plants (or larger with even more roasting capacity) and you have the equivalent (in bird deaths) of an Exxon Valdez oil spill each year. A wise sage once said "It's not easy being green."
If this were a coal or oil source quoting bird kills, would people be so willing to accept their numbers at face value? BrightSource is wanting to build a much larger plant right in a migratory corridor. They have a strong incentive to lie about the numbers.
Also, if you want to compare birds killed here to birds killed by "dirty" energy, scale this ONE complex's Kill per Megawatt up from its (planned) capacity of 392 MW to that of what you're comparing to. Assuming that the plant generates power 8 hours per day year round at 100%, you get about 3.2 GWh of electricity. A search found that for 2010 in the US coal power production was a bit larger than that at 1,994,000 GWh. So, multiply the bird kills by over 600,000 (1,994,000 / 3.2) and you can now compare the kills scaled for power generated. That would be scaling to over 600 million birds by BrightSource numbers and about 17 billion by the environmental group's numbers. The "federal wildlife investigator's" numbers would yield somewhere around 53 billion. I wonder how much coal could be saved by just burning 53 billion birds each year instead...
Don't forget to add in the tortoise habit that was damaged to build this too. I'm trying to think of the name of the thin, extremely fragile layer of crust on undisturbed desert ground that environmental groups want to shut down land so people won't walk on it. (It isn't Desert Varnish. That's what's on rocks.) It takes forever for it to recover. All gone on that six-and-a-quarter square mile site.
But on the bright side, ha ha, at least the owls are safe.
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Oops. Math error. Divide all of my numbers by 365.
So only about 1.5 to 2 million birds (BrightSource) to 46 million (green group) to 145 million (government).
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I'm trying to think of the name of the thin, extremely fragile layer of crust on undisturbed desert ground that environmental groups want to shut down land so people won't walk on it.
That's cryptobiotic soil, I think. Worth preserving, but I think we can stand to lose a few square miles of it in exchange for power for 100k+ homes. This isn't random people walking or driving over it for a moment and then leaving, this is permanently putting a piece of desert to useful work.
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The Exxon Valdez spill killed (from my quick search) an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 birds, about what this would kill in 10 years or so at mid-20k birds killed per year. So, build 10 of these plants (or larger with even more roasting capacity) and you have the equivalent (in bird deaths) of an Exxon Valdez oil spill each year. A wise sage once said "It's not easy being green."
The Exxon Valdez is something which should not have happened at all. Whereas this is a consequence of "normal operation".
This kind of thinking works out so well with nuclear.
Re:god dammit. (Score:5, Insightful)
If we estimate only perfect performance, then we fail to acknowledge that we live in an imperfect world. Spills are normal consequences of oil operations. It's not whether or not they *should* happen, but rather how often they *do* happen that matters.
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"~3 birds each day seems like a lot of KFC for a power plant...."
Indeed, it's about what my cat does damage in 4-5 hours.
Re:god dammit. (Score:5, Insightful)
CSP is a neat technology, but far behind Solar PV and wind in being ready for practical applications, so it will likely remain a quite small part of the energy mix if/when it gets out of the pilot phase.
CSP development is however, a really interesting to follow. It involves a range of challenges that cross engineering and material science disciplines that aren't obvious when you think "its just generating steam with mirrors". But, in reality, it is really hard to obtain the steady heat input and control needed to obtain steady, quality steam. There are numerous trade-offs between heat absorbing coatings, their adhesive techniques and their ability to expand and contract frequently. There is a challenge in designing the right turbine which operates efficiently as possible over a wide operating curve. Central "boiler" tank type designs have very slow heating / cooling times, which helps dampen solar variances, but make it difficult to place turbine cycle equipment nearby in a way that doesn't impact the heating approach. The linear Fresnel mirror/tube type CSP plants on the other hand have big problems in maintaining even heating throughout the long tubes which leads to hammer and damage, and a lot of expansion/contraction related issues. I'd love to work on one of these projects, its worth reading about if that kind of thing gives you a rise.
Inconvenient truth? (Score:5, Interesting)
I suspect oil/coal shills here.
I thought the same thing but a brief skim of their donor list indicates otherwise, an easy to find annual report is also not something commonly available for the myriad of FF front groups.
