Solar energy in the California desert
Desert areas obviously have lots of sunshine and make great places to put solar energy installations. They're an "out of sight out of mind" sort of place that lets us generate "clean" electricity without having to actually see the electricity generation facility. It seems that many simply don't want to "see" industrial facilities, and would rather they be located elsewhere. Hurm.
While the California Energy Commission has approved this, it's not the end of the process. There are other organizations who will have their say. Some controversy exists over this sort of facility. It's amazing that people could object over solar electricity power plants, but they do. With this sort of project the objection is habitat degradation out in the desert. There's a breed of environmentalist whose goal is protecting "fragile" ecosystems in the desert. Yeah, deserts have very little water and the existence of life there is absolutely amazing. Industrialization of the desert with this sort of facility means bulldozing the acres of land to allow installation of the equipment. It stops being desert habitat, and becomes an industrial power plant. That clean electricity has an effect. What might be better is to install solar panels on roof tops in town. Roof tops of existing buildings is already land that's already converted to non-natural landscape habitat. Hence rooftop solar panels or solar carports etc does not degrade habitat that isn't already degraded by something else.Amplify’d from news.cnet.com
The California Energy Commission has approved a permit for SolarReserve to build a 150-megawatt solar plant that uses molten salt to store energy, the company announced Wednesday.
The molten salt system will enable the solar farm to store and release solar energy so that it can continue to generate electricity for up to eight hours after sunset, according to SolarReserve.
However, this latest California board approval does not mean this project is full steam ahead. The Rice Solar Energy Project still needs to receive approvals from both the Bureau of Land Management and the Western Area Power Administration, according to SolarReserve.
