Trump administration has killed a massive solar power project in Nevada | Hacker News Reader

Trump administration has killed a massive solar power project in Nevada

theguardian.com

16 pointssleepyguy8 comments

> The following month, the president said his administration would not approve solar or wind power projects. “We will not approve wind or farmer destroying Solar,” he posted on Truth Social. “The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!!”

Excuse my harshness, but what a moron. It's literally free power from the sun.

I know that there's still lots of hydrocarbons in the ground still, but these guys know it's not infinite or free, right?

Infinite for the old guys. They will be gone by the time it is a problem.

But what if it destroys a farmer?!

Is there any reason to believe this one would have been more successful than the one in California that lost a couple billion dollars?

California has massive penetration of distributed solar to the point that solar supply exceeds total grid demand much of the time, making the marginal value of additional solar generation very low.

Which is a pretty big difference when comparing viability of utility solar installations in California to anywhere else in the country.

And I assume the particular California plant you are talking about is the big solar thermal/natural gas hybrid plant that was being built just as the big price drop in photovoltaics essentially made it obsolete, which barring unexpected breakthroughs on some competing technology, is a big difference from any not-already-obsolete system being considered now.

Well for starters, Ivanpah Solar Power Facility was an attempt to build an innovative new solar design. Esmeralda 7 would have used now-dominant, proven, highly efficient PV technology. Apples and Oranges.

Oh and Esmeralda 7 would have been 16 times larger.

California is an expensive state full of people and bureaucratic red tape. Nevada is empty, most of the land is undesirable, and enjoys fairly lax regulations.

Great news! Killing the Esmeralda 7 solar project is the right decision. People don’t realize how massive it was, over 110 square miles, bigger than Las Vegas itself. It would’ve scraped up pristine Great Basin desert, wiped out wildlife habitat, and trampled culturally important land not to mention diverting massive amounts of water which is a tight resource out here. Renewable energy is great, but we don’t need to bulldoze entire ecosystems to do it. Killing this one might actually push solar developers to think smaller and smarter next time.

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