In Fort Mohave, Arizona, even Republican voters are fighting gas power plants as utilities try to lock in fossil fuels
…
Over the next few months, the Sunrise Hills retirees – among them many climate crisis skeptics and committed fossil fuel proponents – uncovered a trail of misinformation that appear to suggest MEC and Aepco, which is developing and will own and operate the gas combustion turbines, were at times opaque as they sought to fast track approval and circumvent closer scrutiny. MEC/Aepco “categorically deny” any effort to intentionally mislead anyone.
The retirees organized and began fact-checking and calling out claims about affordability, outages and low pollution made by MEC and Aepco in the glossy brochure and during public meetings.
It turned out that with a capacity of 98 megawatts, the two-turbine proposal fell just under the 100 MW limit that requires a state mandated comprehensive environmental review of impacts such as emissions, noise and water consumption by an expert committee at the state utility regulator, the Arizona corporation commission (ACC). Yet the utility has openly discussed plans to eventually double the size of the plant.
It also turned out that many of the county residents who spoke favorably of the plant in front of the board were in fact MEC employees and board members.
Solar in the deserts still a good idea, but I would like to point out that solar farms don’t actually like heat. Makes the panes inefficient and the inverters overheat. Cold and very sunny is the best (“high deserts”), although you don’t get that very often.
It does fine though. Less efficient, sure, so just add a few panels to the array to make up for that.
Can the inverters be kept deep underground? What’s the terminal length for the inverter to be distanced from the panel array? Seems like the array itself could power some geo coolant pumps even
My home has geo heat pumps now. It also has solar that nets more than our use so I’d wager this would scale even better for something outright designed to work this way
That’s an interesting thought, but it might be counterproductive. Commercial-scale inverters are usually fan-cooled so I actually think that would make the overheating worse, unless you used liquid cooling and pumped the water underground or something. But that’s more trouble than it’s worth. The heat isn’t that big of a deal, I was just pointing out that heat isn’t desirable for a solar farm since the title of the article seemed to be implying that a hot desert was the ideal location for solar.
As to your other question I’ve seen dc strings run several hundred feet without issue, so that wouldn’t be a concern.
That’s literally what I said. That’s what geo cooling with a heat pump is. It’s how the heat pump in my house is configured. No fan tower, just liquid pumped about 40 feet underground. It was installed very cheaply since the coolant lines are run using only a quarter inch tube so the drilling is very simple and cost effective. The pump uses almost no energy at all.