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The Ute Tribe will construct one of the largest solar farms in the US

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Re: The Ute Tribe will construct one of the largest solar farms in the US

#81

Post by adrianN »

EasyMark wrote: post #67
thelastgallon wrote: post #53

I wonder if the tribes have enough autonomy to build transmission lines quickly. Just the Navajo Nation can build enough solar/wind and transmission lines within their reservation and probably connect to the grids in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Arizona. US is incredibly slow in building transmission lines, takes decades. And, if they have enough autonomy to import Chinese panels (50% cheaper), a network of these n…

I know it took my local utility about 5 years just to run about 30 miles of HV wire from me seeing "announcment of public commentary" -> studies -> "final notice of commentary on route" -> building starts. The building itself took about 6 months, as it ran along a road I travel a lot. That's a long time for 30 miles of HV towers.

Oh, I thought you wanted to tell an anecdote about a fast project. Five years sound very quick to me.

Re: The Ute Tribe will construct one of the largest solar farms in the US

#82

Post by jondwillis »

thfuran wrote: post #44
appplication wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not suggesting you did this intentionally, because this sort of stuff is difficult to really know or find definitive answers to. But I think it’s worth being aware that, in general, an over-focus on material cost for creating renewables etc is typically a conservative talking point and recommendation towards maintenance of the fossil fuel status quo. It appeals in particular to logical, skeptical folks like many…

But as I understand it, the cloth bags generally do lose out unless used hundreds of times, which is plausible but hardly a given. And the plastic bags are often re-used as small garbage bags, so eliminating them frequently just means someone is going to buy another plastic bag.

Hear me out— maybe we shouldn’t be using plastic for garbage either, despite the convenience of being able to dump your week-old chicken noodle soup into a plastic bag and throw it away versus recycling (composting) it.

Either way, the plastic bags will be here as microplastic fragments long after the cloth bag has disintegrated and been recycled by microorganisms. The science isn’t quite consensus-level, but it isn’t looking good for microplastics, negative externality-wise.

Re: The Ute Tribe will construct one of the largest solar farms in the US

#83

Post by yieldcrv »

aorloff wrote: post #77
yieldcrv wrote: post #55

> But also, it makes sense not to transmit power too far from where you are yep, they’ll waste the energy trying to transmit it sounds like they’re going to be attracting bitcoin miners. they’re the only use case that’s able to be in the middle of nowhere without needing other infrastructure, like robust internet. any other use cases you all know of?

Powering a casino

People have to commute to, well maybe. If more infrastructure comes up around there and people live there then its a nice long game.

Re: The Ute Tribe will construct one of the largest solar farms in the US

#84

Post by adrianN »

lambda wrote: post #78
photonbeam wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You pay a higher price for power that works in darkness

Yeah, but even renewables + storage is likely to be cheaper than nuclear. Right now pumped hydro is one of the best for grid-scale storage, but with the the reduction in cost of batteries, it may be that grid-scale battery storage becomes viable not too far in the future. And remember, nuclear generally needs some form of storage or supplementation with on-demand generation (generally via fossil fuels). Nuclear react…

Reactors can load follow reasonably quickly, but the economics look terrible when the utilization drops, so you don’t want to load follow if you can about it. That’s also why nuclear and renewables don’t mix well.

Re: The Ute Tribe will construct one of the largest solar farms in the US

#85

Post by op00to »

lambda wrote: post #59
loeg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also for context, the quoted 756MW figure is about 68% of a single AP1000 reactor.

And an AP1000 reactor costs about $6.8 billion to build, and substantially higher operating costs. 68% of the power for 14% of the price seems like a pretty good deal to me, there's a reason people are investing more in solar than nuclear, it's just more cost effective. edit: Oh, and that $6.8 billion looks optimistic. This project with two AP1000s looks like it costs $30 billion. https://www.ans.org/news/article-394…

What about at night? Or when it’s cloudy?

Re: The Ute Tribe will construct one of the largest solar farms in the US

#87

Post by bobthepanda »

adrianN wrote: post #84
lambda wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but even renewables + storage is likely to be cheaper than nuclear. Right now pumped hydro is one of the best for grid-scale storage, but with the the reduction in cost of batteries, it may be that grid-scale battery storage becomes viable not too far in the future. And remember, nuclear generally needs some form of storage or supplementation with on-demand generation (generally via fossil fuels). Nuclear react…

Reactors can load follow reasonably quickly, but the economics look terrible when the utilization drops, so you don’t want to load follow if you can about it. That’s also why nuclear and renewables don’t mix well.

IIRC the French are more aggressive about using nuclear for load follow, which is also why a lot of their plants went down for maintenance, because it’s harsher on them as well.

Re: The Ute Tribe will construct one of the largest solar farms in the US

#88

Post by tfourb »

hooo wrote: post #45
dangrossman wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's financially and politically impossible on a relevant time scale, while solar can be built now.

It'll become politically inevitable as this climate catastrophe proceeds.

I doubt that. A couple of reasons:

1) just based on real world observation. The country with the most ambitious nuclear power buildout program is China. It has the perfect combination of incentives: nuclear power is needed to maintain status as a nuclear weapons power, it needs to expand its energy production dramatically while at the same time limiting CO2 emissions, nuclear fuel is a domestic resource and they have a domestic nuclear industry and a generally quite innovative tech sector. But even China only plans to produce 7.7% of its electricity output from nuclear in 2035, barely more than now, while renewables are slated to expand dramatically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_China

EDIT: China also doesn't need to worry about domestic political backlash to new nuclear construction.

2) cost and political risk. There is not a single privately owned or listed company in the world that is willing to take on the risk and cost of building a substantial nuclear reactor. And governments are not keen on spending billions of dollars on potential boondoggles either. In comparison, renewable power generation is already cost-effective and can be built out rapidly with available technologies. If you want more, you can simply spend more. Energy storage is somewhat unsolved, true, but you can probably get 90% of where you need to go in terms of climate change mitigation with existing energy storage technology, while nuclear has no viable financial or political path to your goal at all.

Re: The Ute Tribe will construct one of the largest solar farms in the US

#89

Post by solardev »

CogitoCogito wrote: post #40
solardev wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I wasn't trying to contradict anything you said, just noting that it's not so much "what they call themselves" that determines their status, but whether they were able to secure federal recognition before the treaties stopped.

I see yes this was my original point (though you expanded a bit more than I did). The question of whether they call themselves a tribe or a nation or something else doesn’t really have much bearing on things.

Gotcha. Sorry, didn't mean to make it seem like I was trying to correct anything. Apologies if it looked that way. Just wanted to share the info with people who might not be familiar with tribal governments in the US (it's super complicated!)

But you're totally right, the name itself doesn't mean much.

Re: The Ute Tribe will construct one of the largest solar farms in the US

#90

Post by lambda »

op00to wrote: post #85
lambda wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And an AP1000 reactor costs about $6.8 billion to build, and substantially higher operating costs. 68% of the power for 14% of the price seems like a pretty good deal to me, there's a reason people are investing more in solar than nuclear, it's just more cost effective. edit: Oh, and that $6.8 billion looks optimistic. This project with two AP1000s looks like it costs $30 billion. https://www.ans.org/news/article-394…

What about at night? Or when it’s cloudy?

Wind, hydro, and storage. Pumped hydro has already existed for a long time for helping nuclear with load following https://www.wbur.org/news/2016/12/02/northfield-mountain-hyd... and as battery prices fall and production ramps up, even battery based storage is likely to become feasible for grid-scale storage.
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