Jobs. Really??

They say :

“They predict employing 450 persons at peak of construction, 250 on average, and 50 for ongoing operations after construction. That is per tower”

Ok, first off they are going need people with specific degrees and experience I’m sure, then the few they do hire for construction is only for what 30 months. Then, aw, they’re going to employ 50 people. (or 100 if the second bloody thing goes up) Last I knew there’s more that 50 people in the Valley AND how many of those are going to specific engineer type degree jobs. You know they’ll come back reword it all so they can hire 2 valley people or something.
Let’s say they actually do hire 50 valley folks. Ooooo aaaaah. Gee thanks. Huh all the profits are still going to them. Huh, the valley is still the poorest in Colorado, everyone is miserable and Yay we get to look at two horrific monoliths.

Awesome.

Ok, rant over…for now

Whose with me???

Really

We could do PV systems and land owners AND the county will all benefit. The actual valley will benefit as a whole.

NOT some huge corporation with tax loopholes that will take everything and screw us all! Oh yeah…and it’s experimental. Need I say anything else…

And what jobs…. Jobs of expertise that will no doubt be brought in… for 30 months and then 30 jobs left over. Um I think there’s more than 30 people in the valley. Just sayin….

Not to mention this will tap out our lines and no one will be able to do PV sytems. So once again.. the little guy get squashed.

Come on people

GET REAL!

Lee is ignoring the seriousness of the potential negative impacts of a large-scale industrial project that will inevitably have a massive ecological footprint. Nothing like it has ever been built in Colorado or on the face of the earth. His assumption that SolarReserve will lead to a net-reduction in C02 emissions is unproven. How much concrete will be produced to build two 656’ towers, how much diesel fuel burned to transport all of the material and supplies to our remote location?

What is the footprint of the additional transmission needed to move SLV energy to the front-range? Sulfur Hexafluoride/SF6 is a green house gas 23,900 times more potent as CO2. Most SF6 emissions are generated in long-distance transmission of electrical power, the more remote a new facility is, and the more additional miles of transmission line needed to deliver its power to the grid, the higher the SF6 burden of each new generating facility will be. In 2010 the EPA estimated average emissions of between .58 and .89 kilograms of SF6 for every mile of transmission line per year over the last decade. Please see: Greenhouse Gas Emissions From Industrial Solar. Scientists at the University of California, Riverside have reason to believe that the industrial solar may have a larger footprint than people think. More research is needed before we plow ahead blindly with massive industrial development.

I agree with Lee that we don’t have time to do the research to know if industrial solar really will result in emissions reductions, but we can’t afford to give it the benefit of the doubt, so wouldn’t it me wiser to go with distributed generation where there is no doubt that its faster, cheaper, more efficient and incentivizes energy conservation?

Will the solar energy generated remotely actually replace fossil fuel use, or will it simply be an add-on to the ever-growing energy pie, perhaps even encouraging people to use ever more energy, because, hey, its clean! Locally generated solar has obvious and tangible built-in incentives that are proven to reduce energy consumption at the point of use.

We know that power towers kill birds but the only study we have is on a 10 MW pilot plant long since decommissioned in CA. It is possible this facility could cause the death of hundreds of thousands of migrant birds and bats over its lifetime. But most of the impacts of SolarReserve are unknown; microclimate impacts, visual (including retinal effects of glint and glare from 35,000 – 25 foot square helistat mirrors), groundwater, fire, other wildlife impacts and more.

