The Failure of America's $1 Billion Solar Farm
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- Опубліковано 11 січ 2023
- The Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project was proposed back in 2011, and intended on meeting Nevada's rising demand for electricity to power 75,000 homes throughout the state. While the project was funded by the US Department of Energy and completed in 2015, it faced a number of challenges in the years afterward. This was mainly because of the new form of Solar Technology it was using, which was the first of its kind in the United States.
This new technology would ultimately lead the the failure of this $1 Billion dollar facility, which went bankrupt in 2020. But even as the future of this project looked uncertain, The US Buereu of Reclamation stated that the project had resumed full operation in July of 2021, due to increased demand for electricity throughout the state. Today, the future of this project is still uncertain, but has resumed operation for the state of Nevada.
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What made you think this was the first CSP plant in America?
Why space wasting, costly, corporate solar "farms"... instead of home installations where appropriate?
This is CLICK BAIT. It had delays, it DID NOT fail as of when you produced this video. If you want subs, don't do this.
The technology is inferior to modules and therefore failed. Video is too long for simple answer.
@@Naija4K it did not fail. It stared back up.
Saying the "Engineers did not account for temperature" simply means that no engineers were employed in this project.
Exactly.
For the win. That is how political graft works. PHD losers get a grant and run with it and then wonder why it fails... Because no one competent did the design. Why losers gets PHD's because they are incompetent.
It was JUST a scam from the beginning. My opinion
I agree with you based on all the research I'm doing. It's a toxic ploy to keep us busy doing this while the powers that be finish dimming the sun and locking down the world. In the meantime, Tennesse and Georgia have been scammed and taken to the cleaners believing in this, California has thrown their panels in the landfills, Australia has learned the lesson with these useless things, and now they are actually putting them in water like massive floating toxic lily pads.
Yes, mirrors in that dusty windy environment. Good luck. At least someone got filthy rich, while the tax-payers footed the bill.
700M dollars to power 75K homes? Just put 10K dollars worth of solar panels on each home and call it good.
The rich will not get richer if they do that, they will be sad 😢
Gotta maintain Beamer's !
$10,000 won't provide solar for 1 home. Also thousands more for battery.
Two completely different things. CST creates dispatchable energy (can run 24 hours a day) while SPV creates intermittent, non-dispatchable energy that has a completely different tariff.
Excellent point
the whole idea of implementing a huge new project without first having a small pilot project that proves out the design successfully, is just pretty much beyond belief, running counter to experience and wisdom in manifesting new ideas into reality - yes?
It's the problem of Government funded projects imo. Who cares if it fails, it's not their money right? And if it succeeds government loans rarely have much interest or anything. It's not like the tax payers have a stake in the profits or anything despite putting up most the money.
Yes but Mr X read Tesla wow that's awesome stuff and now we are paying for ev out the bum for him he's going to have to understand his fantasy does not take our taxes
Maybe someone in the Gumming is collecting on the bankruptcy which was intended all along. How many other Government Energy Projects have actually worked out?
When you are relying upon a government loan and looking to rip off the government, you don't want anything like crappy results from a pesky pilot plant failure to muck up the works. Go big or go home as they say.
Actually there were several pilot projects the video is quite inaccurate on this and several other points
I was an airline pilot before my retirement in 2015 and I recall often flying by this facility and another one south of Las Vegas. Flying westbound to SFO or LAX at high altitude, those stupid mirrors would blind us during daylight hours. We had to physically force our eyes away from the glaring light as looking at them hurt and left our vision impaired for several minutes. Very intense light!!
Why be looking at the ground while so Hugh in the air?
Don't forget about all the cooked Birds that just happened to migrate by. Shhhh! we don't talk about the bird deaths. We also don't talk about how much natural gas is used to start these plants up daily. Yep that's real green energy there. But don't forget about all the money from the construction and design that just happened to float into the pockets of the politicians of the local Governments and their families. The Good Old Boy Network still exists and We still pay the price.
Gramma had the same problem as grampa drove them toward the sunset. Sissy.
@@ka7hqp182 how much wildlife is effected by strip mining? Continous Co2 and sulfur emissions?
BooHoo, but interesting.
I grew up near a nuclear power plant that was built in the ‘60s came online in 1973 and is still on line 50 years later. It puts out enough electricity to power 1 million homes and takes up only 2 sq miles which includes a fish farm that raises and realeses native fish into the Mississippi River.
I wonder how much wild life habitat that huge solar farm ruins? How many birds get killed by the reflected sunlight? Because 75,000 homes ain’t shit compared to 1,000,000 homes from a 50 year old reactor.
Nuclear is to the climate crisis, as ivermectin is to the Covid crisis
and costs 10x more to create electricity than solar and wind does
@@flodjod Nuke costs what it does because of excessive litigation by misguided people who oppose any power production be it nuke, coal or natural gas. Solar is nice when you can't run power lines but cannot do the 'Heavy Lifting' needed for industry and country wide home service. At the current solar panel efficiency we'd need to cover the entire country with them and would still have the problem of that pesky night thing that severely limits it's usefulness.
Man you’re talking sense, That’s not allowed in the DEMOCRATIC WORLD OF FANTASY.
I understand that kfc has an arrangement to harvest photon roasted birds.
Money would have been better spent on nuclear energy.
Nuclear energy is to the climate crisis, as ivermectin is to the Covid crisis.
Makes to much sense.
Ask the Japanese and the Ukrainians!
