The World's Largest Solar Plant Started Creating Electricity Today
Take 300,000 computer-controlled mirrors, each 7 feet high and 10 feet wide. Control them with computers to focus the Sun's light to the top of 459-foot towers, where water is turned into steam to power turbines. Bingo: you have the world's biggest solar power plant, the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System.
Long-mired by regulatory issues and legal tangles, the enormous solar plant–jointly owned by NRG Energy, BrightSource Energy and Google–opened for business today.
From the official news release:
The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System is now operational and delivering solar electricity to California customers. At full capacity, the facility's trio of 450-foot high towers produces a gross total of 392 megawatts (MW) of solar power, enough electricity to provide 140,000 California homes with clean energy and avoid 400,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, equal to removing 72,000 vehicles off the road.
Sprawling across a staggering 5 square miles of federal land near the California-Nevada border, it looks goddamn beautiful. Just look at these amazing images.:
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more images:
http://gizmodo.com/the-worlds-largest-solar-plant-started-creating-electr-1521998493?utm_campaign=socialflow_gizmodo_facebook&utm_source=gizmodo_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow
= new reply since forum marked as read
the solar collectors. http://www.winonarenewableenergy.com/ 
Soon as we move and have a little bigger garage I'll be working on a rat rod myself--
Don't worry, it will have LOTS of recycled parts
Hint: It's not because we don't have a Mr. Fusion in every kitchen.
put the stick in the spokes for every attempt to develop solar here.
It is, he is....DISGUSTING.
"We're proud of Solar Two's success as it marks a significant milestone in the development of large-scale solar energy projects," said then U.S. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson.
"This technology has been successfully demonstrated and is ready for commercialization. From 1994 to 1999, the Solar Two project demonstrated the ability of solar molten salt technology to provide long-term, cost effective thermal energy storage for electricity generation.", Boeing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Two
Next: Solar Hydrogen
Solar electrolysis = free hydrogen
Inside the Solar-Hydrogen House: No More Power Bills--Ever
A New Jersey resident generates and stores all the power he needs with solar panels and hydrogen
EAST AMWELL, N.J.—Mike Strizki has not paid an electric, oil or gas bill—nor has he spent a nickel to fill up his Mercury Sable—in nearly two years. Instead, the 51-year-old civil engineer makes all the fuel he needs using a system he built in the capacious garage of his home, which employs photovoltaic (PV) panels to turn sunlight into electricity that is harnessed in turn to extract hydrogen from tap water...
Civil engineer Mike Strizki has lined the roof of his garage with 56 photovoltaic panels to harvest the free and abundant energy of the sun--even in New Jersey.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hydrogen-house/
are turned into efficient solar panels instead
We still remember energy deregulation here. Who was to blame? Corporate whores in the state legislature. Today, the GOP doesn't hold enough seats in either house the state legislature to sustain a gubernatorial veto by themselves. If corporate big shots come to Sacramento looking for whore in the state legislature, they have to buy a Democrat. The Koch brothers don't come to these parts looking for some too often.
The thought for the day is that capitalism really wasn't such a bad thing back in the days when it existed, before it was replaced by corporate fascism, something that goes hand-in-hand with that dreaded institutional disease, corporate elephantiasis. Today, it easier for corporations suffering from elephantiasis to strangle upstart competition in the crib than compete with it. Without competition, corporations do nothing that justifies their existence, like innovate and keep their prices reasonable. There was a time, before corporate elephantiasis became a pandemic, that corporations would have been tripping over each other to solve environmental problems. Now, they deny there is a problem ("climate change is a hoax, so is peak oil and America only needs to tap its own energy resources to become energy independent forever"
. This followed a period where the problem was minimized. Remember when Donald Hodel, a corporate whore who became both Secretary of Energy and Secretary of the Interior in the eighties? He said the solution to global warming was more sunscreen and hats with broader brims. Remember that matinee idol who became a corporate whore who appointed Mr. Hodel Secretary of Energy in 1982 and Secretary of the Interior in 1985. Yeah, that's right, him. The Sally Stanford of corporate whores. Remember when, while successfully running for President in 1980, he said that trees cause more pollution than automobiles?
Now the elephantiasis sufferers' favorite corporate whore is Jim Inhofe. He says "Problem? What problem? Environmental pollution is a scientific impossibility." Of course, Inhofe not only disbelieves climate science, but he doesn't believe in evolution, either. He's got a better reason not to believe in evolution than most people who don't. After two or three million years of human evolution, Inhofe is still an ape.
Another favorite corporate whore is Mitch McConnell. Like Inhofe and many other corporate whores, he can be found in the House of the Senate. Unlike Inhofe, McConnell is a firm believer in evolution. He not only believes that man evolved from a more primitive animal that also became monkeys, chimpanzees and gorillas, but he thinks we're still evolving. He says that corporations are people. Not only are corporations people, but those that suffer from corporate elephantiasis are the highest form of human being yet evolved. A real Nietzschean Übermensch. They should have rights that we mere homo sapiens don't. Like the right to rule over the rest of us and the right to collect the wages on our labor for us, because they are wiser and would know better how to use our money than we do. McConnell is consulting the scientists at a Koch funded think tank to understand how, if corporations with elephantiasis are such smart people, how they crashed the world economy in 2008.
In the California state legislature, as a result of the 2012 elections, has hefty Democratic majorities in both houses. In the Assembly, the Democrats have 55 votes to the Republicans 25; in the Senate, the Democrats hold 28 seats, the Republicans 11 with one vacancy. As I said above "
T)he GOP doesn't hold enough seats in either house the state legislature to sustain a gubernatorial veto by themselves," that is to say, less than a third in each house.
This does not mean that there are no corporate whores in the state legislature, or even that they are confined to the Republican delegation. Democrats have certainly been known to be corrupt. In the present regime of dark money, the people must do more to educate themselves where their representatives get their campaign donations.
With Republicans in the state legislature too weak to do what the Republicans in Washington do routinely, California has crawled out of the hole energy deregulation put it in and balanced the state budget.
The subject of this thread shows the benefits of weakening the party of choice of oil interests.
Bless you for your comments. 
I won't bother pointing the real issues with industrial renewables here. The ulcer is not worth it.
The whole night, early morning and late afternoon too. Sun needs to be relatively high and strong for this to work. This plant has no storage.
More like "generating", right?
