Another Expensive Solar Scheme Bites the Dust

January 8, 2020 By Norman Rogers

The purveyors of solar energy are working overtime to spin the now official failure of the Crescent Dunes thermal solar plant in central Nevada. The contracts to purchase the electricity from the constantly broken plant will be voided. Bloomberg Businessweek claims that Crescent Dunes was obsoleted by technological advances in the form of photovoltaic based solar plants. That is nonsense and misses the whole point of the Crescent Dunes project. It also misses the reality that all utility-scale solar is a failure — not marginal, not growing into being practical, but a total and complete failure.

Crescent Dunes was a serious project designed to attack the great weakness of solar electricity................ The Crescent Dunes project stores energy in the form of molten salts.............  Crescent Dunes was plagued by leaks in the salt tank, forcing it to close for months at a time. By contract, the electricity was sold to NV Energy for $135 per megawatt-hour, or about six times as much as it would cost to generate the same amount of electricity in existing natural gas plants.............

Solar is useless because it can’t replace the generating infrastructure of the traditional electric grid. In Nevada, an army of natural gas plants will never be replaced by solar.......... All the solar accomplishes is to..........[save] some very cheap natural gas fuel..............The massive government subsidies for solar make it seem closer to being competitive than it actually is.

The idea that solar energy is a practical solution for reducing emissions of carbon dioxide is strictly a fantasy.......To Read More.....