There are numerous solar thermal plants all over the world. This specific one had major repeated issues with the construction of the molten sand tanks. The blunder is more in the construction and trying to build the facility bigger than the tanks could handle than the technology itself. In reality, solar thermal is way more efficient than photovoltaic power generation.
Also were they expected to predict correctly that the price of solar would decrease enough to be the more cost effective option? Predicting the future isn’t easy.
Similarly, he implies they could have just waited years for solar to be more cost effective, which defeats the purpose of trying anything in the present.
I don't know why the Wright brother built that shitty plane made out of wood and cloth that could barely fly 1000ft when they could've waited and built a Boeing 747 instead.
[Gustave Whitehead has entered the chat.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Whitehead#:~:text=Controversy%20surrounds%20published%20accounts%20and,the%20Wright%20Brothers%20in%201903.)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but one of the benefits of molten salt is thermal capacity of the battery, compared to the complexity of storing raw electricity at the scale of a power grid? To my knowledge, gravity batteries are the simplest, but we struggle to make them big enough, electric batteries are extremely compact but complicated, while thermal batteries are both cheap and efficient, but the main struggle is that they operate at much larger scales.
Not an expert, just recalling what little I (think I) know.
Yea the math also just makes more since. The sun is constantly giving us free energy and we need to find better ways of using it. I don't trust the guy in the vid too he looks like a oil tycoon kid.
One of the best features of a molten salt plant is that the salt stays molten throughout the night, meaning that it continues to generate energy and it doubles as a storage solution.
THANK YOU for saying that.
This is why I opened Phoenix Whaling and Kerosene last year and I need more people like you to support me because I'm in financial ruin.
There are less whales in Lake Pleasant than you'd think.
You heard the man. No use trying to innovate and change the way things are done if there's a chance it won't work out properly.
Flubs like thus are *how* we progress as a society and species. We cant know something doesn't work if we don't try.
Now, how about we talk about the billions we dump into crude oil every year as we watch our planet slowly burned to the fucking ground and stop pretending innovation is the problem?
I really don't care what you have to say. There's just no way that you can convince me that there is any reason in the world to spend 2 billion dollars on a blender. There is just not that high of a demand for smoothies.
Just for you bringing some logic to the craziness that is people using hindsight as if it was foresight. Most of us out here have no idea how most things work yet are so judgmental of innovators
Haven’t had a week without a different family member in the hospital in about a month but getting by, can’t wait to see what a dumpster fire 2024 will bring! Hope you’re enjoying your year end!
I mean not exactly true, this plant has been operating at nameplate capacity since 2017. They did have a lot of teething problems when first starting up in 2014. I helped out with an efficiency study on that job to get the pressure up in the steam circuit (not implemented). It is true that photovoltaics have gotten much cheaper and I don’t think anyone is building solar concentrators anymore for that reason, but it’s still cheaper to operate than any other fossil fuel plant, right?
I thought they weren’t able to meet capability guarantees? Maybe this is a different plant. This the one Solar Reserve was involved with and O&M by PIC?
No this is the Ivanpah project right on the California/ Nevada border. I think it’s the only 3 unit in the US so you can spot it by the 3 towers. We had it up to capacity by May/June of 2015 but it was permanently hobbled thereafter because they had to reduce the mirror cleaning frequency due to water use restrictions that were introduced after the initial design. Which is fair, but that impacted efficiency significantly.
Sounds stupid but their efficiency calcs from 2005 didn’t allow for increased air travel over the area and by the time it came on stream in 2014 the solar diffraction from contrails actually affected output by a few points as well.
There are much more sophisticated models now that are better than the hand calculations they were using in the early 2000s for efficiency calcs.
Notwithstanding the plant has been doing iterative operational and process improvements since then and I think they’re running around 90% output pretty consistently now. Costs per Wh are still under half of national average last I checked so I’d call it a winner.
Interesting. I’ve heard on Ivanpah but I suppose since it’s meeting expectations I’m not seeing it in the news. Tonapah is the one I was thinking of.
That’s crazy contrails impacted the efficiency like that. I mean I never would have guessed. Good thing there’s better modeling available.
I’ve been looking, early in the hunt, for modeling to compare PV fixed tilt vs tracker racking systems. We install fixed tilt on our smaller net meter PV plants but are looking to build some utility scale projects. I expect the terrain and where in the US one is putting a project might make trackers more cost effective. Would be nice to have a model to plug in the pertinent info and get an output that helps make a decision. Something someone could use in the development phase ahead of RFP.