@@Dreamhelmetimproper management due to authoritarian government cover ups and failure due to a legitimate tsunami aren’t a good argument against one of the cleanest forms of energy and by far the most powerful form of energy generation
Nuclear requires water, and _lots_ of it. The Arizona Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station is an anomaly; it was once "the largest nuclear generating station in the Free World" although it does not sit on a river. Instead, it gets cooling water as effluent from the Phoenix metro area.
Australia has a similar project. The mirrors have to be constantly cleaned, along with the mechanical problems. It cost more to run and maintain the project than the revenue from the electricity produced.
Was that the one at Kogan creek in QLD ?
Brilliant. 🙄
That doesn’t surprise me any. They don’t get paid to think ahead it goes against their way of thinking.
@@SunriseLAW But what becomes of the hazardous materials from the batteries when they have expired???
@@SunriseLAW Yeah riiiight
He says it is the first of its kind, but there was one constructed and made operational in 1994! It was located not far from Barstow, California. It was really something to see yet obsolete almost immediately after completion.
SOLAR ONE was already running when I got there in 1986. Daggett, CA.
Yes. I remember those. Those experiments weren’t cost effective too. But since people have short memories, the scam was reborn decades later. Lots of people made lots of money. Just like the “high speed rail” commission in CA. Some people have made whole careers and retired from that scam too.
It failed because the NCR didn't realize that Fantastic only had a theoretical degree in physics, rather than a degree in theoretical physics
It's working just fine. It had glitches as with any new technology. Go back to cooking your dinner with your cow chips.
you have made my day good sir 😂
@@andyslater2320 Did you misunderstand the reference?
@@NOLAgenX - I guess I did... what has 'Fantastic' got to do with it? Be gentle, I am very old. 🤗
@@gilbertfranklin1537 It’s ok,
Many won’t get it. The posting person was making a tongue in cheek reference to a very big video game that came out in 2010 called Fallout New Vegas. The NCR in the game was the New California Republic which was attempting to restore law and order and a working world hundreds of years after a nuclear war. This power plant was featured in the game, and the player has an opportunity to get it working again. Basically the OP was just being funny.
The promise was to provide electricity for 75,000 homes. Is it doing that now? Since you failed to mention, I'll assume not. This project is another example of how taxpayers get robbed to pay for politicians' pet projects.
Solyndra solar panel another boondoggle of taxpayers
They will always come back with well it was an experiment. 🙂
Yep, Harry Reid did that and his sons managed to get a piece of the deal and got rich off of it.
@@yaimavolWell, that's the Green New Deal, right? Politicians making lots of green, and the middle class get a raw deal.
Didn't he says in the end the farm reinstated in 2021 and was fully operational today?
So, they received a 400 million dollar loan from the taxpayers of our country NOT the Department of Energy. Just wanted to clarify that point.
I have a sister who worked at a Top 500 company. The company installed a solar farm on the campus. It was so hot for months you were unable to sit outside for breaks. A question I have asked with no response, What is the change in ambient temperature around a solar farm vs what the temperature was prior to the installation.
Also, why is no one addressing the number of birds incinerated as they get close to the panels.
My company has a solar canopy over the parking lot and it doesn't seem to have changed the temperatures. Everyone tries their best to get their car under the shaded area created by the panels for sure. I can't imagine solar panels creating much more heat than a black asphalt parking lot. No idea what your sisters company did or how their farm was engineered though.
Either way, alternative energy tech is making rapid improvements. Panels are much more efficient and much less expensive than they were even 10-15 years ago. It should be a very useful technology applied under the right circumstances and mixed in with other forms of energy production, namely Nuclear.
Solar panels aren't going to change the temperature appreciably nearby... I am not sure what mechanism you think would cause solar panels to actually heat up the air. And no, solar panels don't incinerate birds.
@@ericfleet9602 Just just garbagicated together solar cell panels with solar reflector/molten salt systems and yes, the latter incinerate birds.
@@ericfleet9602 The concentrated sunlight one shown in the video does kill birds, however, windmills kill many more.
Valid points & questions which will never be answered due to the 'green cult'.
But if it's still costs three to four times as much as traditional solar, that's no way to go.
Which is why another won't be built until it can be done cheaper. I'm assuming they went with the heating tower because it theoretically produces more net power for the land it takes than PV's as well as providing power at night with the molten salt setup. Getting it back in operation is the only way to recover sunk costs.
It won't without its USP which was working 24/7 without too much maintenance, it was supposed to be able to store energy to be used at night when the sun don't shine, so it was like a energy generator and a free battery system in one, but it was beset with problems, which greatly increased the costs, whether it can be a success depends on if it can run without to much costly maintenance and if all the glitches which shut it down for long periods are resolved and any new plants can be built with the modifications incorporated at a reasonable cost!?!
@@thomasherrin6798 more money please so it can be used as a tax deduction.
But since the construction costs are already incurred, only operational costs should be taken into account. It does mean, however, that no new ones should be built.
One thought is that you have to separate the capital cost of setting up your generation from the ongoing cost of supplying the power and servicing and maintaining the plant. The costs of a solar or wind farm have to be spread over the life of the installation which would be say 25 years or so or until the next hailstorm or catastrophic storm. The costs of a coal, gas or nuclear power station can be spread over a service life of anything from 50 to 80 years (before refitting and refurbishing).
This might also have something to do with solar and wind generated electricity is always more expensive even though they keep claiming that the prices of solar cells etc is getting cheaper.
