“World’s First 24/7 Solar Power Plant Powers 75,000 Homes” for 3 hours per day.

Watts Up With That?

Guest post by David Middleton

SolarReserve’s Crescent Dunes Project in Tonopah, Nevada is quietly providing clean, green solar energy to 75,000 homes in the Silver State even when the sun isn’t shining.

Crescent Dunes is the first utility-scale facility in the world to use molten salt for power energy storage capabilities, a technology also known as concentrated solar.

With a concentrated solar plant such as Crescent Dunes—including other plants like it around the world—more than 10,000 movable mirrors, or heliostats, reflect solar energy to a central, 640-foot tower that heats up salt to 1,050 degrees Fahrenheit.

This salt is used for two purposes, as SolarReserve points out on its website. First, it retains very high levels of heat, making it like a thermal battery that can be used night and day, whether or not the sun is out. Second, when electricity is needed on the grid, the molten…

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Global temperatures are heading downward, and fast

Watts Up With That?

It’s no surprise to us that the “monster” El Niño of 2015/2016 created a very large global temperature spike, after all, that’s what the natural process that creates the phenomenon results in due to the Pacific ocean near the Equator not being able to dissipate heat to space as effectively as it usually does. NOAA says that “ENSO is one of the most important climate phenomena on Earth due to its ability to change the global atmospheric circulation, which in turn, influences temperature and precipitation across the globe. ”

But, as they say, “what goes up, must come down”. NOAA has this to say about the current state:

After dominating the tropical Pacific for more than a year, El Niño ended in May 2016. Near- or below-average temperatures existed in 3 out of 4 ENSO monitoring regions of the tropical Pacific. And for the first time in 2016, wind and…

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Geothermal for Alberta? A Case for Caution.

Friends of Science Calgary

CANGEA – the Canadian Geothermal Energy Association – has been making a concerted case for the development of Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) in Alberta. They propose to use existing abandoned oil wells and repurpose them for geothermal electricity power production (at low temperatures) and as sites for geothermal heat exchange for local heating – such as building a greenhouse above or adjacent to the well.

In this report, Geothermal Alberta A Cause for Caution June 20 2016 Friends of Science Society reviews the potential of geothermal in Alberta and explores the differences between geothermal in well-known spots like Iceland and the differences in Canada that make geothermal a less likely power producer for Alberta.

Additional literature is reviewed regarding various Enhanced Geothermal Systems around the world

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This is intended to be a plain-language document for the average reader though the information has been compiled with the assistance and direction…

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There’s Joe Romm – And Then There’s The Facts

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/06/15/3788651/greenland-record-globe-hottest-year/

Joe Romm has been up to his tricks again:

Last Thursday, Greenland’s capital hit 75°F, which was hotter than New York City. This was the highest temperature ever recorded there in June — in a country covered with enough ice to raise sea levels more than 20 feet.

It comes hot on the heels of the hottest May on record for the entire globe, according to NASA. As the map above shows, May temperature anomalies in parts of the Arctic and Antarctic were as high as 17°F (9.4°C) above the 1951-1980 average for the month.

Greenland in particular has been shockingly warm this spring. Here, for instance, is “land surface temperatures for April 2016 compared to the 2001–2010 average for the same month” from NASA:

NASA reports that some parts of Greenland were 36°F (20°C) warmer than “normal” — and remember, in this map…

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