in my honest opinion, solar is not fit for every state, solar would work wonders in places like say nevada, arizona and new mexico, even texas.
why? because we got alot of sun, theres hardly a day where the sun isnt raining hate on us, storm proof them and its even better. Now adding solar to a place in the midwest, where winters are brutal and you dont get much sun, and solar stops making sense.
But I say I'll accept solar more when they storm proof it more, which Im told is already happening here in texas
Let me tell you a very interesting story about solar power.
Way back in 2013, in the heart of the Mohave Desert between San Bernardino, California and Primm, Nevada, a large solar power plant was built, named the
Ivanpah Solar Power Facility. The Solar Power facility consisted of a series of 3 tall water towers surrounded by miles and miles of mirrors that all focused the reflected sunlight onto receptors on top of the water towers. Theoretically, this would heat the water inside to boiling, creating steam, and the steam would be the source of the power.
By the time the plant opened for business permanently on February 13, 2014, it was hailed worldwide as a grand replacement for nuclear power and was a poster-child project for Green New Deals worldwide. It was lauded everywhere for its zero-emissions harvesting of free energy from the sun. Sure, there were a few scientists grumbling that it was already obsolete before it opened, and a few more grumbling that there's no such thing as "free energy", but those guys were just buzzkill poopyheads, man, no fun at a party at all.
I drove past Ivanpah on my way to Las Vegas many years ago. It stood there in the desert, nothing but empty roads for miles around, not even tumbleweeds or birds (we'll talk about why a bit later). The towers stood out there alone, blinding bright, like the Eye of Sauron, never blinking, and you couldn't look at the towers directly for long or you'd get sunblind. The only sound was a gentle scraping noise as the mirrors turned in unison to follow the sun, and the sussiration of the wind. It was really a foreboding, spooky place. At the time, I didn't know why I was so unnerved by a power plant.
A few years later, I found out the "why" of it, the spooky feeling I had that something was wrong. The entire plant was a giant burning monument to man's hubris, thinking he was powerful enough to change the earth's environment.
First of all, unbeknownst to most people, Ivanpah Solar Facility ran on natural gas. It had ALWAYS run on natural gas. You see, the desert gets very cold at night. Giant towers full of water that are placed in the middle of the desert tend to collect that cold, so that water that is boiling when the sun goes down, can cool quite considerably by morning. The Ivanpah Solar Facility used natural gas to heat the water up to boiling in the morning, and the solar panels simply kept the water at boiling while the sun was up. The Ivanpah Solar Facility burned 525,000,000 cubic meters of gas annually, and created almost TWICE the carbon of an ordinary gas-powered turbine plant, 46,084 TONS of carbon yearly. But wait, there's more!
Of course, that wasn't the only problem. The desert is also very dusty. The wind blows and blows, and there's nothing to stop its passage, except maybe a fuckload of mirrors somebody put out there in the desert. Mirrors, as you probably already know, can't work at 100% efficiency unless they're CLEAN. As a result, Ivanpah was NEVER, in its entire history, running at 100% efficiency, for two reasons, one being dirty mirrors, and the other reason being, parts of the mirror fields being shut down for maintenance, which brings us to ANOTHER problem.
Anyone who has ever started a fire with a magnifying glass as a child has learned an important fact about concentrating the rays of the sun, namely: the sun BURNS things. Ivanpah was no different. It burned birds right out of the sky, including endangered species. It burned every tumbleweed that rolled by, so much so, that they did brush abatement in a very wide margin around the facility. It baked the very earth beneath it, so that not even an earthworm could survive in that ground. And of course, it could bake a man in seconds, which is why parts of the plant were always closed for cleaning; if they didn't point all the mirrors away from the sun, they would roast the cleaning crew to death, even if they weren't working efficiently at the time. As a matter of fact, the Solar Facility burned down one of its own towers in 2016 due to misaligned mirrors. This coincidentally happened when a different section was closed for maintenance, putting 2/3rds of the plant offline at the same time. Oops!
In spite of all the Green New Deal cheerleading, the grumpy old scienrists won out, particularly when the air quality surrounding the Ivanpah Solar Facility became markedly worse than it had been prior to its 2014 opening. Then the poopy old accountants came in with their pesky facts and figures, complaining how the plant had never met its production quotas or provided the cheap power its investors were promised. And now,
just three days after the election, NRG Energy and PG & E have announced that they're pulling out of their long term contracts with Ivanpah Solar Facility, shutting down 2 of the three towers forever. It's only a matter of time until the third one goes, since it was funded by the US Government and random investors like Google, who wanted to pretend they cared about the environment while destroying one of the most sensitive parts of it and zapping birds right out of the air. The experiment cost $2.2 billion, created more pollution and environmental damage than generated power, and only lasted 10 years. Total fail.
holy shit we've been telling you retards to stop bitching about rent and Big Corpo while getting 2 frappes a day and slurping up all the latest plastic crap and marvel slop. We've been telling you to learn to take care of yourselves (cooking, cleaning, repairing your belongings). We've been telling you to be frugal and not spring for the newest, latest thing. We've been telling you to support your local business owners.
Am I retarded, is this a troll, is this ironic? Why does even the end of Clown World and a shift back to being a normal adult need to be framed as 'resistance' in their minds?
They'll show you, they're going to fight back by GROWING UP and SPENDING RESPONSIBLY. FUCK YOU, DAD, I'M STARTING A SAVINGS ACCOUNT AND YOU CAN'T STOP ME.
