systems

ABINGDON, Wash. (WJHL) – Catalyst Energy Partners will host an open house for its Wolf Hills solar project on May 30 at John Battle High School.

According to a statement from Catalyst Energy Partners, the open house invites the community to learn more about the Wolf Hills solar project, including its “economic impacts, workforce opportunities, property value, Wolf Hills Gas Plant, solar pastures and energy flow.” spokesman.

The open house will be Thursday, May 30, from 6-9 p.m

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The 250-megawatt solar project is being developed in conjunction with the Wolf Hills Natural Gas Plant at the Bristol Industrial Park.

The release states:

Developer Catalyst Energy Partners plans to build a hybrid power plant that will provide the community with solar power during the day and use natural gas power when the sun isn’t shining. This will generate enough clean energy to power 40,000 homes in the surrounding area.

The release comes days after a Washington County, Virginia, community raised concerns about the project.

LEXINGTON, Ky. (WKYT) – East Kentucky Power, a nonprofit electric cooperative, wants to build solar panels on a 384-acre site between I-64 and US 60 on the far eastern edge of Fayette County. to the Fayette/Clark County line.

“In the long run, the sun is long-lived. The standard warranty for solar power manufacturers is 25 years. So when solar is installed, a lot of clean energy is generated,” says Joshua Bills, Principal Energy Analyst.

Bills explained that the energy cooperative also gets an exclusive contract to build solar installations thanks to federal legislation designed to promote clean energy. Now, this proposed farm is expected to generate 40 megawatts of energy, enough to power about 4,500 homes.

EKPC CEO Tony Campbell said in a statement that it would help “meet the growing demand for sustainable energy, particularly among businesses and industries.”

But Lexington City Leaders hope to put the plans on hold for now.

“If there is an interest in making the best project possible, people should look at what plans or parameters are available. Like, is there an end-of-life decommissioning plan?”

Mayor Linda Gorton’s office asked the Kentucky Public Service Commission to intervene in the case.

“It takes time to learn and plan,” Gorton said in a statement. Continuing, ‘we should have a say in the location of such projects.’

“You know there’s a growing trend to combine and combine agriculture with solar power generation, which is going to be harder to do now with a natural gas or coal power plant.”

East Kentucky Power also plans to add another solar farm in Marion County. Together with Fayette County Farm, they could generate enough electricity to meet the annual energy needs of more than 15,000 homes.

There is a public meeting for the Marion County Project on Thursday night.

Copyright 2024 WKYT. All rights reserved.

PLYMOUTH, Box Elder County – A new 80-megawatt solar farm in Box Elder County will power several Utah cities across the state.

The Steel Solar project consists of more than 200,000 solar panels. Engineers with SOLV Energy said it sits on about 900 acres off Interstate 15.

“They receive a small radio signal from our operations center outside of San Diego, so there are antennas all over the place, wired in turns,” said project manager Luke Derby. “The computers from San Diego put everything on a timer, and the radio is sent, and the rows alternate as the sun moves through the day.”

Steel Solar is the latest Utah project from national developer DE Shaw Renewable Investments (DESRI).

“We’re about seven or eight projects, it’s a big investment over many years, five or six, seven years we’ve committed to investing in this state,” said chief development officer Hy Martin.

Cities around the state

About 600 acres of solar panels power 20 cities: Blanding, Bountiful, Ephraim, Fairview, Fillmore, Heber Light & Power, Hurricane, Hyrum, Lehi, Logan, Morgan, Mt. Pleasant, Paragonah, Payson, Price, Santa Clara, Springville, South Utah Valley Electric Service District, St. George and Washington.

Each city belongs to the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, or UAMPS. CEO and general manager Mason Baker said 20 of his 50 members have chosen to go solar.

“Solar power like this will occur in the summer when peak load occurs, so our electricity demand on the system is at its highest,” Baker said.

According to him, the project will work only 30% within a certain year.

DESRI’s solar farm, Elektron Solar, in Tooele recently began generating power for Salt Lake City, Park City, some ski resorts and Utah Valley University.

Baker said customers at home won’t notice a difference.

“When it comes to the overall resource mix, it’s still a fairly small part of it,” he said.

Withstand the weather

Solar panels can withstand harsh weather, Derby said.

“If there’s a lot of snow piled up on top of them, they can send a signal to tilt them all over and dump the snow,” he said.

He said they last about 25-35 years.

