Solar Power Tower equals singed birds ?
LINK :
http://news.yahoo.com/emerging-solar-plants-scorch-birds-mid-air-054013072.html
Emerging solar plants scorch birds in mid-air
By ELLEN KNICKMEYER and JOHN LOCHER 6 hours ago
IVANPAH DRY LAKE, Calif. (AP) Workers at a state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave Desert have a name for birds that fly through the plant's concentrated sun rays "streamers," for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair.
Federal wildlife investigators who visited the BrightSource Energy plant last year and watched as birds burned and fell, reporting an average of one "streamer" every two minutes, are urging California officials to halt the operator's application to build a still-bigger version.
The investigators want the halt until the full extent of the deaths can be assessed. 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.
The deaths are "alarming. It's hard to say whether that's the location or the technology," said Garry George, renewable-energy director for the California chapter of the Audubon Society. "There needs to be some caution."
The bird kills mark the latest instance in which the quest for clean energy sometimes has inadvertent environmental harm. Solar farms have been criticized for their impacts on desert tortoises, and wind farms have killed birds, including numerous raptors.
"We take this issue very seriously," said Jeff Holland, a spokesman for NRG Solar of Carlsbad, California, the second of the three companies behind the plant. The third, Google, deferred comment to its partners.
The $2.2 billion plant, which launched in February, is at Ivanpah Dry Lake near the California-Nevada border. The operator says it's the world's biggest plant to employ so-called power towers.
More than 300,000 mirrors, each the size of a garage door, reflect solar rays onto three boiler towers each looming up to 40 stories high. The water inside is heated to produce steam, which turns turbines that generate enough electricity for 140,000 homes.
Sun rays sent up by the field of mirrors are bright enough to dazzle pilots flying in and out of Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
Federal wildlife officials said Ivanpah might act as a "mega-trap" for wildlife, with the bright light of the plant attracting insects, which in turn attract insect-eating birds that fly to their death in the intensely focused light rays.
Federal and state biologists call the number of deaths significant, based on sightings of birds getting singed and falling, and on retrieval of carcasses with feathers charred too severely for flight.
Ivanpah officials dispute the source of the so-called streamers, saying at least some of the puffs of smoke mark insects and bits of airborne trash being ignited by the solar rays.
Wildlife officials who witnessed the phenomena say many of the clouds of smoke were too big to come from anything but a bird, and they add that they saw "birds entering the solar flux and igniting, consequently become a streamer."
U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials say they want a death toll for a full year of operation.
Given the apparent scale of bird deaths at Ivanpah, authorities should thoroughly track bird kills there for a year, including during annual migratory seasons, before granting any more permits for that kind of solar technology, said George, of the Audubon Society.
The toll on birds has been surprising, said Robert Weisenmiller, chairman of the California Energy Commission. "We didn't see a lot of impact" on birds at the first, smaller power towers in the U.S. and Europe, Weisenmiller said.
The commission is now considering the application from Oakland-based BrightSource to build a mirror field and a 75-story power tower that would reach above the sand dunes and creek washes between Joshua Tree National Park and the California-Arizona border.
The proposed plant is on a flight path for birds between the Colorado River and California's largest lake, the Salton Sea an area, experts say, is richer in avian life than the Ivanpah plant, with protected golden eagles and peregrine falcons and more than 100 other species of birds recorded there.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials warned California this month that the power-tower style of solar technology holds "the highest lethality potential" of the many solar projects burgeoning in the deserts of California.
The commission's staff estimates the proposed new tower would be almost four times as dangerous to birds as the Ivanpah plant. The agency is expected to decide this autumn on the proposal.
While biologists say there is no known feasible way to curb the number of birds killed, the companies behind the projects say they are hoping to find one studying whether lights, sounds or some other technology would scare them away, said Joseph Desmond, senior vice president at BrightSource Energy.
BrightSource also is offering $1.8 million in compensation for anticipated bird deaths at Palen, Desmond said.
The company is proposing the money for programs such as those to spay and neuter domestic cats, which a government study found kill over 1.4 billion birds a year. Opponents say that would do nothing to help the desert birds at the proposed site.
