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AP reports that wildlife investigators who watched as birds burn and fell at the Ivanpah Dry Lake Solar Tower Plant are urging California officials to halt the operator's application to build a still-bigger version until the full extent of the deaths can be assessed. Estimates per year now range from a low of about a thousand "streamers" by the plant operator to 28,000 by an expert for the Center for Biological Diversity environmental group. Those statistics haven’t curbed the enthusiasm of the Obama administration for the solar-power plant, which granted Ivanpah a $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee. The deaths are "alarming. It's hard to say whether that's the location or the technology," says Garry George, renewable-energy director for the California chapter of the Audubon Society. "There needs to be some caution." Federal wildlife officials say the plant 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.
The $2.2 billion plant at Ivanpah Dry Lake near the California-Nevada border is 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. 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, says Joseph Desmond, senior vice president at BrightSource Energy. 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 (PDF). When it comes to powering the country's grids, "diversity of technology ... is critical," says Thomas Conroy, a renewable-energy expert. "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."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by geb on Thursday August 21 2014, @11:56AM
Comparing "just" Canada to a single powerplant is a bit disingenuous. If the technology became widely adopted on the scale of an entire nation, the number of bird deaths would rise.
However, I'm optimistic that a technical fix can be found. There's no fundamental reason why scaring birds away has to be expensive in either energy or money.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Vanderhoth on Thursday August 21 2014, @12:14PM
Problem is the anti-environment crowd is holding this technology to a higher standard than traditional power generation technologies. The best I can compare it to is people talk about how bad it would be to put hydrogen in cars and the kinds of safety regulations that should be involved because of how volatile it is, well if people had the same concerns with gas in cars and expected the same safety regulations they expect from hydrogen we most likely would still be using the horse and buggy.
The problem is opponents of the technology are using 28,000, which is the upper bounds on the estimate, as if it's a huge number and don't want a solution to be found. They want to shut the plant down and have it dismantled before anyone can even look into the problem. A solution could be as simple as just blasting a fog horn every now and then to scare birds out of the area. As this technology grows, maybe bird deaths will rise, but deaths from other more harmful power technologies will decline.
28,000 isn't even on the radar when you consider how many animals, not just birds, have been killed by oil spills, and pollution from coal plants, heck they're still cleaning up after, and animals are still dying from, the Gulf of Mexico spill four years ago.
"Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday August 21 2014, @06:57PM
Actually, I *am* rather dubious about putting hydrogen in cars, for the same reason that I'm dubious about helium balloons. Both are non-replenishable resources that involve gases that are not bound to the earth by gravity. It's true that we have a lot more hydrogen than helium, so it's not as imminent a problem, but it's also true that hydrogen (water, carbohydrates, etc.) is more important to life.
It's also true that the hydrogen problem is rather long term, and that by design hydrogen releases won't be intentional. It still bothers me.
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(Score: 2) by Vanderhoth on Thursday August 21 2014, @07:17PM
... I don't really know how to respond to that ...
Hydrogen readily bonds with oxygen to make water, it happens in nature all the time. They use that recombining process to generate power in Hydrogen fuel cells. It doesn't get lost it just gets converted back to water, and what does escape bonds naturally with oxygen to make water. Law of Conservation of matter.
Helium is a stable element that doesn't readily bond with other elements. The problem with Helium is once it's mixed in with the other gasses in the atmosphere, it's hard to separate it out because it makes up such a tiny fraction of all the other elements in the air.
Gasses don't just escape into space. They're still held in the atmosphere, they just float up until they sit on the less buoyant gasses, but they're still head down by gravity.
"Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe
(Score: 4, Informative) by evilviper on Thursday August 21 2014, @08:57PM
Yes, helium does.
"Helium is a finite resource and is one of the few elements with escape velocity, meaning that once released into the atmosphere, it escapes into space."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium [wikipedia.org]
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 2) by Vanderhoth on Thursday August 21 2014, @09:49PM
I guess I stand corrected.
"Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday August 22 2014, @06:49PM
So does hydrogen. The H2 molecule travels at above escape velocity. IIUC so does O, but not O2. One reason that ozone in the upper atmosphere is undesirable is that solar UV can knock an O loose from O3, and that fragment will be above escape velocity. OTOH, even O is considerably heavier than H2, so it needs to be at a much higher "temperature" to break loose...but it gets that from the solar UV.
N.B.: This happens over geologic time scales, so even though it's quite important (in my evaluation) it's not urgent. Still, short-range solutions that ignore this problem bother me.
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(Score: 2) by evilviper on Friday August 22 2014, @07:22PM
Yes, but it's not noble like helium, so it's vastly more likely to react/bond with another molecule (like O) on its way up from ground level.
Oxygen isn't a scarce resource, like helium. I don't see how the loss of a little bit is a serious problem.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday August 23 2014, @03:25PM
Over geologic time a planet can lose it's atmosphere...or at least the lighter parts. To me that's serious. I'll grant you there won't be any measurable effect in the next century or so, but over time little changes add up.
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(Score: 2) by evilviper on Saturday August 23 2014, @07:12PM
3 billion years from now, I'm sure that would matter, if not for the fact the sun will have wiped-out all life on earth a billion years before that.
Hydrogen cyanide is a delicious and necessary part of the human diet.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday August 24 2014, @07:12PM
That might be a significant point. I'd need to run the math. But remember with departing hydrogen the amount of water available will shrink, and carbohydrates will become more difficult to make. I'd expect it to become a significant problem long before half of it was lost. It is, however, clearly not a short-term problem. It's just that short term action impact the long term scenario.
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(Score: 2) by khallow on Thursday August 21 2014, @11:10PM
If we do run low on hydrogen, we can always stock up from one of the huge sources of hydrogen in the Solar System.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday August 22 2014, @06:51PM
Have you even tried to figure the cost of that? Or to make a ballpark estimate?
Sure, it's true that Jupiter has more hydrogen than we could ever use...but getting it from there to here is a bit expensive, even if all you're counting is energy.
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(Score: 2) by khallow on Friday August 22 2014, @08:38PM
Cost doesn't make sense until you know what infrastructure will be around at the time to move that hydrogen around. For example, it wouldn't take much of the Sun's energy output to double the Earth's current water content. So if you have a Dyson cloud tapping the entire output of the Sun, that's going to make a rehydrogenization of the Earth near trivial in comparison. If on the other hand, you have everyone sitting on Earth with the occasional probe flying around, then any such scheme will be impossible to implement.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday August 23 2014, @03:29PM
If you have a Dyson cloud tapping the sun, you won't be very interested in the planets...in fact, you'll probably have disassembled them to get the material to make the sphere. Until that looks reasonable, I'm going to consider that hydrogen should be conserved...and probably by then I'd be more concerned, because once something has dissipated into the solar environs, recollecting it is much more difficult, even if it doesn't have enough velocity to escape the solar system.
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(Score: 2) by khallow on Saturday August 23 2014, @04:06PM
You might as well consider it reasonable as worry about conserving hydrogen. We're as a industrial civilization probably a few more orders of magnitude closer to intercepting all sunlight than we are to lose, say half, of the Earth's hydrogen to space.