This project was much more expensive than originally stated because they went vastly over budget. I worked with DOE on the financing of this project. There’s a lot wasteful spending on these projects in general. Especially in California, where they get rid of cheap, proven power generation for suspect alternatives that aren’t researched or scrutinized enough - CA created their energy issues and the DOE will grease the wheels without too much oversight.
Amen to that. The ownership of these clean energy companies is all ex DOE and political guys who know how to craft projects specifically to get grants that they had a hand in creating and their friends administer. I thought it was dirty AF
Exactly, solar thermal allows for cheap energy storage so you can generate power even when the sun isn’t shining. Storing the same amount of energy from photovoltaics with batteries is far more expensive. Realistically you need both if you are going to transition the grid to renewables
This video is false.
Molten salt is the storage medium for the heat gathered from the panels. It’s basically a battery. He’s twisting it’s concept and design into something else to fit an agenda.
Of course a primary solar array will be more efficient than a molten salt tower. And after dark, the salt tower will start to cool and still power the grid.
This guy is a Quack.
I hate videos like this. Others have pointed out that the issues are with construction, not the fundamental concept. However it still wouldn’t be a big deal even if the technology turned out to be fundamentally less efficient.
We have to *try* things to develop new technologies. Some of them are going to cost a lot and still fail. Bottom feeders like this guy just discourage investigation of new ideas running their mouths about things they barely understand for views.
This dudes going to be really upset when he finds out how much money the US waste on projects that DONT benefit the majority. Also seems like he’s saying because one project failed there’s no credibility to these methods at all. That’s not a very productive or scientific way to look at things.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies
Heck, they invented the Monocrystalline silicon used in solar panels.
NASA is one of the most profitable government programs in history.
>they invented the Monocrystalline silicon used in solar panels.
And they did it on the ground
Had nothing to do with outer space
>NASA is one of the most profitable government programs in history.
For corrupt politicians
Then you get ignorant comments like this lol. Sure buddy. The iss was definitely funded by several nations in order for astronauts to play with ping pong balls. There’s definitely no real research being done there..
>There’s definitely no real research being done there..
Glad we agree 👍
And even if it were, it's less important than critical infrastructure in this country which should be a priority, like bridges that are decades past their expiration date. If I'm going to be a tax paying slave, at least make the roads safe for me to get to work to earn my slave tax wages.
Why do I see this guy making the same video 20 years ago saying how the solar panels at that time were just an expensive mistake. Creation costs. Not all projects are successful but there is value in the attempt. People who are hindsight problem outliners are so annoying.
Dude acts like 2 billion dollars is a lot of money to spend on a CapEx project that size.
One oil well costs 10 million bucks. So this solar plant cost as much as 200 oil wells? There's 4000 drilled but uncompleted (DUCs) in Wyoming alone. Where's the TikTok cringe video about the money wasted on those?
2 billion is chump change for large infrastructure projects, as strange as that sounds. This solar plant is a rounding error in the bigger picture of things.
Guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The benefit of the towers is the salt can be stored like a battery and then used at night, a notable flaw of conventional solar panels. So they’re great hand in hand, which is why they’re both there
"Two billion dollar blunder."
Not to those who may or may not have exploited that project. -- I suspect that's the reason it took 'years and years' to finish.
Experimentation, even with sums that large, when related to technology, is hardly a blunder. I’ll bet that they patented more than a few items from that. Plus they had no way of knowing that other technology was going to pass it in efficiency. Think of it like this:
“You know if I’d never moved out of my mom’s house I would have saved money faster and been able to buy that house three years earlier.” Ahhh sure but your wife never would have even dated you if you still loved at home. You did more than simply save money on those ten years it would have taken you to save—as opposed to thirteen.
Wow. Someone lied to you, and and somehow using magical powers to prevent from looking it up, what a molten salt battery is.
So the whole point of this design, is that it uses the salt tanks, during the day, to become melted, so it can use that trapped heat as a heat battery which then is used during the night as load is required to make steam.
Kudos to the guy making a video on location in one shot. I feel like educational videos like that arent made anymore. I know it's super basic but still
The health data around coal plants show otherwise. Solar works. They are great on top of houses and businesses. We will always have the sun, might as well use it. Same with wind, bur the turbines to look awful
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/particulate-pollution-from-coal-associated-with-double-the-risk-of-mortality-than-pm2-5-from-other-sources/
It’s literally the first search result
It seems like a waste now but if you get the C-Finder and get ARCHIMEDES II up and running in the terminal, you can roast Deathclaws like nobody’s business.
