In Fort Mohave, Arizona, even Republican voters are fighting gas power plants as utilities try to lock in fossil fuels
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Over the next few months, the Sunrise Hills retirees – among them many climate crisis skeptics and committed fossil fuel proponents – uncovered a trail of misinformation that appear to suggest MEC and Aepco, which is developing and will own and operate the gas combustion turbines, were at times opaque as they sought to fast track approval and circumvent closer scrutiny. MEC/Aepco “categorically deny” any effort to intentionally mislead anyone.
The retirees organized and began fact-checking and calling out claims about affordability, outages and low pollution made by MEC and Aepco in the glossy brochure and during public meetings.
It turned out that with a capacity of 98 megawatts, the two-turbine proposal fell just under the 100 MW limit that requires a state mandated comprehensive environmental review of impacts such as emissions, noise and water consumption by an expert committee at the state utility regulator, the Arizona corporation commission (ACC). Yet the utility has openly discussed plans to eventually double the size of the plant.
It also turned out that many of the county residents who spoke favorably of the plant in front of the board were in fact MEC employees and board members.
I live in the Rio Grande valley in nm and we have surprisingly little solar here. Our electric coop refuses to work with any company installing panels.
The university in town did cover a parking lot with panels. I wish others could afford to do that too.
I expect the local energy company is controlled by petroleum interests
They don’t like competition
Solar in the deserts still a good idea, but I would like to point out that solar farms don’t actually like heat. Makes the panes inefficient and the inverters overheat. Cold and very sunny is the best (“high deserts”), although you don’t get that very often.
It does fine though. Less efficient, sure, so just add a few panels to the array to make up for that.
Can the inverters be kept deep underground? What’s the terminal length for the inverter to be distanced from the panel array? Seems like the array itself could power some geo coolant pumps even
My home has geo heat pumps now. It also has solar that nets more than our use so I’d wager this would scale even better for something outright designed to work this way
That’s an interesting thought, but it might be counterproductive. Commercial-scale inverters are usually fan-cooled so I actually think that would make the overheating worse, unless you used liquid cooling and pumped the water underground or something. But that’s more trouble than it’s worth. The heat isn’t that big of a deal, I was just pointing out that heat isn’t desirable for a solar farm since the title of the article seemed to be implying that a hot desert was the ideal location for solar.
As to your other question I’ve seen dc strings run several hundred feet without issue, so that wouldn’t be a concern.
unless you used liquid cooling and pumped the water underground or something.
That’s literally what I said. That’s what geo cooling with a heat pump is. It’s how the heat pump in my house is configured. No fan tower, just liquid pumped about 40 feet underground. It was installed very cheaply since the coolant lines are run using only a quarter inch tube so the drilling is very simple and cost effective. The pump uses almost no energy at all.
I’ll never understand why oil companies don’t just transition to solar.
Apparently, in the 70s Exxon had a solar division, but they shut it down in the 80s.
Not only would it be better for the environment for them to continue with solar research, it would have been better for them too. They could’ve had a monopoly on solar power by now. “Bad news everyone! Oil is bad for the environment, but the good news is that we can sell you a solution!”
Of course, it wasn’t immediately profitable (because research costs money), so they shut it down. Absolutely mind numbingly stupid.
They will eventually. The market (almost) always wins and fossil fuel’s time is running out.
Arrogance. Better profit margins.
The sun, she is free!!!
Systems and maintenance are expensive. The one they built that’s destroying the earth is already up and running so they’ll stick with that.
Sad.
Building solar panels is not much better for the planet right now, and we don’t seem to have an end of life recycling plan for when the panels degrade beyond usability. Not against solar, but definitely against heavy metal extraction techniques currently employed.
You’ve got pollution that can create renewable clean energy and pollution that can create more pollution. Those are your choices, and you either have to pick one or go live in a cave.
Yes better tech is always a goal but we’re in a kind of extermination event here.
a zoning proposal for a gas fired peaker plant
They are adding a peaker plant, which provides power when other sources cannot. Solar fundamentally does not fulfill this role. Which is why it is incredibly common to pair solar capacity with peaker capacity.
Couldn’t that money be spent on more sustainable power storage? I’d imagine water storage isn’t really feasible in the desert but perhaps a battery array like the Aussies recently built.
I’ve been advocating flywheels as relatively cheap small scale energy storage
Happy Blendo noises
Blendo?
Blendo was a robot made by Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman to compete in Robot Wars before MythBusters. Its “weapon” was a horizontal flywheel. After two matches, they were given a newly-created award of co-champion on the condition that they did not participate in any more matches.
The sheer amount of energy stored in and dumped from the flywheel obliterated their competition and posed a very real human safety risk.
Solar also doesn’t do heat well.
It does fine though. Less efficient, sure, so just add a few panels to the array.
My first reaction was that, then the article got into all sorts of shady tactics