"While the technical flaws were a key cause of its major challenges, the financial state of the company was ultimately the key cause behind the project's failure." But the financial state of the company was directly due to their inability to reliably produce competitively-priced electricity because of the technical flaws.
I suspect the purpose of this wasn't to generate electricity but to take advantage of federal green energy grants and loans that will never be paid back. You know..green. The color of money.
Yea, he explained that.
See I wouldn't mind an uptick in prices if it meant better energy for the future. But the line Between "this actually costs more" and "I want a new mega yacht" is so blurred.
@jacob9045 To me it all looks like bellying up to the public trough. Nuclear energy at one time promised electricity too cheap to bother metering and I've watched the party line go from coal plants to maybe nuclear to nuclear is too dangerous back to coal to coal causes acid rain to clean natural gas to CO2 is a problem to windmills to windmills are unreliable to solar panels to solar is unreliable to maybe a melted salt plant to maybe nuclear wasn't so bad after all. Meanwhile the public is being sold on the latest and greatest until its heretofore hidden flaws are suddey exposed and theyre on to something else and after a while it just seems like a way to create a crisis to dump billions of dollars into something new that benefits someone who already had a vapor trail of zeros at the end of their net worth at the expense of someone just trying to pay their rent with maybe enough left over to afford a Big Mac or two. CO2 is .04% of the atmosphere and weather patterns have been oscillating for centuries but suddenly 5 years of weather data is enough to determine something is amiss and we need to dump trillions of $$ into re-rigging the entire economy in some worst case scenario that the planet will be dead in 200 years even though not one of their doomsday scenarios has come true. It is classic all you need to do is repeat the lie often enough and it becomes the truth. Al Gore had made himself a billionaire selling carbon credits. It sounds cynical but there is far more money in creating lies and panic than in telling the truth.
@@OsiDio Nuclear is the obvious answer. The US has nuclear ships and subs circling the planet continually and safely. If you can do nuclear safely on a boat...you can certainly do it on land. The new generation 4 reactors are incredibly safe, efficient and produce ZERO CO2. The latest versions will even consume the spent fuel rods from Gen 1, 2 and 3 reactors...which is an added plus. Instead of putting it in the ground you can use them as fuel for the new reactors. The only problem with nuclear is PR.
You can tell by the video that many of the panels are broken or not functioning at all, the maintenance on these panels must be incredible
Many of the clips shown are of other projects, some are pv panels...
Non-existent.....period. They expected it to work forever with no cleaning or maintenance. Typical rent-seeking behavior. "Western values"...
Hire cheap labour easy.
in 2024 its fully operational solarpaces.nrel.gov/project/crescent-dunes-solar-energy-project
These are mirrors
They’re building these in Ohio near Mt. Sterling. Fields are being bought up, not for agriculture but for solar farms. The locals are outraged because they won’t benefit from it. The power is going out of state. Ohio has less than 100 days of full sun, most are partly sunny or cloudy.
Same in Central Oregon, all going to California.
The power is going to other Americans
What difference does it make where the power goes?
Why do people expect to "benefit" from property and production facilities, that they Do Not own.
If you want to benefit from the project, get some skin in the game. Invest in it.
The solar farms are terribly destructive to the ecosystems.
They are doing it in indiana also. Building a massive solar production plant and plans for very large solar farms.
When flying at 35000 feet over Arizona a couple years back, I saw this place glowing!
You actually probably saw Ivanpah which is what the creator actually used for all of the shots. Ivanpah has three units where Tonapah has only one unit. Ivanpah actually was the first. So many garbage videos out there about stuff.
@@patrickmay8261 If it was southwest Arizona, I think you saw the Solana project west of Gila Bend.
Meanwhile my NV energy bill has doubled
Unrelated. The 2023 rate hike was 2.3%; your usage (possibly including time of day) is responsible for the big increase.
While the Tonopah facility was being bult, there was a big rain storm, in may, fiber optic cable had just been delivered. The fiber was under water, and ruined. Plus the plans called for 2 elevators, to save on costs, they put only one elevator. The elevators were for stability, so the tower now leans. I was in goldfild 4 years ago, i saw the most beautiful coat of hair. It got my attention, as most times they had been mangy, looking. That same day i was in the,Tonopah dump. Inundated by flies. There should have been zero flies, it was 38°. I asked myself why? Didn't take long i found the answer, dead birds were on the ground. Its a migratory fly way. The panels have been left to face upwards. The birds thinking its water fly towards it and become blinded, falling to the ground, dead.
The animal was a coyote
I work with fiber optic cable all the time. Getting wet doesn't ruin it. It is made from glass after all.
hard to believe this is really competitive. what incredible complication, initial cost and maintenance cost!
the plan is to make energy unaffordable, get rid of us faster
It must be a fun job keeping 10,000 mirrors clean. I wonder if sanity will ever return to power generation?
prollynot.
Especially in a desert where water is scarce. The bloody fools.
Hmmmm does Windex clean up bird poop???
Talk about job security
Rarely am I endorsing AI but a single drone could easily automate the process, and it would hardly be difficult to program something like that
So... 1 billion divided by 70k homes is about $15k per home. If each home put solar panels on their roof for $15k, there would be no running maintenance costs, and would produce the same amount, if not more electricity
@@bert1450 there is a role for solar panels on homes for producing electricity.
what happens when the sun goes down or late afternoon or early morning ? yep you get no power !