Having said that, the last line of the summary is oddly misleading, the phrase "but an environmental group claims" should read "but federal wildlife officers claim". It was the Feds who observed "a streamer every 2min", which by simple linear extrapolation is ~25k/yr, they became alarmed and requested the construction halt. Notice they have not called for a halt to operations. I think a closer look is certainly warranted and Federal Wildlife people would appear to be the appropriate group to be doing the looking. Where the environmental group actually fit into the story I'm not sure, if they were the ones who called in the feds, then good on 'em for not turning a blind eye to a politically inconvenient truth.
Disclaimer: Self confessed "greenie" long before greenpeace and science parted ways in the 80's.
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It's the call to immediately stop construction, rather than "design a way of scaring off birds" that fingers this as the usual Green misanthropy. They identify problems with every technology out there, but never support approaches to actually solving them.
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Wait a second.. are you implying that i'm a nuclear shill?
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Re:god dammit. (Score:5, Funny)
Sorry to be completely off-topic, but The Nuclear Shill sounds like the name of a really bad comic book villain.
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Re:god dammit. (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, he is Spot On.
One thing all Environmentalists have in common is the loathing of humans and their "impact" on the environment. A close second is Self Loathing, but not no much that they will volunteer to go first in an effort to reduce the human impact on the environment.
What a steaming pile of shit. There may be a few extremists who tend to get headlines that feel that way but most environmentalists like me just recognize how utterly dependent our human civilization is on the natural systems that sustain us and feel that we should take steps to help keep those systems going.
Re:god dammit. (Score:4, Insightful)
Just because you think something it doesn't become true. There are fanatics that think like that, sure. But one doesn't select an extremist group and try to paint them as the average - that is the way of shills and retards.
Most environmentalists are those that realize we live in a world with finite resources and that our children will indeed inherit the earth as we leave it.
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had the same thought...
what about Airports ?
deploy the same methods they do chirps/sounds and eagle surly someone thought of that and suggested it already ???
personally I see this as far better method to generate electricity than polluting photoelectric cells... they deserve a congratulations !
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Thanks California.
Don't blame California. The idiots complaining about this are from the federal government.
Re:god dammit. The Numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
Crunching the numbers, it's foolish to delay solar power adoption for even 28K birds a year.
Climate change is expected to soon kill off 1/8th of all bird species.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/... [www.cbc.ca]
200M birds die from cats each year in Canada ( which has the human population of California).
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politic... [www.cbc.ca]
Either stop climate change pollution, or kiss some birds goodbye (peck on the cheek).
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I'll buy your number for cats - there are hundreds of millions of them, and they love to hunt birds. A power plant that kills a few thousand is completely irrelevant in comparison, but these are clueless "progressive" types, they aren't expected to understand basic math.
I'll pass on the latest climate change panic...
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That's 28,000 birds for this current, small, solar installation: 0.4GWh, when the US uses tends of thousands of GWh. Scale it up to just 1% of US power generation and you'll be talking about millions of birds a year. It may well be that it is the least harmful way of generating electricity, but just saying cats kill more (which is an issue in itself!) doesn't make it unimportant. Personally I think it's very importan
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Cats killing birds is not an issue. Those little ground finches? The sparrows? They're prolific. They climb into other birds's nests and destroy eggs. They kill small birds. They're vicious, hateful little bastards, and they're extincting the native species of the United States.
95% of birds I see are sparrows now. They're ground-foraging. We need more cats.
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1) starts with the presumption that all changes in bird population are due to Fukushima accident, but makes zero attempts to justify that logic, its basis, or evidence to support that theory.
2) ignores completely the habitat impact of the tsunami
3) ignores completely the impact of human evacuation. No bird feeders, no bird baths, no trash (common food source), no fish cleaning, etc.
4) states that it
Chicken (Score:2)
The concentrated solar energy chars and incinerates the feathers of passing birds. BrightSource estimates about a thousand bird die this way every year...
Probably doesn't taste like chicken though as chickens can't fly.
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Probably doesn't taste like chicken though as chickens can't fly.
Like sheep, they don't fly so much as plummet.
(Actually, chickens can sort of fake it enough to get out of uncovered pens on occasion)
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Chickens can definitely fly. I've seen them fly on many occasions. Sure they're nowhere near as good as a seagull or an unladen swallow, they can get off the ground and fly short distances. This is why chickens are either kept indoors or have their wings clipped (and now you know where the expression comes from), as otherwise they'd fly out of their pen.
