In Fort Mohave, Arizona, even Republican voters are fighting gas power plants as utilities try to lock in fossil fuels
…
Over the next few months, the Sunrise Hills retirees – among them many climate crisis skeptics and committed fossil fuel proponents – uncovered a trail of misinformation that appear to suggest MEC and Aepco, which is developing and will own and operate the gas combustion turbines, were at times opaque as they sought to fast track approval and circumvent closer scrutiny. MEC/Aepco “categorically deny” any effort to intentionally mislead anyone.
The retirees organized and began fact-checking and calling out claims about affordability, outages and low pollution made by MEC and Aepco in the glossy brochure and during public meetings.
It turned out that with a capacity of 98 megawatts, the two-turbine proposal fell just under the 100 MW limit that requires a state mandated comprehensive environmental review of impacts such as emissions, noise and water consumption by an expert committee at the state utility regulator, the Arizona corporation commission (ACC). Yet the utility has openly discussed plans to eventually double the size of the plant.
It also turned out that many of the county residents who spoke favorably of the plant in front of the board were in fact MEC employees and board members.
a zoning proposal for a gas fired peaker plant
They are adding a peaker plant, which provides power when other sources cannot. Solar fundamentally does not fulfill this role. Which is why it is incredibly common to pair solar capacity with peaker capacity.
Solar also doesn’t do heat well.
Couldn’t that money be spent on more sustainable power storage. I’d imagine water storage isn’t really feasible in the desert but perhaps a battery array like the Aussies recently built.
I’ve been advocating flywheels as relatively cheap small scale energy storage
Happy Blendo noises
Blendo?
Blendo was a robot made by Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman to compete in Robot Wars before MythBusters. Its “weapon” was a horizontal flywheel. After two matches, they were given a newly-created award of co-champion on the condition that they did not participate in any more matches.
The sheer amount of energy stored in and dumped from the flywheel obliterated their competition and posed a very real human safety risk.
My first reaction was that, then the article got into all sorts of shady tactics
The way America thinks people should live in deserts is just mind-bogglingly stupid.
I was telling my daughter about Palm Springs. They founded a town over a small spring in the middle of the desert, built over 100 golf courses, and now have to pump in water so they can keep them all green. Fucking moronic.
I had family move to the desert under the auspices of “better, cleaner air” and “a lack of pollen and allergens” because lifeless hot rocky area. A year later, during the regular torrential monsoons of the southwest, the cottonwoods and flowers suddenly bloomed and caused a solid month of air so full of pollen that it left yellow smears on all surfaces. Then the sandstorm/haboobs forced them to clean everything.
There are no good reasons to live in the desert unless you want that Edward Abbey lifestyle, away from the things of man.
For that case, if you use the technical definition of desert, and are willing to move out of the US, I hear Antarctica is lovely this time of the year.
The average American Desert city ought to be eradicated.
In the words of Peggy Hill
Phoenix is a monument to man’s arroganceNo place that experiences temperatures of 100F/37C in the Fall is suitable for human settlement.
Tell that to Cairo and Baghdad.
Hey, Cairo and Baghdad:
No place that experiences temperatures of 100F/37C in the Fall is suitable for human settlement.
Tbf, those cities might have been founded long enough ago that they were mediteranian climates upon founding. Phoenix and Palm Springs weren’t.
It isn’t all of America, but a surprising large part of it. So many short sighted people here. Shoot, you have a large solar installation and they reflect light and therefore heat back up making it cooler on the ground. Instead of importing oil, we can make solar panels here. Just ridiculous.
“America” as in the way American society has been built, not what individuals think.
I understand that there is the general society, but I feel like America is bunch of smaller societies bundled together. On 2 types of extremes Florida and California, but each has smaller groups within. Obviously there are overlaps with certain thoughts of doing things.
Illinois has solar farms, but also one of the largest suppliers of ethanol for instance.
I don’t think either of us wrong, just looking at it from different perspectives.
Yes, but it’s still an American problem in general. The city with 100 golf courses isn’t in Illinois where it wouldn’t have to be watered all the time. It’s in California. It’s not in Illinois because you can’t play golf with warm weather and sunny skies all year round in Illinois. You need a Southwestern desert for that. Even Florida doesn’t work as well despite the Oralndo golf courses because it rains a lot.