@@hokitika4888 It's rather worse than that. I retired from a Fortune 100 electric company five years ago; the company makes millions of dollars per year on the "energy imbalance market," buying solar electricity when it was cheap (sometimes even at negative prices) and selling dispatchable (on demand) energy when the sun was still rising or darkness came. California alone needs an infusion of 12,000 MW over a span of three hours every evening. Here on the Western Interconnection (essentially all North America west of the Rockies from the Mexican border of the US to the Arctic Circle) we already have too much photovoltaic generation with negligible storage.
@@hokitika4888 This is why you have alternative sources of power like hydro. I guess you know the bulk of electricity consumption is during daytime, right ? Well solar PV could take care of that, without the risk of nuke plant or pollution from coal plants
That's exactly what's happening here in Australia@@flagmichael
The primary question really is who were the principals and how were they connected to key politicians.
NO! The question, why in the heck is the tax payer on the hook for such a dumb project? It was a slush fund for both politicians and business, they are in bedt together. And we get screwed. No private bank would be so dumb to risk their depositors money on such a long shot.
@@peterponcedeleon3368 It was quite common in the Obama Admin.
@@caddothegreat it’s common in every administration. There’s not much different between any party administration. I don’t think so much as the pet project, but think more in terms of wasted money.
@@caddothegreatthis was Harry reeds sons project you will remember him being the a speaker of the house at that time . Politics at its best!!!
I used to see a place in the California desert that had mirrors focused on a central location. That was probably in the 80's and 90's.
So there must have already been at least one place where this technology had already existed.
Ivanpah Solar Power Facility
I don't know about the facility you mentioned, but the Ivanpah plant in California, just south of Primm, Nevada, opened in 2014. Many of the photos in this video are actually of that plant.
@@TheChrisJaynes
According to wikipedia, there was a "Solar One" 10mw CSP project near Barstow, CA that started in 1981, and 10 seperate "SEGS" CSP projects in the mojave desert installed from 1984-1990, with altogether a combined 394 MW capacity.
wow
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power#History
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Energy_Generating_Systems
@@TheChrisJaynes I've been in Korea since 2007, so I couldn't see the Ivanpah... Although I did visit family in Arizona in 2014. :)
This is NOT the first of this type of solar plants in the country! There was one in CA Mojave desert in the 1980's using mirrors and concentrating the light onto a central tower containing moltent salt and powering a steam turbine, same basic design! But, it proved not to be cost effective and closed by the early 1990's!?
You are talking about Solar 1 and 2 back in 1995, I was one of the contractors biding on it's demolition...
@@stevetadlock5223 Cool, hope they actually fixed some of the problems with the "NEW" one but I doubt it, the design is fundamentally flawed in many ways for Southwestern US, you need a lot of water just to clean the panels just to start with. But I hear Spain is making a go of it, in the rite location? Thanks!
The new one is called the Ivanpah Power Plant. Its a failure as well.
Same company, same idea, different money, different location!!
@@kenuber4014 and more tax dollars down the drain
Never underestimate the power of stupid money following renewable dreams.
Boy howdy!!
now let's talk about Afghanistan...
It's green all right...green as in $$$ wasted
It would be more efficient to just replace all the mirrors with solar panels..heck...THAT many solar panels would = a crapton of energy
You mean, never underestimate the power of tax payer's money given to politicians who bear zero consequences for their blunerding investments. This would have never taken place in a market free of governmemt meddling.
It only proves that American technological expertise is over-hyped. The truth is much more sobering.
I doubt this comment will be read by anyone associated with naming or producing this video, which I appreciated, but here goes anyway: the town in Nevada where this project took place had the same name as an unincorporated community here in AZ. It is correctly pronounced
TOE-nuh-paw, with the emphasis on the 1st syllable. The narrator of this video incorrectly pronounced the town as tuh-NO-puh. The word tonopah means greasewood water in the Paiute language. Happy video making!
I apologize for the pronunciation mistake.
Thank you for educating us. Yes, we are reading your comment.
No one cares about the town name, or how it is pronounced, we will barely remember the state name, which I already forgot
I live in the Mojave Desert in the town of Ridgecrest. Mis-pronunciations of the place names in the region by strangers is not uncommon. What I am happy about is that he is actually pointing out the failures of this Solar farm, and others are relaying similar stories about Ivanpah and other fields.
@@ArkiveYT Kudos for acknowledging the error. Clearly you are not TONe-deaf !
I'm a truck driver and I delivered several years ago to another solar farm just right cross from the road from that place and they were telling me about all the disasters that happened over there and continue to happen like about 5 maybe 6 years ago at the most
What kind of disasters? You can't say that then not share the juicy part
Your tax dollars at work.
Green engineers
Did you finish the video? It was a success
Another reach into taxpayer pockets with no accountability. 😡
Anyone with half a brain can see how this was a failure from the start
Ten thousand panels to provide energy to 75 thousand homes is ridiculously low rate efficiency
The two years of ZERO production is just another example of government-financed waste.
So the the title is clickbait
Because it hasn’t failed.
The last thing said was that it is in full operation and producing electricity because of the high demand for electricity.
Person posting not clear on definition of the word “Failure” evidently
Projects like this using "new technology" should be constructed in a modular fashion - construct for example 5 percent of the mirrors & test them for a year. Small design flaws can be detected in year one & corrected in year two as the project builds the next 5 percent the following year, etc. Far lower total risk, imho, and slower scale up means less initial capital required.
Right, and vaccines should be tested before being forced on children. But why test when the government will just fully fund?
