Tessera’s Calico Solar Project is another one of those projects that’s likely even worse than Ivanpah. Originally proposed for a swath of land east of Barstow that would have been larger than the city of Berkeley, Calico would affect not just the federally threatened desert tortoise, but the Mojave fringe-toed lizard and the desert bighorn as well. Unsurprisingly, Basin and Range Watch is a great resource for information on Calico, and Shaun at Mojave Desert Blog — with whom Basin and Range Watch’s Laura and I had the pleasure of dining this past week in DC — has a lot of dope on Calico at his place as well.
It’s a really stupid project. We described various aspects of the project to Congressional aides in DC and made them shake their heads in despair. Thousands of gigantic Stirling-engine-equipped dishes would track the sun — a basically useless technology that has proved supremely unreliable at the company’s demonstration site in Maricopa, AZ, where each “Suncatcher” has two replacement engines tucked away for swapping out when the working engine fails. That’s an ungainly arrangement if you have just 60 suncatchers, as is the case at Maricopa. It becomes insane when you’re scaling that up to 26,450 Suncatchers, which is what Tessera is proposing these days for Calico.
Each Suncatcher reflects and focuses sunlight onto a four-cylinder Stirling engine, which uses thermal expansion of a fluid to drive the pistons in each cylinder. Peak output for each Suncatcher would be 25 kilowatts. That’s peak output of electricity. The Suncatchers will output other things as well, mainly including noise. Imagine 26,450 unmufflered Volvos revving in a 4,600 acre area for as long as the sun is out. At a distance of two miles, says the CEC, noise from the Calico Suncatchers should not exceed 57decibels. A 2006 paper in Journal of Urban Health: Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine recommended an upper limit of 55 decibels for “large open offices, restaurants, gymnasiums, [and] swimming pools.”
I don’t know about you, but I don’t go to the desert to enjoy sounds louder than I can find in a crowded restaurant here in Los Angeles.
Anyway, the California Energy Commission has released its Presiding Member’s Proposed Decision on the Calico Solar Project. Guess what? Presiding Member Jeffrey Byron recommends approval.
I’ve heard Jeffrey Byron is not actually a bad guy: looking forward to retirement, friendly even to people on the other side, yada yada.
If Jeffrey Byron is a nice guy, he’s a nice guy with blood on his hands. If even Calico gets the nod from the CEC staff, then the CEC is in no way keeping the environment in mind as it goes about its business.
Read the whole PMPD below, if you have the stomach for it.
Wondering what California’s new initiative of 30% of all electricity must come from “alternative” sources will have on the future of the desert. Does the law have a strict, enforceable environmental component that considers impacts on sensitive ecosystems and rare and endangered species?
Nobody wants to talk about our insane thirst for energy.
Bill:www.wildramblings.com
Science and the public participation process are dead. It’s all political.
At some undetermined future point in time, activists here will discover that no matter what
they do to try to stop a project- whether letter writing, or site visits, networking whatever-
that it won’t stop them because the other side just has all the levers of power at it’s
disposal, secured with help from within the opposition, at the opportune time and under the
radar. Nothing will appear to be able to stop the elite from carrying out their schemes.
Then and only then,after mobilizing and awakening the people, it is actually taken to the
streets via direct action involving thousands and thousands of project opponents, and if Europe’s experience is a guide, some of these boondoggles get stopped.
Unfortunately, based upon my experience and reading of the “tea leaves”, this ain’t no Europe.
Judging by some of the internet comments I have been reading lately, if anything we might
see thousands out there wanting to participate in a “tortoise rodeo”, kind of like the
“rattlesnake rodeos” in the south where I grew up.
Bill Mcdonald
Morongobill
SunCatchers are a new technology. Field experience has been 60 units in Arizona running for 6 months (360 total months of operation). With no more field testing, Tessera proposes to proceed to install some 70,000 to 80,000 units in California and Colorado expecting them to run for 30-40 years (28,000,000 months of operation. Private money would bet on such thin evidence that SunCatchers will actually work and provide power economically. That’s why Tessera is relying on ARRA funds and DOE loan guarantees.
Here are the relevant reliability mentions in the Calico PMPD. They are almost embarrassing.
PMPD p. 103
The Applicant’s revised data from the Maricopa Plant demonstrates an availability factor based on a limited number of operational hours. The long-term availability factor will be determined only with more operational experience of this technology.
(OK, a hint that ‘availability’ is unknown.)
PMPD p. 104, bottom.
Given that the evidence of limited performance history shows the Calico project will likely achieve an availability factor within this range, we find that the project compares favorably with industry norms for utility-scale electrical generation facilities.
(What happened to the uncertainty guardedly recognized on page 103?)
Page 105
A project’s reliability is acceptable if it does not degrade the reliability of the utility system to which it is connected.
(e.g., if a distribution system is insulated from the effects a plant that fails a lot, the plant is considered reliable. What does reliance on such thin support say about the decision?)
“The technology used by the Calico Solar Project has certain potential reliability advantages compared to other generating technologies including its modularity and the ability to maintain and repair individual units without materially affecting overall output, and certain disadvantages including a relative lack of historical field data on commercial-scale installations.
(This argues for high maintenance cost to achieve reliability. Economic viability is ignored.”
And here is the true heart of the whole matter. The CEC evaluation process did not consider economic viability. No commercial venture can survive without economic viability. CEC justified overriding the environmental degradation by judging the power produced is more important. To ignore economic viability is to ignore the possibility that the project will fail on economics, and produce no power. No environmental environmental degradation can be justified under project failure. The CEC has failed to analyze this possibility. )
P. 106
There are no LORS that establish either power plant reliability criteria or procedures for attaining reliable operation.
(LORS means Laws, Ordinances, Regulations and Statutes.)
(OK. No LORS. Just common sense. It implies that since there are no LORS, then reliability problems can be ignored.)
At least the Imperial CEC staff, when it also recommended ignoring SunCatcher reliability risk, had the guts to say:
“Finally, staff recognizes that due to a lack of information regarding the long-term performance of this new technology, it is uncertain whether the applicant’s claims regarding reliability will be met.”
Didn’t know about the noise issue. No wonder the company isn’t trying to sell these things to individual businesses. Otherwise, they could work as distributed power sitting in parking lots(assuming they really work at all).
If and when it turns out that the Suncatchers are not economically viable, then what? Will they just sit there as dead monuments to desert degradation? Or perhaps they might be recycled as radio telescopes? If so recycled, they would have to be moved to some other location because they are too close together to form useful radio telescopic arrays. Hopefully they would be moved to some location that is already disturbed and moreover is not public land.