White House Urged to Speed Up NM Clean Energy Development

Posted by Rachel Pulaski on Wednesday, August 24, 2011
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From publicnewsservice.org- Nearly a dozen New Mexico business leaders have written to the White House advocating that President Obama and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and quickly transition to clean energy using public, private and tribal lands.  One - David Melton, chief executive officer of Sacred Power Corp., - delivered the letter and the message in person. Switching to solar, Melton says, would be good for the environment and add thousands of jobs to New Mexico's rural economy through the entire development process. The Interior Department is finalizing its plan for siting solar energy projects on public lands in six Western states. It has identified three study areas which encompass more than 100,000 acres as potential solar energy zones in New Mexico.  More News New Mexico
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1 comments:

Paul said...

First, solar PV only produces jobs while the facility is being built. After it is built, the full-time jobs are ZERO. For example, the new 5 MW Deming solar PV facility provides ZERO FT jobs now that it is built, and the temporary jobs will be the equivalent of low-paid window washers, perhaps once per quarter.

Second, solar PV is only emission-free when taken in isolation, but unfortunately, the panels only produce power for part of the 24 hour day and when the sun is not obscured by clouds. Furthermore, the power output is dependent on the incidence angle of the sun's ray on the panels. For example. a nomional 10 MW (rated) fixed panel system will only generate the equivalent power of a 2 MW system that faced directly into the sun for the entire 24 hour day (as if it was in outer space).

So to get the full 10 MW promised by our nominal system, something else has to provide the rest of the promised power: another power plant. In California, the recently-approved 800 MW CPV Sentinel power plant will be composed of eight 100 MW simple-cycle LMS100 gas turbines, running on natural gas. This plant will provide ONLY PART of the backup power for the nearby wind farms and the to-be-built 1,000 MW Blythe solar PV facility. NG gas turbines are not pollution-free, no matter how much the NG industry advertises themselves at "clean energy". Compared to coal, burning NG produces half the CO2, a third of the nitrogen oxides and 1% of the sulfur oxides.

August 24, 2011 at 4:44 PM

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