It's Tone Ah Paw, Nevada. You did not mention the largest bird roasting facility on record. Of course the wind farms are a close second for bird mortaility.
Yep..caught that right off, which told me the narrator hadn't ever been anywhere near Tonopah.
Repeating the myth that windmills kill birds does not add to your credibility. Pet cats are number one with around 45%, then windows are around 40% and windmills come in almost lost at 0.04%.
Note: tall buildings and sky scrapers kill millions of birds a year
@@dizzydigger3302 And, didn't bother looking it up before recording.
Trolling? or misinformed Brids ,Bats and wild life avoid the heat.
I remember seeing this type of solar many years ago, so I don't really think of it as new or groundbreaking.
It isn't, if you listen the narrator says, in the US. Up until that time there wasn't one operating in the US. Also I noticed the narrator never once mentioned natural gas. This plant operates all night long due to natural gas being used to keep the "Salt Slurry" hot. One of the many issues they had was having to use more then the 40 percent of it's power from natural gas, but some how the narrator just left that out. The plant in question has more then 60 percent natural gas use due to cold mornings and it was needed to heat the salt up for the reflectors.
Wouldn’t want to be a bird flying through the area. Dead in seconds.
Government should not be subsidizing power plants of any kind.
Maintaining the positioning servos for each and every mirror assembly had to be a nightmare, and keeping the dust off. Holy crap.
So, we got 0% of power from that 700 mil. That was a gamble with taxpayer's money. Could have given loans to each individual households to put a solar system in each home, and it would have given a lot more power to these households.
The gov got most of it back, and are continuing to collect on the balance after it returned to operation under new management.
It's pronounced Toe-No-PAH, not Tenopa.
In energy circles it's pronounced FAIL-URE, sorry!?!
Actually its Toe-Na-Pah
Ah damn it you beat me to the punch .
@@thomasherrin6798 LOL
Solar is nowhere near being a viable alternative... to anything. It may get there but, as of right now, April 2023, solar is still experimental, at best, but more realistically, it's just plain foolishness.
Not for photovoltaic panels. I've been using them at home for over 20 years. All are still working. They've paid for themselves many times over. I have free power every day, even in winter.
@@davidb2206 If you would, what is a photovoltaic panel? Does it differ from what the government is trying to "give" everybody? If they are a better type of panel, why are you the only one I've ever seen mention them. I am not trying to be argumentative. To me, if solar really worked, no one would be connected to the grid. What I want from a solar system is a normal electrical life, the whole house, just the way I have it, powered, at all times. That means NO MATTER WHAT. I want electricity to where, if the sun does not shine, long enough to deplete my system, having electricity will already be the least of my worries. I'm not looking for the system to pay for itself. I don't give a crap about that. I want my own electricity, not attached to the aging, vulnerable grid.
I have begged, pleaded, groveled, flattered and, nearly, bribed, to get someone to give me a ball park of how much solar equipment, panels, batteries, etc., I would need to achieve what I want. Not a soul has answered my question. I just want some numbers; quantities, of things. Any attempts to communicate back with me have been so full of jargon, I can't understand whether they've actually said anything at all. I don't want talk of amp hours, 12 volt, 24 volt, pure sine wave, none of it, at this point.
I want to know how many panels, how many batteries, and what else I need to power my house... always.
Would $100,000. cover such a system? Or, as I suspect, is such a system not possible? Which brings me back to my initial comment.
Did any of that make sense?
The Project worked great for it's true purpose- to get large amount of fast money.
Remember the loans were guaranteed (i.e. by the taxpayers)
So the developers got their money and bailed.
They truly didn't care if the project produced any real energy or not, that wasn't it's purpose, that was just the sales pitch.
no doubt the 2nd company got a fat forgivable loan too
To give an idea of how much money was put into this project, if the grant money was dived equally among just the ten thousand mirrors (just as an example, not as if the mirrors cost that much) it would come out to one hundred thousand dollars per mirror.
or 1/25th the cost of the last Nuc plant to be built, which has taken 22 years and not sure how much in grant money. Yes, we could build 25 of these solar farms for the cost on 1 nuclear plant.
@@craftsoda How is 4.7 billion dollars 25 times as much as one billion, your math must come from CNN. Watts Bar 2, the last nuclear plant built, supplies enough electricity for 4.5 million homes, was completed on budget and provides hundreds of high paying jobs. Win win in my book.
There's a lot more to the plant than just simple mirrors though.
@@craftsoda
WHERE!? not too many places would work.
Mirror Mirror on the wall your price must fall unless the Government is buying them 😂
Solar farms are often subsidy farms.
As is fossil fuel production.
@@malcolm8564 True, but the point of a subsidy is how much it costs versus how much it pays back with the extra economic activity it generates. It's not that it exists but what comes from it. Also if I may point out sometimes trillions of dollars can be sunk in things that don't pay back that much in monetary terms eg:- army, navy and air force. These bring benefits in terms of protection not necessarily profits. An energy independent country is safer and much better off economically for another example and the fossil fuel industry can certainly fulfil that role.
You can have lasting extra economic benefits from an active solar and wind energy sector but maybe Chinese made infrastructure for solar and wind farms with say a 25 year service life (or until the next hail or wild windstorm) might not draw much benefit.
I can see a way you could reap lasting benefits for a country from having a major solar and wind sector. You would have to have a local industry to make, install, service and repair and replace if you wanted to get serious. Also you would have an industry to recycle the stuff after it's useful life in service is over.