“Once a year, they’ll get a little maintenance, but for the most part, we work out all the bugs in the construction so it runs pretty smoothly for the next five to 10 years,” Derby said.

Half of the panels are one-sided. The other half is hypocritical.

“It takes some of the sunlight reflected off the ground or snow,” Derby said.

Although the panels are inexpensive, Baker said, they are a source that many Utahns rely on.

“We have to have different resources, whether they are renewable, we see a place for natural gas,” he said. “We still have coal in our resource portfolio, it’s going to be there for a while.”

Martin said the panels are more affordable.

“What we typically find in our fleet is that we can generate power at a lower rate than older, less efficient coal plants,” he said.

He said Steel Solar’s capital expenditures are in the $100 million range. UAMP’s member communities pay once the power comes online.

“When the project actually declares COD and starts generating power, UAMPS’s member communities pay us for the energy we produce from the project, the renewable energy, for the next 25 years,” Martin said.

The developer will own and operate these solar farms long-term.

“We basically try to develop and build clean energy projects wherever we can, and we think Utah is looking to the future, and we definitely want to meet that demand with future clean energy development,” Martin said.

Imagine if a solar-powered car were released tomorrow, it was cheaper to run than a gas-powered car. It would be incredibly attractive until you realize that the car won’t work at night or in cloudy weather due to limitations in battery storage. If you buy the car, you’ll still need a gas car as a backup. You will have to pay for two cars.

This is exactly the situation we face with renewable energy. Wind and solar power only produce power when the sun shines or the wind blows. At all other times, their electricity is infinitely expensive and a backup system is needed. This is why two-thirds of our global electricity needs are met by fossil fuels. This is why we are 100 years away from eliminating fossil fuels in electricity generation.

We are in a strange situation where politicians and the green energy industry constantly repeat that wind and solar are the cheapest forms of electricity. Still, governments spend $1.8 trillion annually on the green transition, and the real cost of forcing people to use renewable energy instead of fossil fuels is even higher.

The modern world needs power around the clock. Unreliable and intermittent wind and solar come with huge, often hidden, costs. This is a relatively minor problem for rich countries that already have residual power plants they can use as backup – although it makes electricity more expensive because intermittent renewables make everything else intermittent.

However, the poorest countries that do not need electricity have little fossil fuel energy infrastructure. Hypocritical rich countries refuse to finance much-needed fossil fuel energy in the developing world. Instead, they insist that people cope with unreliable green energy supplies that cannot run pumps or farm machinery to lift the population out of poverty.

For the world’s large, developing industrial nations, such as China, India, Bangladesh and Indonesia, dependence on coal is an inevitable reality. Last year, China generated more additional energy from coal than from wind and solar. India got 3 times more coal, Bangladesh got 13 times more coal from green energy sources, and Indonesia got a staggering 90 times more coal. They don’t drag their feet just to be difficult. Credibility is important—especially when you’re focused on growing your economy and helping millions of people lift themselves out of poverty.

Misconceptions about the price of wind and solar energy are possible because the price usually quoted is the price when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. On this basis, they are really relatively cheap. But once you factor in the cost of reliability, the price tag explodes—one peer-reviewed study shows an increase of between 11 and 42 times, making solar the most expensive source of electricity, followed by wind.

Unfortunately, storage technology remains inadequate. Scientists recently looked at the United States and found that to get reliable, 100 percent solar or wind electricity, we need about three months of annual electricity storage capacity. It only has seven minutes of battery life in the US. Closing the storage gap would cost five times the entire US GDP, and the storage would have to be replaced every 15 years.

And we have to remember that wind and solar technology itself needs to change at a fairly alarming rate. Already, a small town in Texas is overflowing with thousands of giant wind turbine blades that cannot be recycled. In poor African countries, solar panels and their batteries are thrown away. One study shows that this doubles the true cost of solar energy when we factor in the costs of recycling and safe disposal.

If wind and solar power were truly cheaper than fossil fuels, billions of dollars in taxpayer spending would not be needed. This claim is constantly repeated because it is convenient and because it supports the political narrative.

But the truth is, if we want to fix climate change, we need to invest more in low-CO₂ energy research and development instead. Only a significant boost in research and development can deliver the necessary technological breakthroughs – reducing waste, improving battery storage and efficiency, as well as other technologies such as modular nuclear – that will make low-CO₂ energy sources truly cheaper than fossil fuels.