Huge Solar Power Station Planned for Portugal (World's Largest)

Huge solar power station planned for Portugal

German consortium says impoverished suntrap is ideal site
The Guardian

A plan to build the world's biggest solar energy power station, covering about 250 hectares and capable of sustaining 130,000 households, has been unveiled in Portugal.

The park would be visible from space, according to a spokesman for the owners of the site at an abandoned pyrite mine near the town of Beja, in the southern Alentejo region.

With a potential output of 116 megawatts, the new station would be several times the size of what is now the world's largest solar energy plant. The output would be fed into the Portuguese electricity grid at a government-set price.

A consortium of mainly German companies plans to erect 116 hexagonal clusters of solar panels. A German manufacturer of solar panels has said it also plans to build a factory at the site, bringing 250 permanent jobs to one of the poorest regions of Europe.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1477412,00.html

a winner for the environment and for the local economy. Thank you, Portugal, for leading the way.

covering 250 contiguous hectares with solar panels is 100% eco-friendly.

n/t

this.

Involved in these panels, most of which are likely toxic. Active solar is fine for some things, such as isolated railroad switches, but the real savings is in passive solar.

L-

Passive solar displaces fuel for heating. Electricity production produces 41% of the greenhouse gases in the US. This is a good project, and the production of the cells can be cleaner than you think, if they want it to be.

www.nrel.gov/ncpv/pdfs/tsuo.pdf

The lower purity of PV-grade polysilicon further reduces the need for processing with toxic chemicals.

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:JslgppVynKIJ:www.theinkstudio.com/sgs/aboutus.html+Moses+Lake+solar+grade+polysilicon+environment&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Here's an excellent overview of the global silicon industry...

www.it-environment.org/publications/QITS%20report.pdf

...and a review of the potential environmental impact of PV maufacturing...(scroll down to the PDF link)...

http://www.pvresources.com/en/environment.php

...and the waste water permit for the Solar Grade Silicon LLC production facility at Moses Lake, Washington.

www.ecy.wa.gov/.../solar_grade_silicon/solar_grade_final/ Solar%20Grade%20Silicon%20Fact%20Sheet%20Final.pdf

Also, PV arrays can be deployed anywhere - rooftops, parking lots, brown-fields and agricultural fence rows - they don't have to take up large areas of countryside....

oil pumpjacks, pipelines, tanks, frac units, and refineries in West Texas are for sure not eco-friendly.

Are you saying 250 contiguous hectares of solar panels are 100% eco-friendly?

Your comment doesn't seem to address that at all.

It's as if you're saying, "The existing energy system is bad for the environment. This system is different. Therefore, this system is good for the environment."

That's some pretty faulty logic.

A Hectare is 10,000 square meters -- or a square 100 meters by 100 meters. That's just under 2.5 acreas. Trafalgar Square in London was laid out as one hectare.

250 "contiguous" hectares is over 600 acres. The way "contiguous" is defined determines much of the ecological damage. You can get that footprint in a square that's 1581 meters to a side, or close to one square mile.

A neat mile square wouldn't be good for what would grow underneath the panels; but a long rectangle wouldn't necessarily have much of an impact, depending on where it was located.

There will always be environmental impacts, no matter what system is used -- I'm sure most of us have considered those factors many times already. The system as described might be eco-friendly, or might be a nightmare; the article isn't detailed anough. But it's worth paying attention to as a test case for large-scale profitable solar energy production using PV cells.

--p!

And considering the collective impact of agriculture in the American midwest and you quickly realize that as a civilization we have little emotional difficulty with harvesting biomass on a huge scale, with literally thousands and thousands of farms. Indeed farm life has a mystical reverence even though through out the midwest agriculture has removed as much as 97% of native cover from Iowa.

Ignoring issues such as endangered habitat and species, I'd say except for NIMBY concerns most people wouldn't have much of a problem.

Major player with lots of experience and experience. They are also in "solar towers" and "MHD" (acquired those technologies when they bought Westinghouse's generation business).

As to the relative eco-friendliness, I live a quick drive from a major "wind farm" (Altamont), and between two major fault systems (San Andreas and Calaveras-Hayward). And, what is the alternative? Coal with concomitant Hg ?

As to the chemicals and materials involved in these panels, while some of the dopants used to make the photodiodes are toxic (dopants are made by introducing such materials as arsine and phosphine into the silicon matrix), the semiconductor industry has never had an accident with dopants. The real issue is with photomasks, photoresists, photoresist developers and solvents, etc. These are the "chronic toxics" and "carcinogenics" -- the exposure from PV cell fabrication is similar to that involved in fabricating Liquid Crystal Flat Panel Displays. This stuff can be controlled --- if we hold the fabricators' feet to the fire. You have to balance it against the Hg and SO2 from coal, and the various risks associated with nuke power.

There are several Superfund Cleanup sites in Silicon Valley resulting from semiconductor industry contamination.

