According to an article at SF Gate this morning (Ivanpah Fire), there was a fire at the Ivanpah Solar Plant Thursday which required the closing of one generating tower. That is 1/3 of its generating capacity, and it is the largest solar power plant in the world right now. One other tower is down for maintenance, so it is currently running at 1/3 capacity. The plant is normally capable of providing enough power for 140,000 California homes. The specificity of that statistic is interesting, one cannot help but wonder how many Oregon homes or Wisconsin homes that would be equivalent to, but that’s another matter.
OK, this fire was caused by one or more misaligned mirrors. The plant uses close to 350,000 computer controlled mirrors to focus sunlight on boilers in the generating towers. One would thing that there are a great many ways in which one or more huge mirrors (think garage door sized) could get misaligned. Add in the fact that they are computer controlled and the number becomes astronomical, unless you break it down into groups and classes of causes and glitches. Hence, this is a pretty big risk which owes its immensity to the immense size of the project (somewhere around 5 square miles.)
Now, if my solar goes down, that’s it, I lose power. Actually, I feed the grid during daytime, so Pacific Grief and Extortion has to go pay retail for enough power to make up the difference, but it is no big deal. Independent, distributed generation systems pose no material threat to the grid itself or to the overall power supply and flow. Micro grids, where in use, have a micro impact, taking down, at most, the members of the micro-grid.
In the olden days, we lacked “devices”, and read or were red to assorted, generally putatively educational fables and tales. They had been handed down over many generations and had embedded cautionary ”morals” or “lessons”. One was that it was pretty fucking stupid to put all of your eggs in one basket. So, one wonders, at what point do bus ad majors get taught that centralization is always better, and can we put an end to that misinformation.
Why centralize something like this. Greater total, end to end efficiency? Probably not. Greater security. Not in any sense of the word. The sole reason is that something that big must be owned by either a government or a corporation. Governments, since the Reagan Revolution, are not supposed to compete with private industry. There are profits to be made. There are monopolies or oligopolies to maintain. I say the old fables are right, centralized power is dumb and no longer necessary. It is time to facilitate, or at least not impede, local, user owned distributed power generation.