Jeff's Comments

Thanks for some balance, Johanna. Millions of acres of the California desert are already permanently protected as wilderness areas. The rooftop solar boosters are well intentioned but lack a serious knowledge of national energy demand and production and what a gigawatt is, and what it will take for renewable energy to make a difference. The opposition to large-scale solar is driven as much by social belief (everything big is bad) than true environmental concerns. While the environmentalists fight over renewable energy, fracking and mountaintop removal just keep chugging forward, laughing at us.

Of course solar doesn't work well during German winters. Meanwhile, what are thousands of German wind turbines doing? Likely they're peaking, or nearly so. The process is reversed on warm summer afternoons. Not a word from Mr. Peterson about that. Solar and wind often complement each other. Germany is putting huge wind turbines out at sea, and they will be technology leaders in such installations when the Us and China get around to it.

China is not necessarily producing more inexpensively; rather the government is subsidizing their solar equipment production massively in order to capture the world market. The thing of it is that these massive subsisidies should be directed inward, towards production for the Chinese domestic market. Having seen their air quality firsthand, no nation needs renewable energy more than China.

Getting back to the specific content of the article, this project's solar energy is our own energy that cannnot be taken away by geopolitics. Even better, it is California's energy that California will be able to retain ultimate control over as it sees fit, even if folks in Texas think differently. I am glad that California approved this project, specifically because it was not PV. PV is on a China-inflated bubble right now that just might be about to pop. CSP with thermal storage still has intrinsic value that PV does not.

Let the Keystone XL pipeline developers REALLY comply with the free market and be forced to pay them Nebraska farmers what them farmers think access to THEIR private property is worth! Take away the government eminent domain mechanism. I dare ya!

Seems a good time to talk about the Keystone XL Pipeline. The pipeline developers get a government(FERC)granted license and right-of-way, which means that they have the right to use Eminent Domain if they are unable to get a property owner to agree to their financial terms where the pipeline corsses their land. In point of fact the entire fossil fuel distribution system is built upon the fiat of government. Without Eminent Domain for pipeline routing the industry as we know it wouldn't exist. That is the single biggest government subsidy the fossil fuel industry receives.

It is going to take both distributed solar and Big Solar just to slow down the juggernaut of global warming. We need both; no need to fight. Distributed solar will not by itself do the job. We need gigawatts, not megawatts, of baseline power that does not die with the sunset. Please educate yourselves on the terms "gigawatt" and "baseline power" and the fact that 93% of electricity used in the country is not used by residences. This reflexive opposition to anything Big Solar is mindless. The tortoise population can be managed successfully with Big Solar. Apparently we should prefer the monstrous destruction of mountaintop removal or gas fracking to power the vast majority of the population who couldn't care less where their power comes from and will outvote the idealists every time. I don't want to be irrelevant to the conversation. I want to do something meaningful to stop global warming. The consumption of a small percentage of desert land is a worthy tradeoff for what is happening right now in WV or PA. If you insist on living in world where you don't want to make any tradeoffs, then you're not going to be part of the answer.

"Aquamarine has doubled in size with a quarter of its staff holding PhDs."

Hope they're actually able to get a final product on the market.

Mr. R t, I've noticed you've entered a skeptical message to every single story posted today on this site. So who do you work for?

Just start building it, dammit...enough talk and promises. Enough deliberate Bush-BLM delays in the calif desert.

I'm hoping that my next car purchase will be a PHEV, depending on price and manufacturer. I am a bit skeptical about the idea of millions of cars plaugged into the grid being used as a buffer for the grid. To do this, it means that under certain circumstances, the car battery will discharge itself back into the grid when the grid tells it to. Consider that - you drive on your errand, using maybe half the battery charge. You pull into your driveway and plug in, and you fully intend that it will be fully charged a couple hours later when you have to go on your next errand.

Is the average consumer going to accept a grid that randomly DISCHARGES their car batteries at certain hours, regardless of their needs? I know I wouldn't. If I take the trouble to plug the car in four times a day, I want it fully charged sitting in my driveway when I am ready to leave the house again. You get a call, needed to visit somebody, jump in the car...and the battery is nearly dead because it's convenient to the utility. This theory needs to be considered a little more carefully.

The other thing we need to invent is a magnetic induction charger that sits on the driveway. The car parks over it, a light on the dash signals proper alignement, and the charging current is delivered to a receiving coil on the car by magnetic induction. No crods or plugging in needed. Perfect for lazy Americans. And much safer than a 240v plug in the rain.

Kudos, yes, to the companies' lobbyists. These sketchy market mechanisms ultimately don't work. Where have never really worked? The So Cal AQMB had to abandon its pollution credit scheme for power utilities because they were buying credits, gaming the system, and nothing was being built to reduce pollution. As soon as the credits became available, investment in new pollution reducing technology in Southern California essentially stopped. Emmissions actually increased. The market gamers are far ahead of the regulators. These market mechanisms sound good, but they are ultimately pushed by free market ideologues who really want to stop effective government action. Same for carbon cap and trade. TAX carbon, and use the money to keep the US from going bankrupt.

"The challenge...is verifying the authenticity of the credits they sell." No kidding, and that challenge will be perpetual. This is a tragedy and a knife in the chest for the California RPS. It'll all look good on paper, like Enron, but ultimately less renewable energy production will be built. The utility lobbies win again.

I agree with the article. McCain's allies and fundraisers are enemies of clean energy, regardless of what the candidate might say. Everything is in the implementation. Clinton's heart might have been in the right place with renewables, but with oil historically cheap during much of his presidency, massive expeditures on renewables were not politically feasible. Besides which, there have been tremendous technical advancements since the 90's (such as dramatically larger and more economical wind turbines) that have made the this time for renewables.

Generally I am a supporter of nuclear energy, although there is no way the industry will find the capital for 45 new reactors, much less 100 (McCain's latest proposal). We should develop the potential of uranium from seawater (already demonstrated) and increase reprocessing to reduce the waste problem. Yes, that's a risk, but anything to stop planetary Death By Coal. I believe that just one year of the cumulative worldwide environmental cost of coal mining and combustion is equal to or greater than the environmental and human cost of Chernobyl. The Coal Chernobyl is just less spectacular and more spread out. A trip to China helps make this clear.

The government should really be pushing two things: grid improvements to bring the renewables online, and a massive new investment in electricity storage, by hydrogen production, flywheels, or any other means. That will be a huge enabling technology for clean energy. I think the tax and policy incentives should be pushing energy storage harder than anything else, and the renewables will follow.

And also algae based fuels!!

Let's be less critical about the journalism, guys. Yes, the author is a bit sloppy on the units, but remember this information is FREE and offered to you openly on the internet. Obviously REW.com doesn't have a huge paid staff to research the engineering details of every corporate press release that crosses their desk. The value of the article is to inform me that Corus is developing this promising technology. If I want the nitty gritty, and I have potential business involved, then I should contact Corus myself. Upon doing so, I would probably find that Corus is still trying to resolve some of the questions that have been brought up on this posting. As far as I can tell from the article, they are not actually offering this product for sale yet. They're building the lab to advance the technology. No competitive performance claims are actually being made.

Have any of the proposed California plants actually started construction? Many agreements have been signed, but..?

My understanding is that many of the proposed California plants are planned for BLM land, and that BLM is dragging their feet on approvals.