Solar-powered.......oil refinery?

[NickB79]

This isn't my state's proudest moment.

https://renewablesnow.com/news/minnesota-oil-refinery-seeks-builder-for-30-mw-solar-farm-729266/

Flint Hills Resources LLC is looking to build a 30-MW solar farm at its Pine Bend refinery in Rosemount, Minnesota.

The company, a subsidiary of Koch Industries Inc, said on Tuesday it has sought bids for the construction of the facility from select solar companies and expects to make a decision on whether to go ahead with the project by the middle of this year.

The solar power plant would be developed on farmland owned by the company, located west of the refinery. It would complement a recently commissioned 50-MW combined heat and power (CHP) plant, which supplies power for about 40% of the refinery's daily operations. Under optimal conditions, the solar farm and the CHP plant could meet more than 50% of the refinery's daily electricity requirement, estimates the company.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. That seems kind of perverse.

[Miguelito Loveless]

4. Yep,

Even oil companies know solar is the future.

[hedda_foil]

2. "The company, a subsidiary of Koch Industries Inc"

[NickB79]

3. Yep. Good ole Koch

Screwing us from beyond the grave.

[progree]

5. Perfectly fine with me. People keep buying the refined product, so I'm happy to see

them find a way to produce it in a more green way. Why shouldn't they?

A few months ago, we even had a "progressive" from the same state bragging about buying a new gasoline ICE car every 5 years (the carbon emissions to produce such a car are about the same as driving it over its lifetime). Moreover, nobody saw anything wrong with any of this. Even though it was posted on what most consider a progressive message board.

I used to work for an evil electric utility (NSP, now Xcel). Back in the day, there were no other options other than nuclear and fossil fuel (what little hydro resource was long ago developed and maxed out). But we worked to minimize the pollution anyway. For example we were about the first utility in the U.S. to put scrubbers on our new coal-fired units.

There were some wonderfully wonderful progressives who found it somehow ironic to put a scrubber on a coal-fired plant, as if we were putting lipstick on a pig (which was true in that the coal-fired plant, while emitting far less SO2, still emitted some of that and a lot of other pollutants). But they found nothing wrong with buying the product, insisting instead that we make it more affordable and almost perfectly reliable.

At that time, by the way, natural gas was more than 3 times more expensive than coal, and what's more, everybody was worried that we had only ten years left of it.