I need to add more solar panel charging

If I had a big white balloon I could claim a China spy balloon landed in my yard.

There’s this huge thermal solar farm just outside Vegas called Ivanpah. Instead of solar panels they have mirrors aimed at a tower to boil water to drive steam turbines. Even though it’s in Nevada, it’s all a California project, and all the power is for Los Angeles, same as Boulder Dam (Vegas doesn’t get any power from the Dam.)
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So after their $2Billion green energy boondoggle came online, the output fell way short of expectations. The blame was on everything from dust on the mirrors to contrails from jets out of Nellis AFB.
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They finally discovered that nobody, not one single engineer, took into account how fast heat is lost from water. It was taking almost until noon everyday to produce enough heat to drive the turbines until the sun went down, because the water lost so much heat during the night, despite insulating the whole system.
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To salavge this $2 Billion green energy FAIL, they ended up having to install a HUGE fossil fuel (Natural Gas) hot water heater system, same principle as in most people’s homes. This kept the water hot all night long until the sun could take over and drive the turbines. And even then, the turbines stop when the sun goes down, and they have to fire up the burners again. $2 Billion to produce power for maybe 8 hours a day, if it’s not cloudy.
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The irony is, it uses so much Natural Gas that it would have been a whole lot cheaper and more efficient to simply build another Natural Gas Power Plant, same as is used all over Nevada. But of course we’re talking about California :crazy_face:

Here’s another irony. Remember that hard freeze that hit Texas a few years ago. All those expensive and noisy windmills froze up and snow kept burying all the solar panels. They had rejected the idea of building more Natural Gas power plants. And the kicker, there is so much Natural Gas in Texas that they have no more room to store it, so they burn it off in flare stacks that light up the night sky for almost 50 miles.
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Face it, Green Energy makes people stupid. I’ll get off my soapbox now. :stuck_out_tongue:

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