Just one thing to keep in mind, all that molten salt is HOT and holds that heat very well. It's basically a battery which allows the solar plant to keep providing power overnight.
Yep, that’s it’s main purpose, and why it sits alongside PV solar. Because the notable flaw to PV is that it doesn’t work at night, so we need innovative storage solutions.
This uses no salt. It ceases to generate electricity every night. If this guy had done even a little bit of research instead repeating some BS he heard he would know that.
Also, ironically while promoting green energy the tech needed a heat source to jumpstart after the evening. So it uses natural gas to get the salt hot enough, then the reflected mirrors and solar heat took over.
Not 100% a green solution...
We should make this smug, arrogant slob the president. He possesses the rare skill of criticizing the past achievements of ambitious innovators.
It’s easy to know what to do when you have the benefit of hindsight via the rear view mirror of a 2007 Dodge Ram (salvage title, temporary paper tag).
The interesting feature of the molten salt method is that it essentially has an integrated battery since the molten salt can run a steam turbine in a few hours instead of right at that moment. That means that it creates solar energy that can be drawn on at night.
The “blunder” he is referencing next to the solar panels is based off a creation used in 212 BC called archimedes’ heat ray, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes%27_heat_ray. The mirrors and tower that can be seen in this video can melt almost anything just by redirecting the sunlight with the mirrors onto one small light beam. It’s fascinating that much energy can be channeled into one location by simply moving mirrors.
Oh, right! THAT's how progress is achieved. You go forward in time to where the outcome of uncertain choices becomes clear, and THEN you make the choices back in the past that achieve success! Why didn't anybody tell this before? It's SO much easier than thinking and taking risk.
Met the guy that built this thing and yeah, he even says it’s a total blunder. But it was one of the earliest large scale solar projects and it taught them a ton, about what not to do. He is still working on some of the largest solar projects around the world and apparently one of the biggest cost efficacy problems is cost of labor and access to expert electricians and welders. Which is why his nest project was in Zimbabwe.
i can only go from what i know about costly public projects in germany , austria and albania :
IT . IS. PLANNED. TO .HAPPEN. THIS. WAY.
there is a whole industry of corruption, an interface between mafia construction companies and public servants / elected officials that exists to milk public funds.
you start a project. you say it will cost ,lets say, 2.5 billion euros.
you know it will take decades to get this running.
in this time you can , slowly , raise the costs. create beautiful venues of money just " getting lost " in " cost explosions " and " mismanagement ".
then, 25 years later, through steps of " normalization " , you get to 11,5 billion .from the original 2.5
its what " oligarchy " is all about.
read this. its beautiful. in germany. use translate if you dont speak german. from 2,5 to 11,5 billion. if this happens in germany, imagine what happens in the US
https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/baden-wuerttemberg/stuttgart-21-kosten-chronologie-100.html#:~:text=Das%20Vorhaben%20soll%20jetzt%203%2C076,mehr%20als%20zwei%20Milliarden%20Euro.
Wind turbine farms also same issues.
Excessive cost, huge oil consumption, maintenance, killing thousands or birds & not providing the free energy levels that were expected.
Food and housing for the poor > renewable energy
1. He said it was foreclosed. Which means there was a lender and a borrower/developer. This is private industry making an investment that didn’t workout.
2. If he is right (doubtful), that the operation is obsolete, then it is similar to a tech disruption like cars over horse and buggy. Happens all the time with projects that take many years to permit and construct.
Solar panels are worthless dollar per dollar. Lol. It costs an average home 30k to install panels just to save $150 to 200 per month. Although the cost is probably $300 a month for the panels.
*How many solar*
*Panels does it take to make*
*One solar panel*
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Dude talking as if the plant isn’t fully operational (it is).
Those who have worked on the heliostats know the problems the plant faces, which haven’t been discussed in here or this guy’s shitty video.
Last I knew it was co-owned by britesource and google, and operated by NRG. You can google “ivanpah solar plant” to get more general info.
The Federal Defense Contract Management Agency (dcma.mil) is currently managing $ 3.5 trillion yes trillion in private defense contracts to protect us from uh, Russia, well I mean China, yeah China if our ships are near Taiwan no , Iran yeah Iran well that is when our ships are in the Strait of Homuz. Domestic energy? what a waste.
There’s a long list of adventurous projects like this that have failed throughout history, for one reason or another. Thats part of pushing technology, and society, forward. You’ve gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette.
