Re: Las Vegas Anomaly

A couple of images from that area.

The Las Vegas Anomaly

It seems all the iPhones as part of the once-unknown location tracking log all have visits to locations in northwest Las Vegas, all at the same time. Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden at O'Reilly Radar have dubbed this "The Las Vegas Anomaly", an elegant turn of phrase that will undoubtedly be incorporated into science fiction stories just as soon as writers get wind of it. Speaking as someone born and raised in Las Vegas, I have no clue why those locations are listed. There's not that much between the Kyle Canyon and Lee Canyon roads on US 95. A golf course, a small park, and scattered homes.

Las Vegas precipitation

Las Vegas received more rain last week, 1.69 inches, than it did in all of 2009, when it received 1.59 inches. The "average" is about 4 inches annually. If the rains continue into a full El Nino style winter, the area will bloom green in spring with the normally brown/gray mountains turned into green.

Source: http://www.lvrj.com/news/breaking_news/Rainfall-expected-to-taper-off-today-82379942.html

IR focus test: Agave

IR focus test: Palo Verde

An old focus test. As you can see, the right side is not doing so well.

Southwest solar meets the New York Times

Turning Glare into Watts.

If large numbers of plants are built, they will eventually pose some problems, even in the desert. They could take up immense amounts of land and damage the environment. Already, building a plant in California requires hiring a licensed tortoise wrangler to capture and relocate endangered desert tortoises.

Often in desert construction the entire lot is bulldozed for convenience and it doesn't have to be. This applies to one acre lots (from personal experience) to larger plots as mentioned. The compressed surface often only allows the invasive non-native Russian thistle (aka tumbleweed) to grow. I've never seen the dominant native vegetation in the Mojave, the creosote bush, grow back in disturbed plots.

End of the year non-review, #1

A non-review, since I didn't post about things I saved in "starred items" in Google Reader. So, some quick posts about them.

Grist complains Senator Harry Reid is defending the 1872 Mining Law, which is still on the books. Parts of it are stupid; we should hold profitable companies to clean up their messes and begin to increase the tiny rates charged for minerals on public lands. But in parts of Nevada mining is all that keeps the area inhabited. Reid comes from a down and out mining town to the south of Las Vegas that I've spent plenty of time in; and no one would argue it was having a too-hot economy. Reid also gets re-elected by the will of the people of Nevada every six years, and to be honest, it can be a close vote every time. Reid is not perfect; a true politician as I found when I talked with him years ago; but he's fantastic for Nevada--holding off the results of the "Screw Nevada" bill and deflecting the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump as long as possible, despite the efforts of many in both parties. He works well with Senator Ensign on nonpartisan issues for the state like smart planning on wilderness and auctioning federal lands in southern Nevada. All these things would be much worse off if he were defeated--there would be no Mining Law reform, no wilderness declarations, no effective attempt at ending the bureaucratic environmental disaster that Yucca Mountain will be.

Nevada Solar One

image from Solargenix

A large solar thermal energy plant is now online in the Eldorado Valley, just south of Las Vegas, creating up to 64MW of power from a 400 acre site covered with reflective troughs and tubes filled with brine (I was tempted to write "a series of tubes"). Molten salt is used to retain excess energy for later release when it freezes back into a solid. A view of the under construction site is here. The site is located conveniently next to a very large power distribution network hub.

The heated tubes are interesting in their own right. Schott makes them--a vacuum insulated glass tube with a blackened steel tube in the center. The outside has an anti-reflection coating, and the steel coating is made to reduce IR thermal emission: visible and near-IR go in, steel heats up, but it can't radiate thermal IR out. The result is 95% of light is absorbed; but only 14% of the IR is emitted. Keeping everything sealed at temperatures between freezing and 750F is difficult, and one of things Schott did was make a special glass with a coefficient of expansion the same as steel.

The second major solar energy project in southern Nevada is a 15MW plant at Nellis Air Force Base, using photovoltaic cells directly creating electricity. The system will track the sun, and it sits conveniently on an old landfill, land previously unusable.

In addition to these two major projects, there is a little over 3MW of solar energy projects in southern Nevada, with most of the total from the Las Vegas Valley Water District. See the status of Nevada energy projects in this 2007 report

Renewable decentralized solar energy continues to have arbitrary limits placed on it by law, keeping power companies monopolies in place. How requiring power companies to produce 15% of their power from renewables in eight years while disallowing much locally-produced power sources works together is beyond me.

From Friday's Las Vegas Review-Journal:

A lobbyist for the Clark County School District said she was pleased that the proposal increased the maximum amount of solar power the district can generate to 2 megawatts compared to 570 kilowatts. ...

But per school limits are 50 kilowatts.

Conklin liked that limitation, because it encourages the district to install solar plants at more schools, giving more students an opportunity to see how solar power works.

... Under the bill, customers may qualify for net metering if they generate as much as 100 kilowatts on their site, up from 30 kilowatts.

Nevada Solar One is static--a cheap low-maintenance support structure that resists wind damage very well (EDIT: someone corrected me: it's a one-axis tracker). The Nellis project uses tracking systems to maximize the solar gain. What is that gain? It depends a lot: on how much Sun you get, how long your days are, and how cloudy it is over the year. In Las Vegas, for instance, the overall solar energy received with a tracking system is about 7.1kWh per square meter per day averaged over the year. A static mount would get 6-6.5kWh. It doesn't sound like a lot of difference, but that's a per day number for only a square meter: multiply by 365 and for the size of the project, and it adds up. For single sunny months, tracking wins by far--over 9kWh per day in June in Vegas compared with 7 for a static system. It's interesting to note the incredible values created on the North Slope of Alaska--nearly as much as the desert Southwest--merely from having the Sun around for 24 hours a day.

Why aren't we doing more to power the cities of the Southwest with solar? Even just using solar water heaters in the warm months and smart skylights for daytime lighting would change energy use forever there.

A video describing Nevada Solar One, including some interviews, is available here.

And finally,
click here for a more amusing video about the 360MW of solar energy projects in California.