Power-tower proponents are fighting to keep the deaths from forcing a pause in the building of new plants when they see the technology on the verge of becoming more affordable and accessible, said Thomas Conroy, a renewable-energy expert.
When it comes to powering the country's grids, "diversity of technology ... is critical," Conroy said. "Nobody should be arguing let's be all coal, all solar," all wind, or all nuclear. "And every one of those technologies has a long list of pros and cons."
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Petey Coober
10 years agoSorry that the embedded photo gallery did not embed correctly . You can view the picture evidence at the above link or just the gallery at :
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Petey Coober
10 years agoI'm thinkin' bout starting up a business there . Just collect the singed birds after they fall , defeather them & cook them up for tourists . I've got to work up a few recipes and a menu . Possible name of the establishment : The Air Kill Cafe
Whadya think ?
Broliver "TheSquirrel" Stagnasty
10 years agoThink beyond the grid, at least smaller scale. We tend to become trapped into thinking that the way that we produce and distribute electricity is the way that we have to produce and distribute electricity. It is not.
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Petey Coober
10 years agoThere are some reasons why the centralized approach is better . This is the 1st major snafu I've seen to concentrated solar .
1stwarrior
10 years agoThis is an issue we, DoD, have had with the energy industry, specifically the Department of Energy and this present administration, regarding their "fast tracking" of "renewable" energy sources. A Memorandum of Agreement was signed two years ago with DOE as the lead that sez, in effect, environmental impact studies will only be given cursory looks, Endangered Species Act requirements can/will be waived, Sikes Act and numerous other environmental rules/regulations/policies will be "considered", but the energy sources will not be stopped.
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Petey Coober
10 years agoI didn't realize that environmental factors take 2nd place . One would think this would cost Obama some political capital .
1stwarrior
10 years agoOh hell no, it's adding to his political capital. Harry is making our like a raped ape over this in Nevada.
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Petey Coober
10 years agoIn Nevada I expect the potential solar installations would be huge & numerous . No surprise .
Broliver "TheSquirrel" Stagnasty
10 years agoAnd there are numerous reasons why the decentralized is "Better", if you want to call it that. The large projects such as this one (Was this particular plant not in the news for a regulatory snafu of some sort?) benefit from economy of scale and a more rapid time to profitability.
Electricity for 140,000 homes? That has to pay for itself rapidly. So, it is better for the builder/owner, because they get their license to print money all the sooner.
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Petey Coober
10 years agobenefit from economy of scale and a more rapid time to profitability.
Yup . I expect the thermal efficiency is greater as well .
Rooftop solar has some specific problems even if it is wanted :
It must only be on houses with very little shade .
Once installed it becomes expensive to do roofing repairs .
Then there is the problem of getting your utility to accept a grid hookup . However that last issue can be ignored if you can store the energy in battery banks ,
Broliver "TheSquirrel" Stagnasty
10 years agoRooftop solar, meaning Semiconductor Solar panels directly converting the sunlight to energy, is not as efficient as the solar>water>steam>energy, even though there are more steps and mechanical hoops to jump through. (Just feel the solar panels, they are hot, so a great deal of the energy from the light is going towards heating the panels, not making electricity.)
I am not so sure of the differential of a smaller vs larger plants relative to thermal efficiency... shrugs... does not seem to me that it would be that large.
When talking power plants such as this one, the utilities or related companies are the ones building and financing the project, and as such, they wish to maximize return on their investment.
We should pursue all avenues of alternate power generation: Solar, both cell and Hot Water;Wind, turbines come in various shapes and sizes; wave and tidal; hydroelectric; geothermal.... What I was intending to convey was that not all power generation facilities need to generate megawatts of power. If we shift to thinking about how to best do it for a given situation, some applications will call out for the larger plants, and some lend themselves to smaller and varied types of generation.
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Petey Coober
10 years agoI am not so sure of the differential of a smaller vs larger plants relative to thermal efficiency... shrugs... does not seem to me that it would be that large.
I was looking at the difference between a power tower and rooftop photocells .
(Just feel the solar panels, they are hot, so a great deal of the energy from the light is going towards heating the panels, not making electricity.)
This is true . Recently I was reading about a muli-layer cell that is a lot more efficient and "runs" cooler . That implies a longer life cycle . Life cycle is one of the most overlooked parameters .
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