The plant uses 5 square miles (12.9 square kilometres) of giant mirrors that focus beams of concentrated sunlight onto three different 40-storey-tall towers.
The plant sits along the Pacific Flyway – a popular migratory route for many different types of birds, including protected species like varied thrushes and northern goshawks.
Birds flying to close would be set on fire.
The $2.2 billion facility was developed by BrightSource Energy and Bechtel. The largest investor in the project was NRG Energy which contributed $300 million. Google contributed $168 million. The United States government provided a $1.6 billion loan guarantee and the plant is built on public land. In 2010, the project was scaled back from its original 440 MW design to avoid disturbing the habitat of the desert tortoise
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Don’t they have ways to scare off birds like owl statues or recording of hawk calls?
Don’t these CSP plants need to burn significant natural gas overnight to keep the working fluid from freezing?
I’m quite happy to see the NJ offshore wind project (with Royal Dutch Shell), halted by presidential executive order – it would have been a lot more costly to let the economics prove themselves over 20 years.
Someone recently did an economic analysis of CSP on the Moon and even there it does not make sense unless you were using it for a specific purpose like smelting ore.
If there’s manufacturing on Luna, then CSP would be very useful.