Video or it didn't happen (Score:4, Interesting)
No seriously, I'd love to see a video of this.
Very interesting problem, wonder how it can be solved?
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We have those ultrasound acoustic weapons - highly directional noise projectors. Presumably the volume of wildlife isn't very high, so you could watch the sky with a camera and then direct some sound which they treat as "fly away from" at any birds which crossed over a safe zone. Most nearby wildlife would quickly figure out where not to go.
Re:Video or it didn't happen (Score:4, Informative)
And an actual scientist did that experiment in 1973, and it worked.
CSPs can get over 1000 F. I've seen them direct mirror to a single spot in the air, and that spot lights you. Looks like a floats 'ball' of light. It does that because it's super heating the dust particle.
I use to drive by on fairly regularly when I live in Ca. One day I just drove in and talk to some people about it. They were very knowledgeable and nice
Hydroelectric Dams (Score:5, Interesting)
Mortality rate of fish through the turbine is close to 10%
Except fish are slimy, scaly and make weird mouth shapes when you pull them out of the water to look at them. They look pretty awkward.
Birds on the other hand, are beautiful creatures flying through the air, truly, beautiful, feathered friends, God's own creations.
But if 3 birds die in a 3500 acre site per day, heaven help us all for destroying nature. I can go out in my back yard and shake the six to eight trees on my half-acre and watch at least four birds fly out.
Re:Hydroelectric Dams (Score:5, Funny)
Three humans die each day due to obesity-related health reasons within 3500 of the McDonalds by my house. They say humans are attracted to the site by the brightly-lit golden arches which some say is a food source for the species.
Re:Hydroelectric Dams (Score:4, Informative)
Except fish are slimy, scaly and make weird mouth shapes when you pull them out of the water to look at them.
They're sea kittens! [peta.org]
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Cut out the middle man! (Score:5, Funny)
Why not skip all the expensive equipment and just use birds for fuel?
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I don't have mod points right now so I have to thank you unanonymously for making me laugh.
Estimates (Score:2)
From the article;
Estimates per year now range from a low of about a thousand by BrightSource to 28,000 by an expert for the Center for Biological Diversity environmental group.
A thousand is not much of an issue but 28,000 could be. Both are estimates and it should be looked into.
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Looked into, but not freaked out about. Cats kill hundreds of millions of birds each year. 200M die in Canada alone.
200,000,000
vs.
28,000?
It's not even close. Delaying a switch to solar is much more deadly for birds, as it's expected 1/8th of species will soon (within decades) become extinct due to climate change.
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I question the logic a bit.
1. We are talking about the desert where birds are more scarce that forested areas.
2. This is only one plant. What happens when there are 100 or 1,000 such plants?
3. Just because there are worse problem does not mean that we should ignore lesser problem.
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1. Solar Thermal plants are built in the desert because that's where they have the most ideal operating conditions. The fact that there are more birds in forests than deserts is completely irrelevant because they don't build concentrating solar plants in forests.
2. We would expect the casualties to scale roughly with the number of plants, so is you had 1,000 such plants, that would be 1,000x the casualties. Still a drop in the bucket compared to the billions of birds killed by feral cats every year in North
Can they just ... (Score:2)
...set up some streaming cameras. I'm sure the nerds on the Internet will write something to count them.
Or are they afraid the videos will go viral. WATCH BIRDS GET ROASTED OMG WTF LOL!!!!
LOL (Score:2, Interesting)
This has been going on for months and months. I wondered how long it would take Slashdot to finally surface it.
This is Brightsource in Mohave. Feinstein et. al. held it up for years to protect turtles that were supposedly endangered.
Now it's frying birds. Certain species could be wiped out because they happen to inhabit the area.
This is the no. 1 best contemporary example of exactly why renewables will never displace more than a trivially small fraction of electric supply in the Western world; land use a
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Except for example Israel is quite keen on solar power give that it is hot and sunny there to the point where they have deserts. Also not relying on hostile neighbours for fossil fuel is seen as being a "good" thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The suggestion is that Israel could meet all it's power generation using solar in the Negev. Heck the Tesla S almost has the range to drive from any point to any other point in the country. Given the hostile nature of it's neighbours, that they control much of th
TANSTAAFL (Score:5, Insightful)
Every kind of energy generation has a price. It's the price of civilization. Only in California could this come as a surprise...
