Hacker News Reader

Comment by niftich | Hacker News Reader

San Bernardino County is home to the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility [1], which is a mirror-focused solar thermal power plant. It generates a lot of glare and is controversial for its impact on animals. It also took several years to ramp up to its promised output.

Solar panels don't have problem with glare, but the landscape of the county has large viewsheds of sloping treeless desert, so any facility will have a large visual impact. It also disturbs the ground and replaces the desert scrub with actual bare ground, which is more susceptible to dust, and dust is a problem that plant operators try to combat [2], but have long accepted as an inconvenient reality of siting in the desert.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility [2] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7274289

View on HN

> Solar panels don't have problem with glare

You clearly haven't been on a highway leading straight towards a hillside panel cluster [1] at that particular time of day and year when the reflection trail of the panels passes over the road. It's much worse than going towards dawn or sunset because those are toned down do much by atmospheric attenuation. All you can do is blindly maintaining speed and hoping that nobody in front of you panics. We have a lot to learn about panel placement and permits, maybe we need to deliberately add jitter to panel orientation in locations where the reflection beam would pass over sensitive locations like high speed roads or even go back to heliostat installations there. (Or at least have some minor articulation capabilities to aim the reflection away)

[1] http://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=NM32&daddr=E56&geocode=Fet... I think it was at the location marked in the link, the end points of the route mark the glare source and target. IIRC it is an unrestricted stretch, where on a Sunday when trucks are not permitted even the slow lane often travels at 150 kph or more

EDIT: I apologize. I misunderstood the statement.

<!--

It's the same light from the sun that you say is attenuated by the atmosphere before reaching your eyes that is reflected from the solar panels. It is literally impossible for it to be worse.

-->

When the reflection hits the sun is higher in the sky. The almost tangential rays at sunset/sunrise have a much longer intersection with earth's atmosphere.

Edit: no problem, maybe I could have been more clear :)

The problem is that it's coming from ground level, instead of up in the sky.

> Ivanpah Solar Power Facility

Blew my mind when I drove past that (on the way to Las Vegas?).

I swear it appeared as though the air was incandescing at the top of the tower where all the sun's rays were focused. Def something out of a Sci-Fi film....

You truly don’t understand how blinding it is until you drive past it. I didn’t realize it was in San Bernardino.

I saw it driving from Las Vegas to SF. Remember it being near Zzyzx which reminded me of Sonic Youth music video.

Birds literally burst into flames in the air.

There's the Crescent Dunes Solar Plant outside of Tonopah, NV which is also on the way to Las Vegas. It's further away from the road I believe but it's equally as blinding. The first time I drove past it I was shocked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crescent_Dunes_Solar_Energy_Pr...

The glowing tower contains molten salt, used to store the focused solar energy. [1] I never knew that was a thing until I too drove past it. It was one of the more memorable sights on a 3000 mile road trip.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy#Molten_...

Ivanpah uses water, not salts:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility

Or perhaps Fallout: New Vegas....

Definitely. Unfortunately I was driving by in heavy traffic (memorial day weekend rush to Las Vegas) or I would have slowed to find a safe spot to stop and take that sight in.

IANABotanist, but I wonder if there are plants that do well in sandy soil and shade that could be used as ground cover underneath the panels and keep the dust down.

IANABotanist either, but your real problem isn't finding the right species of ground cover. It's coming up with sufficient water in the Mojave desert.

Might be an interesting terraforming project: bring some water along with the electrical infra, plant drought resistant shrubs and watch as they start covering soil, capturing moisture and so on...

Or maybe just leave the desert ecosystem alone?

I am not sure why people think that a desert is bare and empty, I guess most just assume that because you can't see it as easily as you can in a forest that there is nothing there, but desert ecosystems are much more fragile than most other ecosystems and do not adjust easily to random interference.

But you have to grapple with the counterfactual. The status quo of not building some of these projects is we keep pumping tons of coal soot and gas fumes into the air. We are currently on course to destroy the ecosystem of the entire planet.

I won't pretend that I know these projects are well-sited or they couldn't easily be done in a better way to lessen their impact. But, you can't use "it has a new harm" as an a priori veto of changes when the status quo is so deeply, deeply harmful.

Any human activity had an impact on the earth. At some point even the most well-intentioned of us have to accept that some big benefits may come at some (ideally lesser) costs.

I would ask those locals if they are ok with having no electricity other than what they can generate themselves on their own houses.

Desert may be a fragile area, but what is the real impact of its disruption? Everywhere there are tradeoffs.

Phosphorous from Saharan desert sands fertilizes the Amazon.

Messing with ecosystems on a large scale will probably have serious side effects which we haven’t investigated; better to err on the side of caution.

Define large scale...

I grew up in San Bernardino County and never knew about this valuable info, thanks internet stranger!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com