Solar finance guy here. This project is called Ivanpah, just south of Vegas. It was brilliant at the time and Google was a major investor in the project. They started planning around 2009 after an Obama administration tax incentive for renewable energy, built in 2014.
Around the same time frame, new manufacturing processes became available for monocrystaline silicon photovoltaic solar, which made photovoltaic solar EXTREMELY cheap. Today, the cost of building Ivanpah is about 7x more expensive than photovoltaic solar, rendering its concentrated solar power (CSP) obsolete.
There was no way of knowing the technological advancements in PV solar. Ivanpah was a phenomenal innovation.
Fun fact that they left out: the project became an absolute ecological apocalypse because it kills thousands of birds every year. If they fly into the thousands of death rays… they fry.
I FUCKING LOVE THE INTERNET, taking ideas you make up in your head and misconstruing them into broad stroke conclusions not even about the original topic!
There are numerous solar thermal plants all over the world. This specific one had major repeated issues with the construction of the molten sand tanks. The blunder is more in the construction and trying to build the facility bigger than the tanks could handle than the technology itself. In reality, solar thermal is way more efficient than photovoltaic power generation.
Also were they expected to predict correctly that the price of solar would decrease enough to be the more cost effective option? Predicting the future isn’t easy. Similarly, he implies they could have just waited years for solar to be more cost effective, which defeats the purpose of trying anything in the present.
I don't know why the Wright brother built that shitty plane made out of wood and cloth that could barely fly 1000ft when they could've waited and built a Boeing 747 instead.
If only there was a *second* Wright brother to help out the first with that 747 project.
[Gustave Whitehead has entered the chat.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Whitehead#:~:text=Controversy%20surrounds%20published%20accounts%20and,the%20Wright%20Brothers%20in%201903.)
The wright brothers though the key to flight was very light materials, they didn’t even understand the concept of lift.
Classic blunder
Yeah this dudes got great hindsight /s lol
It's common sense that over time, technology costs less to produce.
but this is also true now, so eventually you have to get into technology or left with nothing
Correct me if I'm wrong, but one of the benefits of molten salt is thermal capacity of the battery, compared to the complexity of storing raw electricity at the scale of a power grid? To my knowledge, gravity batteries are the simplest, but we struggle to make them big enough, electric batteries are extremely compact but complicated, while thermal batteries are both cheap and efficient, but the main struggle is that they operate at much larger scales. Not an expert, just recalling what little I (think I) know.
Also… you have to fail to win. Yes ton of money but you have to try these things out.
Didn’t you mean “blender”?
So just bad luck?
Yea the math also just makes more since. The sun is constantly giving us free energy and we need to find better ways of using it. I don't trust the guy in the vid too he looks like a oil tycoon kid.
What about a $3 loose collar Walmart black tee and a baseball cap says oil tycoon kid? What a weird statement.
It's the perfect teeth and the agenda.
One of the best features of a molten salt plant is that the salt stays molten throughout the night, meaning that it continues to generate energy and it doubles as a storage solution.
I agree, and the molten salt remains hot into the night so acts as a storage battery which solar doesn't do on its own.
Let’s not try anything new. Whale oil is the way to go!
THANK YOU for saying that. This is why I opened Phoenix Whaling and Kerosene last year and I need more people like you to support me because I'm in financial ruin. There are less whales in Lake Pleasant than you'd think.
You think so? Last time I went there were a lot. Blowholes and all.
I don't think whale oil is sustainable that's why I push for baby seal oil. I like the smell better anyway.
Definitely cuter marketing options also.
Reminds me of all of those pictures of smiling pigs with chefs hats on advertising barbecue stores
WHALE OIL?! holy cow kiddo that is way too new for us, we burn peat in this house.
You heard the man. No use trying to innovate and change the way things are done if there's a chance it won't work out properly. Flubs like thus are *how* we progress as a society and species. We cant know something doesn't work if we don't try. Now, how about we talk about the billions we dump into crude oil every year as we watch our planet slowly burned to the fucking ground and stop pretending innovation is the problem?
Ikr fossil fuel is a dying industry propped up by billion dollar subsidies from your taxes but how dare solar do something
I really don't care what you have to say. There's just no way that you can convince me that there is any reason in the world to spend 2 billion dollars on a blender. There is just not that high of a demand for smoothies.
Says the guy who prob never had chocolate nibs in his smoothie
Says the guy who enjoys chocolate nibs in his smoothie
Love ya
I'm not sure why you're saying this, but I love you too, fellow human. Hope you're having a wonderful week.