“The large-scale approach thus seeks fair, balanced trade between the valley and the larger world, a sharing of the corporate infrastructure burden, and accepting at least some of the responsibility for sustaining it here. Thankfully, multi-decade transformative leadership by far-sighted visionaries like Paul Hawken, Al Gore, Amory Lovins, William McDonough and Jeremy Rifkin pioneered green commerce models that have improved the global business activities of established corporations and new ones like SolarReserve”
Ceal Response: I find the statement to be enormously naïve. The energy industry, in particular, has amassed more political power than any industry, at any time in history. Industry tycoons like the Koch brothers have effectively undermined global efforts to combat climate change and move aggressively towards a clean energy economy. The proponents of industrial solar and wind are, for the most part, the same Wall Street corporations (BP, Chevron, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, et al.) who are responsible for our global environmental and economic crisis. Solar is simply a good business deal as long as the federal government continues to hand out massive subsidies.
Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, Jeremy Rifkin, Bill McKibben and energy visionaries are, in fact, calling for massive deployment of distributed generation and Energy Democracy. Please see:
Jeremy Rifkin, the Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral (i.e. distributed) Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy and the World
Emory Lovins, Small is Profitable
Hermann Scheer, the Solar Economy
Al Weinrub, Community Power (endorsed by Bill McKibben, Angelina Galiteva, Paul Gipe, James Woolsey, John Farrell, Randy Hayes and others)
John Farrell, Democratizing the Electricity System – A vision for the 21st Century Grid
“Large-scale efforts in these major sectors will thus mitigate the lion’s share, followed by multi-scale global energy-efficiency improvements, smart growth, land-use-practice improvements, and the small-scale approach, over the next 20-30 years. Clearly, more approaches are better than one!”
Ceal Response: Please see, 4 Myths about Large-scale Solar, by Janine Blaeloch.
“SolarReserve is currently SLV’s only larger-scale, high-effectiveness, quick-turn-around option. Each of its two planned 100 MW phases (75% of SLV’s peak load ea.) take 2.5 years to build. When fully completed, it would single-handedly mitigate the majority of SLV’s carbon footprint—2.4 million/tons/CO2/yr! Most or all the power will stay here short-term, enhancing our electrical resilience, self-reliance and energy-independence while small-scale projects ramp up”
Ceal Response: A very undesirable side-effect, ignored by Lee is that it would require a $.5 billion new transmission line and open the door to the large-scale industrialization of the San Luis Valley.
Relative to 2.5 years, it takes almost no time to permit and install distributed solar. With the right policies (Property Assessed Clean Energy and German style Feed-in tariffs), there is no limit to how much distributed generation could be installed in the SLV. A recent report by Colorado Harvesting Energy Network revealed that San Luis Valley farmers could generate 2,500 MW, using just the pivot crop circle corners. This would generate magnitudes more economic benefit for the valley while still allowing for up to 800 MW export on the upgraded existing transmission system.
Germany is the world’s leader in solar energy, with 7,400 MW of solar installed in 2010 alone, 80% of Germany’s solar generation is owned locally by small farmers, businesses and communities.
FunFactoid: The entire continental US has more solar energy than Germany, even rainy Seattle, WA has 15% more solar than Germany!
Please see, 4 Myths about Large-scale Solar, by Janine Blaeloch.
In the bigger picture, SolarReserve will greatly support the health and vitality of the larger whole, the global interdependence of humanity and nature. If we still had lots of time, and the SLV was an idyllic, autonomous world unto itself, we could legitimately wait for superior technologies and/or small-is-beautiful methodologies to save the day. Unfortunately though, time is short, we don’t live in a vacuum, and we can’t continue shirking the CC heavy-lifting. Although it’s imperfect, one trait makes SolarReserve admirable and worthy of our support: its huge, global-interdependence-recognizing, carbon-saving paradigm is doable, right here, right now, and hopefully, in time.
Ceal response: While this path may well be the easiest, it is clearly not the fastest, smartest, most cost effective or efficient. It will serve to drive the cost of solar energy up (thus limiting how much we will generate), perpetuate our dependence on far-away energy sources and the same consumption-driven old energy system that got us into the global warming mess in the first place. Einstein was right when he said, “we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking that created them”. It’s time for a new energy paradigm.

This will not be a “pilot project.” This is a proven technology, with research largely paid for with taxpayer dollars, that is perfect for the SLV’s cool sun and abundant, pre-disturbed landbase. Here are two quotes regarding the Solar Two project in Nevada:

“We’re proud of Solar Two’s success as it marks a significant milestone in the development of large-scale solar energy projects,” Former U.S. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson

“This technology has been successfully demonstrated and is ready for commercialization. From 1994 to 1999, the Solar Two project demonstrated the ability of solar molten salt technology to provide long-term, cost effective thermal energy storage for electricity generation.” Boeing

And Solar1, the biggest drawback for PV is its inability to store the power it generates. We need this breakthrough technology on the electrical grid in order to replace our current energy paradigm, which is dominated by dirty fossil fuels. And water use for the project is reportedly lower than the site’s current agricultural use.