NIMBYs? Crackpots? (Score:5, Informative)
California has had 2-3 of these running for decades. Yes, newer ones are bigger, but even the smaller ones like the one in Coalinga can fry a bird if it flies near the focal point.
Maybe just stop building these. They are quite expensive. They are the most expensive source of electricity, bar none.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org] (sort by levelised cost).
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According to the gov, 33% total efficiency for coal. I don't know what part of that is turbine efficiency. Only natural gas is significantly better.
Business opportunity (Score:3)
Open a new Kentucky Fried Bird! Offers only the finest organic, free-range birds, with no added hormones or antibiotics and fed only their natural diet. Guaranteed to be extra-crispy!
Rebranding Is the Key (Score:2)
Think about it...California won't be shutting KFC down anytime soon, and they are not kind to birds. [kentuckyfriedcruelty.com]
Icarus Beware (Score:2)
Insignificant...unless you're the bird (Score:2)
According to Science News, anywhere from 365 million to 990 million birds die each year in the United States from crashing in to windows. Science News also reports studies that show 1.3 to 4 Billion birds die each year in the US because of cats. Compared to those numbers, power generation facility deaths are not even a blip.
Re:Insignificant...unless you're the bird (Score:5, Interesting)
Most glazed windows are in areas of high bird populations. Birds and people like similar environments. Deserts where these plants are located have much lower bird populations and much rarer birds. Raw numbers are meaningless. It is proportion of population that matters.
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Re:Insignificant...unless you're the bird (Score:5, Funny)
Actually no, Society is not OK with that. Only the most horrible pet owners let their cats out like that. It's the scumbag fringe of society that is OK with it.
Many cities are trying hard to fight the scourge of bad pet owners letting their cats out.
Research has been done (Score:3)
From memory, it found most birds were killed by collision with the mirrors and only a few were killed by the concentrated radiation.
Glazed windows kill birds in the same way that mirrors do.
Drop solar heat for direct conversion (Score:3)
Solar to heat to mechanical to electricity as already reached its maximum efficiency.
Photovoltaic has still many recent discoveries for great efficiency improvements, and more are likely to come.
Using heat for conversion is degrading the energy to its worst and less usable form, direct conversion is the way to go. Halting those heat projects is good news.
Re:Drop solar heat for direct conversion (Score:5, Insightful)
Solar to heat to mechanical to electricity as already reached its maximum efficiency.
Photovoltaic has still many recent discoveries for great efficiency improvements, and more are likely to come.
Using heat for conversion is degrading the energy to its worst and less usable form, direct conversion is the way to go. Halting those heat projects is good news.
The big advantage heat-conversion plants have is that you can heat slow cooling material such as salt which can continue production electricity long after the sun has set, effectively turning it into a electricity storage medium. The big problem large scale use of Photovoltaic has, is that we do not have a cheap and scalable way to store generated electricity for use when needed, not just when the sun is shining.
Re:Drop solar heat for direct conversion (Score:5, Informative)
Except you can not exceed the solar power that hits the surface of the planet from the sun.
There are actual, serious, plans to put solar in orbit. Solar isn't limited to the surface of the planet.
But let's ignore that power-in-sky thinking for a moment.
The amount of sunlight that hits the Earth is an astronomical 150,000,000,000,000,000 Watts.
That's around 1000 times man's total energy usage.
To put it in per capita terms;
At noon, 1 square meter on the surface receives about 1 kilowatt of energy.
The average over a day is 4 kilowatt hours per square meter.
A typical home is 100 square meters, and uses 24 kilowatt hours a day.
At 12% efficiency, you only need to cover half the roof with photovoltaics to supply 100% of that homes electric needs.
The solution is simple (Score:2)
Pigeons (Score:2)
Hahaha! (Score:3)
Reminds me of the "peace dove" scene in "Mars Attacks!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
Environmental impact: TANSTAAFL (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously. People need to stop thinking of renewable energy sources as completely clean and utterly harmless.
They aren't. And never have been.
Once the lies and misconceptions are cleared away, THEN people can start making intelligent choices about the risks they want to take building out their power systems.
Birds falling from the sky fully cooked (Score:4, Insightful)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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...and kill two birds with a single... 300,000 mirror array?!