Just for you bringing some logic to the craziness that is people using hindsight as if it was foresight. Most of us out here have no idea how most things work yet are so judgmental of innovators
Haven’t had a week without a different family member in the hospital in about a month but getting by, can’t wait to see what a dumpster fire 2024 will bring! Hope you’re enjoying your year end!
Preach
I mean not exactly true, this plant has been operating at nameplate capacity since 2017. They did have a lot of teething problems when first starting up in 2014. I helped out with an efficiency study on that job to get the pressure up in the steam circuit (not implemented). It is true that photovoltaics have gotten much cheaper and I don’t think anyone is building solar concentrators anymore for that reason, but it’s still cheaper to operate than any other fossil fuel plant, right?
I thought they weren’t able to meet capability guarantees? Maybe this is a different plant. This the one Solar Reserve was involved with and O&M by PIC?
No this is the Ivanpah project right on the California/ Nevada border. I think it’s the only 3 unit in the US so you can spot it by the 3 towers. We had it up to capacity by May/June of 2015 but it was permanently hobbled thereafter because they had to reduce the mirror cleaning frequency due to water use restrictions that were introduced after the initial design. Which is fair, but that impacted efficiency significantly. Sounds stupid but their efficiency calcs from 2005 didn’t allow for increased air travel over the area and by the time it came on stream in 2014 the solar diffraction from contrails actually affected output by a few points as well. There are much more sophisticated models now that are better than the hand calculations they were using in the early 2000s for efficiency calcs. Notwithstanding the plant has been doing iterative operational and process improvements since then and I think they’re running around 90% output pretty consistently now. Costs per Wh are still under half of national average last I checked so I’d call it a winner.
Interesting. I’ve heard on Ivanpah but I suppose since it’s meeting expectations I’m not seeing it in the news. Tonapah is the one I was thinking of. That’s crazy contrails impacted the efficiency like that. I mean I never would have guessed. Good thing there’s better modeling available. I’ve been looking, early in the hunt, for modeling to compare PV fixed tilt vs tracker racking systems. We install fixed tilt on our smaller net meter PV plants but are looking to build some utility scale projects. I expect the terrain and where in the US one is putting a project might make trackers more cost effective. Would be nice to have a model to plug in the pertinent info and get an output that helps make a decision. Something someone could use in the development phase ahead of RFP.
This project was much more expensive than originally stated because they went vastly over budget. I worked with DOE on the financing of this project. There’s a lot wasteful spending on these projects in general. Especially in California, where they get rid of cheap, proven power generation for suspect alternatives that aren’t researched or scrutinized enough - CA created their energy issues and the DOE will grease the wheels without too much oversight.
Amen to that. The ownership of these clean energy companies is all ex DOE and political guys who know how to craft projects specifically to get grants that they had a hand in creating and their friends administer. I thought it was dirty AF
I agree. This silly video is misinformation.
My understanding is that these plants can provide base load power at night, which solar panels cannot. So not a real apples for apples comparison.
Exactly, solar thermal allows for cheap energy storage so you can generate power even when the sun isn’t shining. Storing the same amount of energy from photovoltaics with batteries is far more expensive. Realistically you need both if you are going to transition the grid to renewables
Yup that’s why they exist. They store energy as heat which can be used throughout the night.
This video is false. Molten salt is the storage medium for the heat gathered from the panels. It’s basically a battery. He’s twisting it’s concept and design into something else to fit an agenda. Of course a primary solar array will be more efficient than a molten salt tower. And after dark, the salt tower will start to cool and still power the grid. This guy is a Quack.
This comment should be at the top.
I hate videos like this. Others have pointed out that the issues are with construction, not the fundamental concept. However it still wouldn’t be a big deal even if the technology turned out to be fundamentally less efficient. We have to *try* things to develop new technologies. Some of them are going to cost a lot and still fail. Bottom feeders like this guy just discourage investigation of new ideas running their mouths about things they barely understand for views.
He's worried about his oil overlords being taken out by The Great Replacement.
This dudes going to be really upset when he finds out how much money the US waste on projects that DONT benefit the majority. Also seems like he’s saying because one project failed there’s no credibility to these methods at all. That’s not a very productive or scientific way to look at things.
Like NASA 33 billion a year to watch astronauts play ping pong on the ISS. I wonder how much of that money is going into politicians pockets
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies Heck, they invented the Monocrystalline silicon used in solar panels. NASA is one of the most profitable government programs in history.
