Trump administration quietly canceled the nation's largest solar project

[Dulcinea]

(CNN) The Trump administration’s cancellation of the largest solar project in the United States has sparked confusion and concern among Republicans and Democrats alike.

Known as the Esmerelda 7, the collection of seven solar projects in rural Nevada was set to generate up to 6.2 gigawatts of energy when complete, enough to power 2 million homes. That’s an eye-popping amount of power to add to an electrical grid that desperately needs more of it, due to the insatiable demand from AI-related data centers and increasing residential needs.

Under former President Joe Biden, the federal government was moving the sprawling project through the federal permitting process as one proposal. Developers had planned to use 118,000 acres of federal land in Nevada’s desert as the home for solar arrays and batteries to store the sun’s energy.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-administration-cancels-nation-largest-100052755.html

[mikeysnot]

1. Moving the nation

Backwards

[thought crime]

4. We are an un-developing country.

With respect to energy, the developed nations have passed us by.

[Lovie777]

2. WTF.. ....

😡😖😠😢😱

[NNadir]

3. As always there is the nearly illiterate use of units of peak power...

...the Watt a unit of power as if it were a unit of energy The Joule is the unit of energy. The "home" is decidedly not a unit of energy.

Nevertheless journalists have abused the words for decades, with the result that the general public is confused about issues in energy, and in part this is the reason the planet is burning.

Solar facilities rarely achieve 30% of capacity utilization, even in deserts, so in terms of continuous average power, the proposed plant would have been equivalent to a roughly 2 GWe power plant, with the environmental and economic penalty of requiring a redundant reliable system.

The Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, with two reactors produces 2 GWe of power, largely on a continuous uninterrupted basis on a 12 acre footprint. It does not require redundancy on a daily basis.

Doing the right thing for the wrong reason does not make the right thing wrong.

Similarly doing the wrong thing for the right reason does not transmute wrong into right.