Naturally you would also have to build more generation to bolster the grid for the times your essentially unreliable intermittent power generation from solar and wind etc can't service the load requirements. Hydro, nuclear, gas, coal, coal seam gas, unconventional oil and gas etc come to mind.
We can pin our future hopes on nuclear fusion with any luck at all.
So by all means subsidise wind and solar but how about we ensure base load generation to buffer the grid and how about the operators of the solar and wind farms that are responsible for the unreliability in the power supply are responsible for ensuring the on demand generation to fix it?
So are corn, soy, tobacco, and cotton farms.
"Too Cheap to Meter" died during the Nixon Administration when ORNL Director Dr Alvin Weinberg was fired for promoting the inherently safe molten salt reactor. Dr Weinberg also invented the pressurized water reactor for the Nautilus but warned that this reactor is only safe is smaller than 500 MWth. Westinghouse, GE and B&W ignored this warning and built 3000+ MWth light water reactors like Three Mile Island and Fukushima. Dr Weinberg wanted to build a molten salt breeder reactor fueled with Thorium as the ultimate energy source and we need to finish this now.
That's not a "solar farm", it's 100s of mirrors directing light to a tank full of water. A worthless steam generate electricity plant that needed water, in the desert that has very little water.
What could go wrong with really hot salt? Corrosion on a quantum level maybe?
Well, kinda. The smaller system the company I worked for had problems with the pipe seals. I imagine thermal cycling had a hand in that.
I am not a blanket supporter of solar electric, nor am I anti-alternative power source.
But I have a hard time taking seriously any report that hasn't bothered to talk to locals, even enough to find out how to pronounce the name of the project.
The town from which the project gets its name is Tonopah, pronounced tone-oh-pah'.
If you can't even get that right, I don't have much hope for the veracity of the rest.
It's about 200 miles from Las Vegas... pronounced "lace veejus."
Agreed, lived in nearby Round Mountain/Hadley for a bit.
My wife was a hotel supervisor at Primm and she housed the farm workers stay with her all week. On weekends they usually went home. They had deals with the airlines.
Did you guys know this plant was to generate power for 75000 homes in nevada to meet its rising power demands, because it was intended to generate enough power for 75000 homes in nevada to meet rising power needs.
JFC have an editor look over the script for needless repetition
You did not mention the affect this had on wild life. The heat from the mirrors caused birds flying in the area to burst into flames and drop from the air like burning little bombs.
Zero videos of this....
Wildlife lol Birds Bats and flys avoid the heat.
Renewables are AWESOME!!!......until the cost hits your monthly power bill!!
My NVE bill has skyrocketed to nearly 50% more than a year ago; they blame fuel costs. While this may be true, I guarantee, blunder like this will also impact your bill.
It's amazing to see this facility on the drive from Las Vegas to California.
So how much does it cost today to operate?
I drove past one of these plants in 1998 on my trek out to CA. They had a few years to figure these flaws out prior to 2011.
What's interesting is this solar salt heat storage works very well with high tempature nuclear reactors. Used this way a small nuclear reactor can store up power to output like a much larger power plant when the power is needed. This enables the power plant to output its power when wholesale power prices are high like when renewables are having trouble producing power. This enables the nuclear power plant to be profitable even if the cost of the electricy it produces is higher than other sources of electricy that can't produce power when this plant can. This sort of plant actually lowers cost of power to consumers by enabling lower cost intermittent power to be used when available.
You had me at VENTURE CAPITALISTS
Nuclear.
Repeat that and say it LOUDER! We may be the last country to go "back to the future", as they say. Nuclear works 365/24/7 and is profitable. 'Nuff said! 👍🏆
Nuclear energy is to the climate crisis, as ivermectin is to the Covid crisis.
@@gilbertfranklin1537
Nuclear energy is to the climate crisis, as ivermectin is to the Covid crisis.
You keep saying this is the first of it's kind in America It is not. Southern California Edison built the first in test plant at Yermo, California in the 80's . It was dismantled at the end of the contract test period and was a success. It lead to the development of several plants all over the world in desert climates.
It wasn't a success by today's standards.
If the plant was torn down at the end of the contract, that's was a funny measure of "success."
Yes. It had a visitor's center. We (Army) used to fly near it from the Daggett Airport.
I was out at Noor (in Morocco) last year and I have to say that while they had teething problems, they were nowhere near as bad. Despite the term 'dry cooling', these plants still required a consume a considerable amount of water! The most exciting aspect is the molten source storage that allows the plant(s) to operate almost 24 hours a day.
I'm curious as to why they didn't just build one tower to begin with and get that right first - adding mirrors to ramp up and see how things operated. No, they had to go ahead and build three untested arrays.
And the taxpayer will see a return on THEIR UN-approved capital expenditure when?
Also my understanding that the air space in front of the mirrors results in constant carnage of birds flying into the invisible heat waves reflected at the tank.
Nope....you can't get fried unless you are in the focal point of all of the mirrors.
I like how the narrator keeps calling this a "new form of solar technology" even though the first facilities doing this were built in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
This technology is more than 40 years old.
All of that to only power 75k homes, we gotta make a stand before it's too late, folks
Thank goodness the tax payer got to foot the bill
nice to hear that it works now
It is not working now ...check the article in wikipedia..it is junk
@@snotnosewilly99 It was generating power again much of the time since 2021 - the last 5 months of 2022 are noted as production. They've had a lot of tech issues they've pretty well fought through, the real problem was the high cost per MW it was costing vs wholesale pricing power companies are willing to pay. NV Energy is now taking it at lower unit cost, as a lot of the cash demand from production company was trimmed in chapter 11 proceedings, which in the end allow it to be more doable with other tech.
