In addition to holding the solar developers to high environmental standards, we should take a close look at the EROEI (energy return on energy invested). How long does one of these solar panels need to operate in order to generate the amount of energy consumed in the production, transportation, and installation of these devices? And what is the useful life of these panels?

Clearly, solar and wind makes sense in applications where access to the grid is not readily available. However, it isn't clear to me that this is the most efficient way of providing kilowatt hours to people's homes in Aurora, CO or Walnut Creek, CA.

We need to take a close look at this. We've wasted so much time and made so many mistakes that we won't have many chances to get it right.

Investment banks, such as Goldman Sachs, are very good at identifying opportunities that maximize their private wealth on a short-term basis. Their record of undertaking projects based on long-term social benefit is not as good.

Solar Investments filed its first land claim in December 2006 and within a month had applied for more than 125,000 acres for power plants that would produce ten gigawatts of electricity.

What is a "land claim"? Is something like the Homestead Act still in effect?

It's a disclosure, not a disclaimer.

Disclaimers are for removing from scope, rights and responsibilities from one or more parties in a contract.

Disclosures are for making readers aware of possibly biasing information. It's a nitpick but I am in that kind of mood today I guess.

Will depend on what they're looking to do. I would assume a project of the scale I've see will more likely be CSP (concentrated solar power), using some heat store (some kind of high heat capacity molten salt, as I'm lead to believe) to do the same other power plants do - boil water, spin turbines. The heat store would be able to keep the turbines running all night as they won't release all the heat at once.

Not sure if that's the final plan. If so a good portion of the parts should have the same lifespan as any other power plant. I'm not sure about the mirrors and other pieces, but based on solar thermal it's again commensurate with or better than standard power plants. If we take Joseph Romm's article here on Salon from a little time back (and others) to be at least semi-accurate, they're a pretty good idea for a large company to pursue, better than PV, and use rather less water than you'd think.

If it's solar PV, and with the amount of sun they get down there, it's probably still a big enough win. EROEI on the high end of the expected range (10-30, again much as a standard power plant). After 30 years the panels degrade to ~80% capacity, and the degradation is constant. I tend to think my personal warranty will be up before I need to replace my system's panels.

I don't know at what point they would be taken out and recycled, replaced with others. Inversion hardware on the small scale is guaranteed for 25-30 years as well, but you know, I have plenty of working electronics that are past their warranties. I'd expect large scale to be at least as good, but wouldn't balk at wanting to assume the worst and "only" as good as my home setup.

I am curious how the local flora & fauna would react. Likely better than burning more natural gas & coal in the long term is my suspicion. Still, might be some tuning of plans needed to keep the impact down.

It will disturb the natural order of things and therefore must be opposed at all costs.

to help their oil industry friends for as long as they can. This time though the outcry over their obvious scheme forced them to back down.

It's a rough life way up there on the migration high-way. Our feathered friends have their bird brains stressed to the limit just trying to avoid all those windmills. Now they're going to need sunglasses to deal with all that reflected light. And what happens if they fly across a mirror array? ..................Oh, the horror!!! But a good opportunity for a KFC franchise.

Some environmentalists need a kick up the backside.

Whatever solution one comes up with to the current climate crisis, there is going to be a cost somewhere down the line - and if the choice is between the desert tortoise and the bulk of the species on Earth, tortoise becomes soup.

Scientists at MIT have found a new way to concentrate solar power that can be used to enhance the efficiency of existing solar panels.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20080710/sc_livescience/moreefficientsolarenergycollectorsattachtowindows;_ylt=Atlvyz3Jknc.9edPINDWKUyyvtEF

Or click my screen name.

A forest with farmland is no longer a forest, and farmland with McMansions is no longer farmland but a desert with solar panels is still a desert. I know there are ecosystems and tortoises and all that, but we need harm reduction right now. If that means spoiling a Kennedy's ocean view or carpeting the desert with solar panels, that is preeferable to stip-mining in W. Virginia, oil drilling in Alaska, and global warming putting half the world's rich coastal ecosystems under water.

While Goldman certainly does it's fair share of nefarious deeds around the globe, I think that the fact that they have historically been leagues ahead of their counterparts in spotting what will be the "wave of the future", and how they often play a catalyzing role for an industry, is only a good thing for finding alternatives to fossil fuels.

Yes, solar power may be more expensive than fossil fuels right now, but CSP (what this new site will use) uses commodity parts that are far cheaper to produce than "solar cells". If you factor in a "carbon emission tax" of $30 / ton, the total cost to build & maintain a CSP plant is competitive with coal-fired power. The mere fact that Goldman is investing in the project will give a significant boost to research in the solar field, as researchers become more confident that there is a future for their technology, with a leader like Goldman investing (& other industry investors to follow).

While the desert tortoise surely deserves protection, I think people need to look at facts & analyses before jumping to conclusions out of sheer knee-jerk moral outrage. A few basic facts:

(1) The mojave desert spans 22,000 square miles, and the 165k acres that this article reports having been staked out is equal to a mere 257 sq miles. The urban sprawl that are Las Vegas in the center and Palmdale to the west pose far more disruption and danger to the desert tortoise. The Las Vegas metro area alone is growing by about 80,000 people a year.

(2) 10 Gigawatts is a *lot* of power -- enough to power 4-10 million homes, depending on who you ask. There are 12 million people in LA metro, and approx 4 million households. Besides powering most of SoCal, if this power plant can actually deliver this amount of power, it will be enough to take up to TEN average sized coal (or gas-fired) power plants offline.

(3) The tortoises are unlikely to live in places that the solar power builders will want to build. According to wikipedia, "They have a strong proclivity in the Mojave desert for alluvial fans, washes and canyons where more suitable soils for den construction might be found." -- all poor building sites for obviously reasons. There will undoubtably be some environmental damage. But covering 1% of the mojave to provide power to almost 1% of the US population, and dealing with the damage associated with building it (including some tortoise habitat inevitably destroyed by transport of materials, laying cable, etc), will in my mind be infinitely preferable to building.

In theory, if this experiment works we could cover the entirety of the mojave (or portions of all the deserts in the southwest) and provide enough power to turn off every fossil-fuel power plant in the country. (Of course, this would require technological advances, building a DC-nationwide power grid, etc, but we're talking "theoretically" here.) Would I kill off 95% of the wildlife in the mojave to make the entire country's electricity nearly carbon free? I can only come to the conclusion of the reader above: sorry turtles, but it's soup time.