Let me repeat my post--

"As to the chemicals and materials involved in these panels, while some of the dopants used to make the photodiodes are toxic (dopants are made by introducing such materials as arsine and phosphine into the silicon matrix), the semiconductor industry has never had an accident with dopants. The real issue is with photomasks, photoresists, photoresist developers and solvents, etc. These are the "chronic toxics" and "carcinogenics" -- the exposure from PV cell fabrication is similar to that involved in fabricating Liquid Crystal Flat Panel Displays. This stuff can be controlled --- if we hold the fabricators' feet to the fire. You have to balance it against the Hg and SO2 from coal, and the various risks associated with nuke power.

I am well aware of the fact that "There are several Superfund Cleanup sites in Silicon Valley resulting from semiconductor industry contamination." - including TWO near where I live.

The statutory warnings related strictly and solely to organics, which are enumerated in the legal documents as photomasks, photoresists, photoresist developers and solvents, (including by function, chemical name, etc.).

I have followed the literature very closely - photolithography chemicals and not dopants ---- a world of environmental and toxicological difference.

As to nuke - this area is between the Hayward-Calaveras system and the San Andreas fault.

As to coal generators and Fischer-Tropsch fuels from coal --- you might consider the Donor PA Killer Smog with another - I grew up in the Mon Valley and started my engineering career as a student intern at the government's Fischer-Tropsch pilot plant in Bruceton PA.

So, you take your choice -- the "do nothing" option is either more "Resource Wars" - like Iraq. - or some sort of return to the 1890's (James Howard Kunstler) or an earlier state (John Zerzan's "Anarcho-primitivism")

... that there's any such thing as a 'safe' technology or any industry that doesn't externalize costs, particularly ecological protection costs where the 'externalization' comes in terms of public health. In older technologies, as far as I know (not being a chemical engineer), the dopants were neither as toxic nor as abundant in the fabrication process as the solvents (such as benzene compounds). While I realize there are both preventative and ameliorative techniques and safeguards, I'm not of the opinion there is any such thing as a 'safe' energy technology, merely that the industrial economics and practices amplify the 'more or less' safe. I'm personally in favor of solar (photovoltaic) arrays, both in a centralized and decentralized deployment. That doesn't mean we don't have to attend to both manufacture and disposal impacts. (Industry never dealt with PC disposal considerations, either.)

Unlike fossil fuel sources - they are not emitting pollutants while generating electricity, And, unlike nuclear power, they do not sit there with the politically charged capability to cause massive losses in the event of a catastrophic failure.

The environmental risk is in the manufacturing process.

The dopant gases are contained within multiple layers of vacuum deposition equipment within "clean rooms."

The problem is with the benzene compounds (and the halocarbon solvents) used in lithography. The benzene compounds (including polycyclics and heterocyclics) just don't degrade -- they are there waiting to interfere with cellular level processes.

Remember - these same or similar benzene compounds are found in coal, tar sands, shale oil, and crude oil (although not as concentrated) and are released in everything from Fischer-Tropsch liquid fuel synthesis (from coal) to petroleum refining.

The advantage with PV cells is that after the PV cells have been manufactured they are not multiple sources of cyclics or of halocarbons - not dispersed sources, not mobile source, not sources at all. The manufacturing process is the "source" - there are only a finite number of "fabs" -- and we can put environmental cops and environmental sensors at a finite number of "fabs."

This gives PV a significant "environmental cop law enforcement advantage" - we know where the emissions could happen - and we can put the (human or robotic) environmental cops there.

Anyone remember when we were the world leaders in science, rather than fundamentalist superstition? Heck, we put a man on the moon. Soon it will probably be illegal to teach that the moon is not made of cheese.

That day is fast approaching.

The article says that the location will be an abandoned pyrite mine, where acid runoff long ago killed all vegetation. More details:

"The Mina Sao Domingos pyrite mine was run by a British company, Mason and Barry.

The mine, founded in the 1870s and closed in the 1960s, was run by British engineers for much of its life and involved both opencast and underground excavation.

Helmfield Horster, managing director of the company that owns the site, said the banks and inclines of the reservoirs were already close to having the 32 degree slope that allows solar panels to make best use of the sun's rays.

"That means we will be able to mount most of them on wooden frames rather than the metal ones that are often used," he said.

Mr Horster said that the yellow banks would have to be covered with something dark grey. Acid water that had pooled in the reservoirs has killed all vegetation."

What better use could this abandoned mine be put to? A solar plant will definitely be a win-win operation.

to test it's efficiency? Some place where there is a lot of brush to clear.

There is a 40+ square mile area in Oklahoma known as the Tar Creek Super Fund Site that is contaminated with lead, zinc, cadmium, acid runoff, and other hazardous waste from years of mining lead and zinc. (Lots of us blue voters think that this whole red state is a wasteland, but that's another story.) Seriously though, the Feds and State officials and residents have been arguing and studying about what to do with this site for over 30 years to no avail, and people still live in it! If the mountains of mine tailings could be bulldozed flat, solar collection might make an excellent use for the area.