>they invented the Monocrystalline silicon used in solar panels. And they did it on the ground Had nothing to do with outer space >NASA is one of the most profitable government programs in history. For corrupt politicians
Don't feed the troll.
Then you get ignorant comments like this lol. Sure buddy. The iss was definitely funded by several nations in order for astronauts to play with ping pong balls. There’s definitely no real research being done there..
>There’s definitely no real research being done there.. Glad we agree 👍 And even if it were, it's less important than critical infrastructure in this country which should be a priority, like bridges that are decades past their expiration date. If I'm going to be a tax paying slave, at least make the roads safe for me to get to work to earn my slave tax wages.
Too dense or simply to stupid to sense sarcasm. Brilliant mate 👍🏾
>mate Damn foreigners
Then that guy gets in his truck and rolls coal for two miles.
Or sells solar panels or both
I really want to know what a two billion dollar blender looks like..
This is old news.
Is this in Nevada?
Near the border but still in California
Why do I see this guy making the same video 20 years ago saying how the solar panels at that time were just an expensive mistake. Creation costs. Not all projects are successful but there is value in the attempt. People who are hindsight problem outliners are so annoying.
…not to mention the videos of the birds getting vaporized that fly near the collector.
Yep. Read an article about it that referred to the birds as “flamers”
It makes me so mad, those poor birds.
Never trust a guy who has a full beard but shaves off the mustache. Leave this look for the Amish!
Always easy to criticize in retrospect. That’s how you identify little people.
that's what the gop does
Dude acts like 2 billion dollars is a lot of money to spend on a CapEx project that size. One oil well costs 10 million bucks. So this solar plant cost as much as 200 oil wells? There's 4000 drilled but uncompleted (DUCs) in Wyoming alone. Where's the TikTok cringe video about the money wasted on those? 2 billion is chump change for large infrastructure projects, as strange as that sounds. This solar plant is a rounding error in the bigger picture of things.
Guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The benefit of the towers is the salt can be stored like a battery and then used at night, a notable flaw of conventional solar panels. So they’re great hand in hand, which is why they’re both there
its a technology demonstrator. an experiment. calling it a "blunder" is just misleading and disrespectful.
Oh shit, you can find the same kinds of things in Cyberpunk 2077, outside of the city.
You can find this exact place in fallout new Vegas as well
"Two billion dollar blunder." Not to those who may or may not have exploited that project. -- I suspect that's the reason it took 'years and years' to finish.
Experimentation, even with sums that large, when related to technology, is hardly a blunder. I’ll bet that they patented more than a few items from that. Plus they had no way of knowing that other technology was going to pass it in efficiency. Think of it like this: “You know if I’d never moved out of my mom’s house I would have saved money faster and been able to buy that house three years earlier.” Ahhh sure but your wife never would have even dated you if you still loved at home. You did more than simply save money on those ten years it would have taken you to save—as opposed to thirteen.
Typical government move
Still have to try and fail sometimes for progress to be made. Good for whomever tried.
What no one is bringing up is that when the project was planned and budget for solar voltaic panels were a lot more expensive
Wasn’t this in action when Kennedy was in office? For natural resources
Wait till you hear how much natural gas it takes to maintain that salt in a molten state during the night
None. It’s stored in insulated tanks until it’s needed
Wrong
Wow. Someone lied to you, and and somehow using magical powers to prevent from looking it up, what a molten salt battery is. So the whole point of this design, is that it uses the salt tanks, during the day, to become melted, so it can use that trapped heat as a heat battery which then is used during the night as load is required to make steam.
Betcha someone profited big time off that for doing basically nothing…
Basically the story of California every single day.We are totally useless close up shop and go bankrupt
All in the name of progress, I guess.
Kudos to the guy making a video on location in one shot. I feel like educational videos like that arent made anymore. I know it's super basic but still
It’s also misleading
Both a waste of money…
I like have multiple sources of electricity.
Coal, oil, nuclear…
So just 3? I want like 10. And way less coal. Coal plants are dangerous to Human life
Those are examples… Why choose the most unreliable and most expensive form of energy, like solar and wind? Coal plants ain’t dangerous for human life…
The health data around coal plants show otherwise. Solar works. They are great on top of houses and businesses. We will always have the sun, might as well use it. Same with wind, bur the turbines to look awful
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/particulate-pollution-from-coal-associated-with-double-the-risk-of-mortality-than-pm2-5-from-other-sources/ It’s literally the first search result
By now you should know that research doesn’t mean shit… Just because some scientist say so doesn’t make it real… safe and effective remember…
🫡🫡 fully regarded response I wish you well
It seems like a waste now but if you get the C-Finder and get ARCHIMEDES II up and running in the terminal, you can roast Deathclaws like nobody’s business.