Sure, but having it’s sunk capital cost wiped out in bankruptcy is kind of the point. It was never going to be profitable…and it wasn’t. It went bankrupt. What’s the point of building these if every time we do, the U.S. taxpayer’s take it the ***. $400M bad loan?! Eff that. Batteries and solar PV panels are half the cost and twice as efficient as they were in 2015. Would have a better rate of return if they had just built a solar farm plus batteries. $1B and you could buy almost six Hornsdale power stations for a total of 900MW, that operate perfectly from the word Go.
@@LourdVicious Probably this was the more economical option when the project was greenlighted.
Can you imagine being one of the people building this thing..... geeze, blinding light, hot, cold, winds, dust, wow!
It was interesting
@@tadchantler6883 Are you saying you were one of the builders? Wow!
No problem about bankruptcy. The CEO's were well paid during the construction. And that is the whole goal of all the alternative energy projects.
Was there a comparison between this new technology and a conventional solar farm with battery backup? My guess is that conventional solar energy using the latest solar cell technology, together with battery backup would probably be the best bet.
The vast quantities of batteries that would be required at $100 per kWh . And using those batteries means that they can't be put into EVs due to a battery production rate chokepoint for the next few years.
The liquid salt was a battery.
Tesla is producing such a system, the Megapack. The units are 3 MWh apiece, currently starting at $1,879,840 plus installation. Enough of those to feed California's evening deficit in the Spring (about 15,000 MWh) would be about 10 billion dollars and up, with a two year wait for the first of them.
I saw this facility as I flew over Nevada in 2016. What is the current cost to produce power vs. alternatives like traditional solar, natural gas, or nuclear?
When it comes to solar the cost of firming or storage of energy very different depending on the source your getting the information from. I've seen the cost as little as $20Mhw to $170Mhw and pure battery storage is higher again. Be nice if the was a way to get a basic answer to these types of questions without the mention of climate change or some other emotional charged perspective.
@@LyallDilkes Yes! I want real numbers that ultimately will determine what the non-subsidized price is that I would have to pay for energy generated by natural gas, nuclear, solar in its various forms, wind turbines in various locations or whatever, taking account of costs of transmission and such as well as generation.
I drove by the Crescent Dune Project in August if 2017. It was impressive, but I wondered where the water would come from, given the location and the type of facility it is. That is a very dry area, and a power plant of any type not wind or traditional solar requires water to run the turbines. I didn't even consider that it was already having problems. Hopefully, it can function moving forward.
In 2022, this averaged about 11.5 MW of actual power production, 101 MW-H in roughly 8700 hours) so it has a staggering cost of $86,000 per kilowatt of actual production. That much production has a market value of $5-10 million, depending on market conditions, so it's unlikely to even be covering the ongoing costs of keeping it running. I wouldn't call it "back on track" - it's consuming a lot of somebody's money.
Thanks. At least somebody came with the real numbers, instead of glossing over the failures.
Well, that ended with a thud. What was the price per kilowatt hour after the farm's restart and what was the gain in efficiency as compared to standard solar panels?
I'd like to hear from someone who is actually using from this facility and that it is indeed in operation. Just because they say something doesn't make it so. Solar is an awful big lie that must be perpetuated.
@@paulapatterson4301 Wikipedia says "In July 2021, the project restarted production." The article, "Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project" contains a chart of the output through last December. It had no output from March 2022 until sometime in August.
@@flagmichael Thankyou Michael but Wikipedia is not a reliable source of truth.
Never a good idea to invest in a massive project that they haven't even built on a small scale yet.
Doesn't matter. A simple survey of the proposal by a E.E. or physics major would tell you it would fail
@@protonneutron9046 Yes and it also makes me worry
@@Sttuffs why because they didn't consult one?
@@protonneutron9046 No, cause I'm an undergrad and I hear and see older people, not just my seniors in uni who agree that the courses and class we take these days are a lot easier and made less stressful, yet I still find it hard to understand this 'less stressful' classes and courses
It makes me worry about my line of generation in future... What if these people did consult a physicist or an engineer but it was someone who didn't know what they're doing... With so many new undergrad universities and online masters program, it's quite easy for someone to attend uni if they can afford it and graduate without proper knowledge in that field... My worry is being one of those people and leaving a massive consequence like the one of this project
@@Sttuffs Good point. The college grads I interview for my company are less educated than I was at age 13. I actually give them tests I had to take at that age and almost all fail them. Haven't tested any E.E.'s or physics majors as not our line of work. I watched Harvard Law first year students being asked questions from 4th grade curriculum (of my generation) and none could correctly answer.
future generations will look back and be convinced that insanity was rife in this generation with all this "renewables" nonsense
He failed to mention the thousands of birds that have died since it came online or the millions of beneficial flying insects affecting any bat activity.
