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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

#141

Post by doug_durham »

doodlebugging wrote: post #95
EasyMark wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sounds like a nice, sustainable economic boom for the Ute Tribe once they bring it online. As long as they properly distribute the profits to tribe members. There have definitely been some boondoggles in the past that only help the 1% ers

This is a problem with all tribes. Resource extraction on tribal land is not necessarily improving the living standards of all members of the tribe. It's the same story whether we look at oil and gas production, coal or mineral mining, hydroelectric power generation, timber production, or wind and solar energy production. Electing tribal leaders who will focus on improvements that spread the wealth and boost living s…

This is not a tribal problem this is a human problem. This is a universal situation. I think you agree with this. There is an ongoing problem of singling out "tribal" issues as though tribes are somehow specially deficient.

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

#142

Post by latchkey »

lukan wrote: post #76

"Having said that, we're going to be producing a large amount of power. So I'm not sure that all of it will be able to be consumed within Colorado." Hopefully they can attract further industry, that will consume that cheap energy close to production. Metal smelting ones for example.

Metal smelting has the often frowned upon side effect of generating super fund sites.

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

#143

Post by sirspacey »

latchkey wrote: post #138
hannob wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of bitcoin miners use stranded power, which would otherwise go to waste. Often claimed, rarely supported by evidence or numbers. It's also unlikely to be very practical, because that'd essentially mean running bitcoin miners in load-balancing mode, and not running them most of the time. Given that bitcoin hardware tends to loose value quickly, as the next generation of mining hardware comes to the market, thi…

I have evidence and numbers. Update: I got downvoted for not posting them. I did in the link above though. https://www.coinmint.one/ is the data center. They have about 500MW of power going to them from the Moses-Saunders dam. They don't need to shut down cause it is hydro and 24/7. They actually help keep the dam running cause they balance the load coming from it. Just like the aluminum smelter before it did. The lo…

Would you be willing to post them?

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

#144

Post by tfourb »

araes wrote: post #123
tfourb wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how it went in that specific case but yes, these type of impact studies are usually hands on, you go out into the field with a bunch of people and comb an area completely. In case of a chip factory currently developed by Intel in Germany, they went out onto the 200ha (roughly 280 football fields) and found and resettled 7 rare hamsters. 2 of those had to be dug out: https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/sachsen-anh…

That story is one of the weirder stories I've read on Hacker News recently. Cute though: "The last hamster of the fields gave a timid crow when Alexander Resetaritz drew it out of the construction on his paw and pushed it into the transport box."

This type of environmental mitigation is pretty common here in Germany. I'm currently working with a local organization that wants to revitalize an old water mill barn from the 1700s (I think). It's currently in a really bad shape but to even start the permitting process to put a new roof on it, we need a qualified person doing an environmental impact study, making sure that there are no rare bats or owls hanging out in the rafters. It's actually not that big of a deal, they basically go in, look closely for any signs of these animals and make a few photos, the actual report is only a page or so. But if there were any of those animals, they'd have to be professionally removed and resettled elsewhere and the new construction would likely have to be adapted to continue to offer habitats.

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

#145

Post by tw04 »

latchkey wrote: post #121

> US is incredibly slow in building transmission lines, takes decades. A lot of bitcoin miners use stranded power, which would otherwise go to waste. People often respond to me on HN that the power could be easily/cheaply sent elsewhere for better uses [0]. Comments like this just re-enforce the fact that these people have literally no idea what they are talking about. Thanks, I'll favorite this one. =) [0] https://n…

> A lot of bitcoin miners use stranded power, which would otherwise go to waste.

A lot of bitcoin miners are keeping fossil fuel spewing power plants from being retired because the regulations that keep power affordable for Americans haven’t caught up. There’s a reason China killed bitcoin mining and the US needs to follow suit. Literally killing the planet for imaginary coins that don’t solve any problems that weren’t already solved. Well, besides the whole anonymous ransom thing.

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

#146

Post by novok »

jondwillis wrote: post #82
thfuran wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’…

The vast majority of garbage of most households is not compostable, and most recyclables are already not put in any specific bag due to a lack of fluids. On top of that, many places put recyclables in landfills also. Once you learn that your 30m of extra labor a week of 'doing it right' is literally being thrown in the trash for little benefit, people don't care anymore.

This fixation on picking up plastic bag pennies on the ground while refusing to pick up the $100 bills like funding an electric train transit network and enforce the law on current transit systems so people feel safe to be on them makes it feel like there are no real adults in the room when it comes to these things. Nobody is building nuclear power plants in the desert running mass CO2 scrubbers either.

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

#147

Post by samatman »

loeg wrote: post #28
Matthew_Stevens wrote: post #21

Figured this out because I was curious- This would makeup about .17% of total US electricity consumption in 2022. Assuming 4 trillion kWh. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect... .

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

That's a serious overestimate. Figuring a 90% capacity factor for the reactor and 20% for the solar installation, it's 1005MW delivered power for the former and 151MW delivered for the latter. That's 15% of one reactor, or put another way, it would take about six and a half of these solar installations to provide the same power as one reactor.

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

#148

Post by dralley »

lambda wrote: post #90
op00to wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pumped hydro is very dependent on geography. Good luck doing pumped hydro in Kansas.

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

#149

Post by novok »

yieldcrv wrote: post #114
theptip wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Datacenter for AI training workloads.

Thats pretty good if the data is already there, other data centers rely on heavier internet infrastructure

Fiber lines have less power transmission loss than the equivalent power lines themselves. In this hypothetical build out I'm guessing the huge fiber runs would be part of it.

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

#150

Post by AlotOfReading »

hooo wrote: post #33
dangrossman wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a coal mine better for the land than a silica mine? Are a few mines worse for "land" than tens of thousands of square miles of it sinking into the ocean due to sea level rise, taking millions of homes with it? I think people generally value the coastlines more than piles of rock in an unpopulated area of West Virginia or what have you.

No one mentioned coal

Before these recent solar projects, the generating capacity of this area was mostly coal and hydro. The hydro capacity is already exhausted, so the only room for growth is in fossil fuels.
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