Meanwhile, Illinois gets nowhere near as much sunshine as the Southwestern desert.
So until we, as a nation, start building things in places that make more ecological sense rather than more economic sense, it will be an American problem in my eyes.
And most water restricted states have had laws regarding the building of new golf courses for at least a generation, including more conservative states like Arizona. There is also a legally set system for water rights based on who first developed the land.
And it isn’t like other parts of the USA don’t have ecological risks of their own.
Yes, you are definitely correct about this. I was looking more at the energy side while you are looking at it from the water sustainability side. Different part of the overall same thing.
With climate change I am half expecting to be discussing the “great plains desert” someday in the future, assuming I live that long.
There’s a lot of corn, and there’s huge potential market for a renewable liquid fuel, even after renewable energy and EVs. If they could develop a better product for markets not served by batteries, they could be the new Texas (which was the new Pennsylvania)
Corn isn’t necessarily the best plant to choose though. Farmers already knew how to farm corn.
Honestly going forward hydrogen will probably be the preferred energy source. Planet has plenty of water and can be split with electricity. Largest problem is that it requires pressurized containers, and the lack of infrastructure, but that applies to everything except petroleum product.
I would like to point out that this whole “America is so special! We aren’t just one group but a bunch of different groups” is fucking stupid. Every country is like that, but y’all are too fucking caught up in American exceptionalism to care or notice.
States are incredibly more powerful in the US than their equivalent units in the vast majority of other countries. This gives incredible diversity in the government and legal systems that the vast majority of other singular countries just do not have.
I wouldn’t put it as “America is so special” so much as “America is so big”. I’ve seen a lot of Europeans get pissy about describing the EU in the same manner that the USA is described, and yet both the EU and USA are roughly on the same scale in terms of land size and population.
I live in the Rio Grande valley in nm and we have surprisingly little solar here. Our electric coop refuses to work with any company installing panels.
The university in town did cover a parking lot with panels. I wish others could afford to do that too.
I expect the local energy company is controlled by petroleum interests
They don’t like competition
I’ll never understand why oil companies don’t just transition to solar.
Apparently, in the 70s Exxon had a solar division, but they shut it down in the 80s.
Not only would it be better for the environment for them to continue with solar research, it would have been better for them too. They could’ve had a monopoly on solar power by now. “Bad news everyone! Oil is bad for the environment, but the good news is that we can sell you a solution!”
Of course, it wasn’t immediately profitable (because research costs money), so they shut it down. Absolutely mind numbingly stupid.
They will eventually. The market (almost) always wins and fossil fuel’s time is running out.
Arrogance. Better profit margins.
The sun, she is free!!!
Systems and maintenance are expensive. The one they built that’s destroying the earth is already up and running so they’ll stick with that.
Sad.
Building solar panels is not much better for the planet right now, and we don’t seem to have an end of life recycling plan for when the panels degrade beyond usability. Not against solar, but definitely against heavy metal extraction techniques currently employed.
Solar in the deserts still a good idea, but I would like to point out that solar farms don’t actually like heat. Makes the panes inefficient and the inverters overheat. Cold and very sunny is the best (“high deserts”), although you don’t get that very often.
Can the inverters be kept deep underground? What’s the terminal length for the inverter to be distanced from the panel array? Seems like the array itself could power some geo coolant pumps even
My home has geo heat pumps now. It also has solar that nets more than our use so I’d wager this would scale even better for something outright designed to work this way
That’s an interesting thought, but it might be counterproductive. Commercial-scale inverters are usually fan-cooled so I actually think that would make the overheating worse, unless you used liquid cooling and pumped the water underground or something. But that’s more trouble than it’s worth. The heat isn’t that big of a deal, I was just pointing out that heat isn’t desirable for a solar farm since the title of the article seemed to be implying that a hot desert was the ideal location for solar.
As to your other question I’ve seen dc strings run several hundred feet without issue, so that wouldn’t be a concern.
unless you used liquid cooling and pumped the water underground or something.
That’s literally what I said. That’s what geo cooling with a heat pump is. It’s how the heat pump in my house is configured. No fan tower, just liquid pumped about 40 feet underground. It was installed very cheaply since the coolant lines are run using only a quarter inch tube so the drilling is very simple and cost effective. The pump uses almost no energy at all.
It does fine though. Less efficient, sure, so just add a few panels to the array to make up for that.