Results don't matter. As long as they can do their press conferences, and pretty to be green, the money doesn't matter, the environmental damage doesn't matter, the lack of success doesn't matter. Not the first or the last major solar failure
Don't assume that because a company goes through bankruptcy in the US, that it means they're not in business. Chapter 11 is about trimming debt load so they can keep functioning which is what's happened here - but with new owner/operator. Chapter 7 is about shutting things down, selling off assets etc. They've been out of production at various times, but were generating in late 2021 and in 2022. CSP as this is known, is not a simple thing and the first 2 in the US have both had tech/engineering issues to overcome as it was somewhat oversold using overly optimistic planning estimates. I doubt you'll see any more of this type installed again in the US, personal opinion - it's too easy to do PV at lower cost now and get up and running at full production much quicker. There's not a question about can solar energy power much of US demand, the challenge is getting grid access to put it out there, both for regulatory and wire capacity reasons. Good article on CNBC on 6 April 2023 about those bottlenecks.
it stopped functioning
@@flodjod give me a date ? They were producing power the last 3 months of 2022 at GWhr levels.
We knew back in my E.E. college days >40 years ago that solar CANNOT be a VIABLE replacement for existing base load generation systems. Only an idiot or a criminal politician would claim otherwise.
The bankruptcy is their method to get more millions of dollars from the government.
I have a solar panel farm in my backyard, runs my house and my car but I must admit the 30 mile extension cord on my car is a drag.
It is up and running again, most of the Delays were Court and Bankruptcy Filings by Solar Energy, a venture capital firm by the way, As one result of this plan's confirmation, Cobra now has operational control of the plant. In July 2021, the project restarted production for NV Energy.
Where do they get the water to generate steam?
They deplete the local groundwater
They use the same water over and over. Obviously, steam condenses back into water. It is collected and heated again to create more steam which when it cools, recondenses again. It's a closed loop system.
@Mitesh Damania apparently you don't know what you're talking about. Steam condenses back into water. Which the heat again to make steam again. That steam cools again and condenses back into water again. It's called a closed loop system. Maybe before making uninformed comments, look something up first. You may learn something.
@@glnnchrstphr9717 wow you said nothing about the economics
@@glnnchrstphr9717 they deplete groundwater to wash the mirrors
I think the one in Spain works just fine.
With power generation being 4 times as much as other processes, there is no way this is viable.
tone-ah-paw, Nevada. California has their own concentrated solar site, the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System that can generate ~392 mW.
Each set of mirrors should has its own solar ray tracking system, that means a high maintenance cost, Eventually the dust, sand and dirt will cover all the mirrors, and it will fail against.
I believe all controlled by a central computer based on time of day and date, and position relatiive to the tower.
The mirrors are too steep for dust to be a problem. How they fare against sandstorms is another question.
@@flagmichael How do you know that? How steep are they anyway? How do the windows on my house get dirty without dust and dirt being the cause?
Glad to see that it is back on track. I saw it last year on a drive to Vegas, so interesting. I do wonder though why they didn't build it on a smaller scale first to work out the bugs
Because they would make millions!
@@MissionaryForMexico they needed Solyndra/Obama solar products however those weren't and still aren't available but the money is still being used by some former promoters.
Because it is involving tax dollars!
Duh! We knew back in my E.E. college days >40 years ago that solar CANNOT be a VIABLE replacement for existing base load generation systems. Only an idiot or a criminal politician would claim otherwise.
Scaling up would require replacing the molten salt system, requiring long down time after being in service for a while.
Human history of development is littered with failures.Failures helped men to achieve the wonders of technology we have today.
Love how miraculously, everything was fixed in 2021 and now is beneficial. I guess they solved the issue of being 3-4 times more expensive than electricity from traditional panels.
For one thing, the panels that we use today are a completely different technology called "photovoltaics", so best not to conflate that with the mirror-based "solar thermal" described in this video. They were lazy and didn't do their research, putting photovoltaics panels in the thumbnail when that tech has nothing to do with this
It failed, unlike this videos quality 🔥
This video's quality sucks. Most of the units shown aren't even of the plant in question.
Nuclear is the way to go
That's a big ass 🐟
I remember it being on news chanels as the future of energy.
so glad it failed. Instead of monopolizing, the govt should be helping people to get their own solar arrays and wind energy on their houses so they can have free energy and feed energy back to the grid
Oh ya I forgot I live 40 minutes from this and omg the glare from that cases car crashes every year you literally can't see anything but burning bright light for at least minimum 2 miles.
Can I say remove this or relocate it also its right in the middle of 5 bird migration paths and a few miles from a bird preserve like wtf.
Cities should use thirsty cement to reduce flooding and sand mining and increasing groundwater aquifer and soil levels helping cities ecosystems and you.
They should also have better insulation in there buildings to reduce energy demands.
If cities lined the sides of roads with native plants and trees it will reduce flooding heat wind and air and ground pollution.
If they line the sides of freeways at least 50 miles to 100 miles it can do the same and reduce car accidents do to less winds and people looking because they really don't want to crash into a tree.
so your solution to have less crashes is to make those crashes more deadly? that's what planting trees in ditches would do
@@somethingsomething404 how fast do you drive in the city? Lmao
When flying at 35000 feet over Arizona a couple years back, I saw this place glowing!
Most don't realize it was a Chinese company behind this project. If you want to blame someone, start there. And it's very remote and dry there.
The video was discussing a solar farm near Tonopah, Nv., yet repeatedly showed areal views of the solar farm near Ivanpah, Ca. Why?
Government should stay away from business.
Relax. We learn from experience. We never seem to learn from oil on our beaches or the Saudis screwing us whenever they get a chance.
When we were producing our own oil, the Saudis didn't get the chance.
“No customer to purchase it”. Umm, tax dollars were used to build it. So we the people, already purchased it.