LA is going to get cheap nighttime power from a massive solar and battery array in the Mojave

[Ray_Ceeya]

They are decommissioning those plants because their boilers are shot. Every power plant that utilizes the brayton cycle (steam turbine) has a lifespan limited by the condition of it’s boiler. It doesn’t matter if it’s oil, coal, gas, nuclear, or whatever. That life span tends to be around 50-100 years depending on the condition of the water and the fuel. Dirtier fuel and harder water kill the boiler faster. There’s no reason to refurbish these aging power plants if the scarcity of the fuel and the economic cost of the carbon emissions outweigh the revenue returned over the course of the next 50 years. Even then that’s only a break even point. This is just basic economics. We’re at the tipping point right now and solar is just becoming more economic than fossil fuel.

The writing is right there on the wall. Fossil fuel is dying. Time to move on.

[d_r]

According to the article, these will be placed in “eastern Kern County”. Funny, I was just reading about that area a few months ago. Interesting choice of location to put lithium batteries and giant glass panels.

[Michael_R_Smith]

The nice thing about solar power is that it is decentralized and modular. An earthquake may destroy 10% of your capacity but the remaining 90% will keep working just fine.

A quake could, I suppose, destroy an entire battery plant, just as it could take out a nuclear, coal or gas plant. But the batteries don’t actually have to be in one place, just on the same grid and accessible to the same network.

[d_r]

I don’t disagree. It just seems to me that, all else being equal, I’d locate this somewhere not near a violently active fault.

[Brainspore]

Most of the densely populated areas in California are near major earthquake faults. As infrastructure projects go a solar array seems like one of the least risky projects you could put in a place like that.

[glenblank]

@d_r

I’d locate this somewhere not near a violently active fault.

You mean, like, outside of California?

Besides, after the aftershock sequence dies down, “near a major fault that recently had a major rupture” is probably one of the safest places, seismically speaking. Biq quakes on strike-slip and thrust faults produce a “seismic shadow” for some time after. The big shock relieves most localized stresses, leaving a period of seismic quietude that can last for decades after.

The LA area is only now emerging from the “shadow” of the Northridge quake. Moderate quakes, which were a regular thing pre-Northridge, were, until recently, so uncommon that a lot of people who’ve lived here for twenty years have only recently felt their first tiny jolting quakes.

Likewise, the Bay Area seems to have begun emerging from the shadow of the Great 1906 quake. Prior to 1906, medium-sized shocks in the mid/high 6s had occurred regularly, usually alternating between the San Andreas and its parallel branch, the Hayward, about once every fifteen years, After, those shocks virtually disappeared. Until Loma Prieta.

Besides, historically speaking, nearly all of CA’s large damaging quakes have occurred on faults that were unknown before the quake happened. Most seismic risk analysis is essentially useless. You can calculate ‘odds’ until you’re blue in the face, but biq quakes don’t happen often enough for odds and averages to be meaningful, except in the geological long-term.

Besides, if you can’t build solar panels and storage batteries that are immune to the largest credible quake for the area, u r doin it wrong. (-: As seismic engineering goes, those are easy-peasy.