Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
Thursday, April 25, 2013
California’s dream to be the Saudi Arabia of solar dries up in the desert
Three years ago California regulators in quick succession approved nine multibillion-dollar solar thermal power plants.
They were to be built in the desert and would generate 4,142 megawatts
(MW) of carbon-free electricity. The state, it was said, was on its way
to becoming the Saudi Arabia of solar. Not any more. Today, the
developers of four of those projects have since gone bankrupt and only
three solar thermal power plants are under currently under construction. In
recent weeks, BrightSource Energy put on hold two new solar thermal
power plants that would have generated an additional 1,000 MW. (Its 370
MW Ivanpah project, however, is set to go online this year.) And last
week, the builder of what would be the world’s largest solar station at
1,000 MW—at peak output that’s equivalent to a big nuclear power
plant—downsized the project to 485 MW. For risk-averse bankers, tried-and-true solar panels seemed a better bet than solar thermal. Even with a $2.1 billion loan guarantee from the US government,
Germany’s Solar Millennium could not find bankers willing to put up the
billions needed to build its 1,500 MW of solar thermal projects in
California. It eventually filed for bankruptcy. Tessera Solar met the same fate after bankers balked at financing $4.6 billion to install 54,900 solar dishes—each 40 feet (12 meters) high—on 10,000 acres (4,000 hectares) of government-owned desert land. Utility regulators also have begun to resist approving the high-priced power-purchase agreements for solar thermal projects.
No surprise, then, that the developers of four of the solar thermal
projects approved in 2010 have since switched to photovoltaic technology
for their power plants...more
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