From pv magazine USA
Denmark’s largest power provider and wind project developer, Ørsted, has completed its Permian Energy Center project, a 460 MW hybrid solar and battery storage facility located in Andrews County, Texas.
Permian Energy Center brings Ørsted’s onshore operating capacity to 2.1 GW. The project and its 420 MW of solar PV and 40 MW of battery storage are on a 3,600-acre site alongside existing oil and gas installations and will supply growing West Texas demand for electricity.
Ørsted said it is one of the first developers to own the full spectrum of new renewable energy technologies at utility scale in the U.S., onshore and offshore wind, solar PV, and storage. More technical or financial details on the project were not disclosed.
Solar is on track to make up the largest share of new capacity additions in Texas between 2020 and 2022. Almost 50% of the additions during this time period will be solar, surpassing wind (35%) and natural gas (13%) additions, according to the Energy Department’s Energy Information Administration.
Factors driving solar investment in Texas include lower solar technology costs and plentiful sunlight, particularly in West Texas’s Permian Basin, where about 30% of the state’s planned solar capacity will be built.
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Where are the studies showing of migration paths of birds, monarch butterflies and even bats over this plant, and what mitigation has been done to prevent birds and insects from burning up when crossing over the panels?
Birds, monarch butterflies and bats are incinerated mid-air when they fly above the concentrated energy of large arrays of panels like this plant. What is being done to stop this slaughter? The solution is to spread out the panels with small solar panel systems on every rooftop to disperse the potency. (This would also eliminate high energy transportation costs.) This plant is contributing to the disappearance of the nearly extinct Western Monarch butterfly (99.9% gone from the western US) and the loss of billions of birds. This plant is a factor in driving extinctions, and today we are in the midst of the earth’s 6th mass extinction event. Put these panels on every rooftop instead of letting a profit-generating corporation destroy what’s left of our wildlife.
Birds igniting: California solar power plant scorches birds in mid-air
https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Latest-News-Wires/2014/0818/Birds-igniting-California-solar-power-plant-scorches-birds-in-mid-air This problem plagues solar plants everywhere –
This Mojave Desert solar plant kills 6,000 birds a year. Here’s why that won’t change any time soon:
https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-solar-bird-deaths-20160831-snap-story.html
A macabre fireworks show unfolds each day along I-15 west of Las Vegas, as birds fly into concentrated beams of sunlight and are instantly incinerated, leaving wisps of white smoke against the blue desert sky.
Workers at the Ivanpah Solar Plant have a name for the spectacle: “Streamers.”
And the image-conscious owners of the 390-megawatt plant say they are trying everything they can think of to stop the slaughter.
Federal biologists say about 6,000 birds die from collisions or immolation annually while chasing flying insects around the facility’s three 40-story towers, which catch sunlight from five square miles of garage-door-size mirrors to drive the plant’s power-producing turbines.
The Mojave Desert plant is a solar thermal system that uses mirrors to focus the light and heat on a collector. The danger is to birds, bats and insects that fly near the focus point. The Permian Energy Center uses a photovoltaic system that does not concentrate (focus) the light, so it does not pose the same danger to flying creatures.
This kind os issues only occur in thermal solar plans, in photovoltaic solar plants, birds can not get burn, there are not concentrated solar beams neither temperatures high enough to burn them.
I’m all for PV and all renewables installed on available land (or over water like reservoirs, etc.). Just curious about the math, though. Obviously you can’t cover 100% of anything. And you can’t get fully perpendicular light on the panels, shading etc. But by my quick calculation 420 MW on 3600 Acres works out to about 29 watts per square meter. Panels these days make well over 200 W/Sq Meter. Why so little?
Is it possible that the company is promising 420MW during daylight time, and so needs to be able to generate this much under heavy cloud? This would mean that it has a large surplus much of the time, for which a possible use would be to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen that can be stored for later use.
This is interesting
At Lee Nguyen, This is a PV solar project. Only CSP, concentrated solar plants of the central tower type produce so much heat that it affects birdlife. There are few CSP projects around, and most are of the trough kind.
Quick google search: “In 2016, a first-of-its-kind study estimated that the hundreds of utility-scale solar farms around the US may kill nearly 140,000 birds annually. …” We know the estimates are lower than the actual numbers. PV or CSP, these plants are inefficient and not necessary; spreading the panels around on every rooftop means higher efficiency and no bird kills. I have panels on my roof – not one dead bird. Over vast areas (like this 3600 acre plant!) the power kills flying organisms, no questions about it. This plant should not go online; the panels should be dismantled and distributed to local homes so every house has its own power. Insects – 25% of bee species have disappeared over the past decade, and monarch butterflies (the Western Monarch) are <.01% of base population, near extinct. How many of these are flying (in migrstion) right over Texas and this plant (and others) and never seen again? Not worth it when rooftop solar will have no risks. We must reduce risk to all species – we're living in a mass extinction event an we've lost 50% of wildlife populations already. No more of this "who cares about a few birds" attitude re solar and WIND, too. We can do better- and we must.
Spreading them out to tons of rooftops sound great, but is hugely more expensive. I have 8 on my roof, and it was tough and expensive. Much cheaper to have then in an empty field, rather than on my complicated roof. I bet its a factor of 5 or 10. Would 1/5 of these panels on individual roofs be better, if we still then have to burn coal for that lost production ?
I think that every big box store with a flat roof should have solar panels. That area is wasted, and could be doing some good. I dunno that every roof should have solar. Lots are shaded or poorly configured for solar.