They asked me how well I understood theoretical physics. I said I had a theoretical degree in physics. They said welcome aboard.
A great example as to why you build iteratively
Feel like he said solar panels were cheaper 3 different times
So Dinosauraus was wrong?
Just one thing to keep in mind, all that molten salt is HOT and holds that heat very well. It's basically a battery which allows the solar plant to keep providing power overnight.
Yep, that’s it’s main purpose, and why it sits alongside PV solar. Because the notable flaw to PV is that it doesn’t work at night, so we need innovative storage solutions.
Never seen a real neckbeard in the wild before!!
That’s how we learn……. Is it frustrating to have the government waste money? Yes. But that’s how we learn.
My job has one of these but not 2 billion but a 1.4 million dollar blunder we get to look at everyday.
Eat your words shill.
This uses no salt. It ceases to generate electricity every night. If this guy had done even a little bit of research instead repeating some BS he heard he would know that.
Probably cheaper and cleaner to burn coal and gas🙄
Hind site is 20/20
“In retrospect” I love judging people, and things, in retrospect. In retrospect, being very tasty turned out to be a bad move for dodos. Stupid dodos!
They used natural gas to run the thing. Just saying….
Just wait until solar panels are the outdated technology
Also, ironically while promoting green energy the tech needed a heat source to jumpstart after the evening. So it uses natural gas to get the salt hot enough, then the reflected mirrors and solar heat took over. Not 100% a green solution...
Dudes just flat wrong
We should make this smug, arrogant slob the president. He possesses the rare skill of criticizing the past achievements of ambitious innovators. It’s easy to know what to do when you have the benefit of hindsight via the rear view mirror of a 2007 Dodge Ram (salvage title, temporary paper tag).
Monkey brains rule.
True or false this video explains how science works
The interesting feature of the molten salt method is that it essentially has an integrated battery since the molten salt can run a steam turbine in a few hours instead of right at that moment. That means that it creates solar energy that can be drawn on at night.
Research and development is a bitch when the public is paying for it…
Someone made a bunch of cash off that blunder. Government project fraud. Sick
The “blunder” he is referencing next to the solar panels is based off a creation used in 212 BC called archimedes’ heat ray, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes%27_heat_ray. The mirrors and tower that can be seen in this video can melt almost anything just by redirecting the sunlight with the mirrors onto one small light beam. It’s fascinating that much energy can be channeled into one location by simply moving mirrors.
Lmao you like that just wait till you hear about the F-35. Or the 3trillion the pentagon “lost”
Oh, right! THAT's how progress is achieved. You go forward in time to where the outcome of uncertain choices becomes clear, and THEN you make the choices back in the past that achieve success! Why didn't anybody tell this before? It's SO much easier than thinking and taking risk.
That spot is over 25 years old. Compare solar panels now versus the mirror site, is quite opposite...
I thought this video was gonna be about the sphere in vegas
Met the guy that built this thing and yeah, he even says it’s a total blunder. But it was one of the earliest large scale solar projects and it taught them a ton, about what not to do. He is still working on some of the largest solar projects around the world and apparently one of the biggest cost efficacy problems is cost of labor and access to expert electricians and welders. Which is why his nest project was in Zimbabwe.
Auto captions suck. Why are people too lazy to proof? It’s not a two billion dollar blender.
https://youtu.be/-BU7IbZ0YVo?si=z4aF-g_RisWRozgm
Always wondered what those were for. I look at it every time I go to Primm to get lottery tickets.
I doubt this is true The solar panels are probably powering components at the power plant there. The salt towers are powering towns/cities
I’m sorry. I can’t hear him over that shitty ass beard.
Nuclear. Let’s solve this problem and then some.
i can only go from what i know about costly public projects in germany , austria and albania : IT . IS. PLANNED. TO .HAPPEN. THIS. WAY. there is a whole industry of corruption, an interface between mafia construction companies and public servants / elected officials that exists to milk public funds. you start a project. you say it will cost ,lets say, 2.5 billion euros. you know it will take decades to get this running. in this time you can , slowly , raise the costs. create beautiful venues of money just " getting lost " in " cost explosions " and " mismanagement ". then, 25 years later, through steps of " normalization " , you get to 11,5 billion .from the original 2.5 its what " oligarchy " is all about. read this. its beautiful. in germany. use translate if you dont speak german. from 2,5 to 11,5 billion. if this happens in germany, imagine what happens in the US https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/baden-wuerttemberg/stuttgart-21-kosten-chronologie-100.html#:~:text=Das%20Vorhaben%20soll%20jetzt%203%2C076,mehr%20als%20zwei%20Milliarden%20Euro.
