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U.S. approves solar project in California desert
- WJW 6y agoWhat a peculiar caption on the image: > Arrays of photovoltaic solar panels are seen at the Tenaska Imperial Solar Energy Center South as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues in this aerial photo There does not seem to a single person in the image and I don't think solar panels can catch COVID. How is the spread of COVID continuing "in this aerial photo" haha.
- nathancahill 6y agoGaming SEO maybe?
- indemnity 6y agoPerhaps there are 5G radios in the vicinity.
- guerrilla 6y agoWritten by AI?
- vmception 6y agoIt’s like saying “in bed” after reading any fortune cookie “As the spread of the coronavirus disease continues”, good for any sentence!
- KirillPanov 6y agoThe news biz has its own version of SEO, keyed mainly off of article titles but also to a lesser extent off of image titles. Both of those are selected by the editor, not the reporter. The main difference is that they aren't optimizing for search engines. There were tons of cases of this weird "article/photo title is trying way too hard to spin this story while the text is pretty neutral and unbiased" during election season. It also shows up in the tendency to insert the prefix "Commentary:" in the title of any article noting any negative facts about a certain particular country. The WSJ is particularly hilarious in this respect.
- shoto_io 6y agoI guess it was the AI built on Rust and hosted on Lambda that wrote this caption
- maxerickson 6y agoThe picture was taken and captioned last March: https://www.reuters.com/search/pictures?blob=Tenaska+Imperial+Solar+Energy+Center+South&sortBy=&dateRange= https://www.reuters.com/search/pictures?blob=Tenaska+Imperia... This article just uses it without any changes. The caption would have been somewhat less strange at that point (but still hard to contextualize). Edit: Oops, the earliest date is June 2020. Doesn't really change the explanation any though.
- indymike 6y agoThe caption is search spam. SEO is a thing for stock art.
- bongobingo 6y agoHave to keep people hysterical somehow.
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoWith a side dish of "appeasing the algorithmic overlords".
- sandworm101 6y agoIt looks like my latest Factorio biuld is bleeding into this reality again.
- WJW 6y agoYou're playing with a COVID mod for Factorio? :O ... that sounds pretty cool actually, though I'm not sure how it would work. The main character of the game is pretty good at social distancing already.
- travisporter 6y agoWhere are the damn drones that install them onto my roof?!
- hnedeotes 6y agoHopefully someone has some spare paracetamol tablets
- peter_retief 6y agoSolar farms are an ecological disaster, deserts are complex ecosystems full of life.
- oblio 6y agoHow do they impact deserts? Are there some species that can only thrive in the searing sun? Plus, to my untrained eye, what else, except for bacteria (and even that, in limited amounts) thrives in desert conditions? Everything I know about biology tells me that deserts are relatively bereft of life compared to temperate or tropical climates. Also, what alternative is less harmful to life, in general?
- mcny 6y agoYou raise a good question. I wonder, just a thought experiment, if providing shade in a desert might create refuge for plants that can't survive directly in the desert sun...
- Symbiote 6y agoThose would be different plants than the ones already living there (ones that can survive in direct sunlight). The usual aim is to preserve the full variety of the world's ecosystems, and encouraging or allowing non-native species into a desert works against that.
- evgen 6y agoYes, there are some species that require desert conditions in order to live. They have adapted to this particular harsh environment and the conditions in these places help keep out competition for the scarce available resources. You really should do some basic research or at least watch an Attenborough documentary because "everything you know about biology" is apparently quite limited. Yes, deserts have less life and far less obvious signs of it given the lack of resources, but that also means that the web of life between the various organisms is far more fragile and takes a lot longer to recover from any injury or intrusion. A far better place to put solar panels are in places where we know the impact of people and machines will be barely noticed and where life will spring back quite quickly. Put them in the middle of farmland. We have far more arable land than we need to be using, taking it out of production for a decade or two will be good for the soil, and it will spring back to life within days of the construction machinery leaving.
- ovi256 6y agoWhy does the federal government even need to approve a new power plant, solar or otherwise ? As long as it is done to code, legalize building! I see that they provided 800ha of federal land, that may be why.
- pulse7 6y agoThe project "will be sited on 2,000 acres of federal land": you need owner's approval if you want to do something on his piece of land...
- glutamate 6y agoDo I have this right: 90,000 homes each pay $1400 [1] in electricity, so $550M is paid back in 4.3 years. Makes the economics look pretty good, assuming distribution costs are not much higher than 50% [1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46276 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=46276
- samwillis 6y agoIt’s slightly more complex than that I think, the development doesn’t appear to include any sort of energy storage for overnight workloads.
- jcims 6y agoIf generation is 50% of the bill then ~$700 per home per year, so probably closer to 10-15 years payoff. Still a great deal IMHO. I'm thinking about a ground-mount system in Ohio, payoff in ~15y, I was pretty shocked to see how little solar there was between Vegas and San Diego (aside from the Ivanpah spectacle lol)
- Bombthecat 6y agoDoes this already include maintenance, repair and replacement?
- jcims 6y agoThe solar projects around me have a 30 year budget that includes expected costs for all of that. The aggregate of those costs is the big number that floats around. Not sure if that's the case with this project.
- jcims 6y agoMeanwhile Ohio has about 7GW/71,000 acres of solar projects in the application, construction or operational state with the Ohio Power Siting board. PDF warning - https://opsb.ohio.gov/wps/wcm/connect/gov/b504e379-a4ba-49e4-aa35-dba759ffee7f/Solar+Map+and+Stats.pdf?MOD=AJPERES https://opsb.ohio.gov/wps/wcm/connect/gov/b504e379-a4ba-49e4...
- drchickensalad 6y agoI got a 404
- jcims 6y agoThanks for the heads up, i think i fixed it.
- mbreese 6y agoOf which only one site is operational and two are in construction. Given the amount of coal power due to be shutdown in Ohio in the next few years, it will be important to have these projects up and running quickly. To put it into context, the approved solar projects (not yet operational or under construction) is ~ 2200 MW of power covering 23,000 acres. There are two major coal plants outside of Cincinnati that are due to be shutdown by 2027. Combined, they produce 2300 MW by themselves [1]. And that is just those two plants. It is nice to see the shift, but we still have a way to go. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Ohio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Ohio
- jcims 6y agoGiven the stakes, timelines and all of the possibilities for these projects to get sidelined or stalled, I’m surprised the development firms involved with these projects have done almost nothing to appeal to individuals that will be affected by them.
- tlb 6y agoCan you explain what might happen if the solar projects aren't up and running in time? Delays in constructing power plants are pretty common, but I'm not sure what the practical consequences are.
- williesleg 6y agoDesert killers
- splithalf 6y agoI want to be excited by this but 500 million dollars to create 10 jobs doesn’t sound efficient. Maybe there’s more to this than just job creation?
- birdyrooster 6y agoAh yes 90,000 homes or 0.065% of total homes in the US. So why is this news?
- vesrah 6y agoI'm in this area pretty often due to Chuckwalla Valley Raceway in Desert Center, Ca. There is already quite a bit of solar west of Blythe.