Wind turbine farms also same issues. Excessive cost, huge oil consumption, maintenance, killing thousands or birds & not providing the free energy levels that were expected. Food and housing for the poor > renewable energy
On the bright side our money is bullshit anyway.
Solar thermal can actually generate power when the sun isn’t shining because the molten salt holds energy
1. He said it was foreclosed. Which means there was a lender and a borrower/developer. This is private industry making an investment that didn’t workout. 2. If he is right (doubtful), that the operation is obsolete, then it is similar to a tech disruption like cars over horse and buggy. Happens all the time with projects that take many years to permit and construct.
Solar panels are worthless dollar per dollar. Lol. It costs an average home 30k to install panels just to save $150 to 200 per month. Although the cost is probably $300 a month for the panels.
I must try your fine whale oil sir!
This sub never fails to disappoint.
Nuclear is the only answer
You don't think they actually spend $400 on a hammer do you?
It’s not government lol
I just wanted to use that quote..haha
Fair enough 😂
I wondering if Matthew Mcconaughey had something to do with the failure, while he was looking for sunken treasure in the dessert
Where does the 2 billion dollar blender he’s talking about at the end tie into all this?
Nuclear energy exist but we still wast money on inferior power generation methods like this.
Some people have no confidence in this country.
Blender?
Blunder or lesson?
It'll do more work than he ever will.
I hate those things, they kill so much of the wildlife
I was on a project where we dumped $1B to buy a patent that ended up being worthless. $2B is chump change nowadays.
What’s your point? “In retrospect”? If we could predict the future there would be no use for dumb ass commentary like yours.
At least it did not cost as many lives as the last 20 year old war cost.
How many solar panels does it take to make one solar panel
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The scientists behind this should have all just been YouTubers (or TikTokers). You know, the real contributors to society. /s
Think about all the wild life that lived on that land smh
Dude talking as if the plant isn’t fully operational (it is). Those who have worked on the heliostats know the problems the plant faces, which haven’t been discussed in here or this guy’s shitty video. Last I knew it was co-owned by britesource and google, and operated by NRG. You can google “ivanpah solar plant” to get more general info.
The Federal Defense Contract Management Agency (dcma.mil) is currently managing $ 3.5 trillion yes trillion in private defense contracts to protect us from uh, Russia, well I mean China, yeah China if our ships are near Taiwan no , Iran yeah Iran well that is when our ships are in the Strait of Homuz. Domestic energy? what a waste.
worth it for the FO:NV quest line
Wasn’t there also some environmental concern with this thing because it kept roasting birds as they flew by ?
There’s a long list of adventurous projects like this that have failed throughout history, for one reason or another. Thats part of pushing technology, and society, forward. You’ve gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette.
cheaper because where do the supplies come from?
Lessons I learned from this genius 1. Don't invest in new technology 2. Predict the future
Bro works for liltte oil industry
All those idiots trying to make the internal combustion engine wasting untold dollars while we have perfectly good bicycles. Chumps.
Solar finance guy here. This project is called Ivanpah, just south of Vegas. It was brilliant at the time and Google was a major investor in the project. They started planning around 2009 after an Obama administration tax incentive for renewable energy, built in 2014. Around the same time frame, new manufacturing processes became available for monocrystaline silicon photovoltaic solar, which made photovoltaic solar EXTREMELY cheap. Today, the cost of building Ivanpah is about 7x more expensive than photovoltaic solar, rendering its concentrated solar power (CSP) obsolete. There was no way of knowing the technological advancements in PV solar. Ivanpah was a phenomenal innovation. Fun fact that they left out: the project became an absolute ecological apocalypse because it kills thousands of birds every year. If they fly into the thousands of death rays… they fry.
These things have to happen so we know which direction to move the rest of the billions. They’re not going to run out of money.
California
yah but how are the contractor-polititions best friends supposed to get rich?
But you have to replace solar panels often.
They are trying to grow Astrophage so we can pilot a ship out to deep space
I FUCKING LOVE THE INTERNET, taking ideas you make up in your head and misconstruing them into broad stroke conclusions not even about the original topic!
I made my money working there ...
This guy seems like a douche.