Tag: solar power

Chinese ‘Kill Switches’ Found in US Solar Farms

Chinese ‘kill switches’ have been found hidden in American solar farms, prompting calls for Ed Miliband to halt the rollout of renewables over security concerns. The Telegraph has the story.

On Thursday, the Energy Secretary was urged to impose an “immediate pause” on his green energy blitz to review whether UK solar plants are also at risk.

The components found in the US included cellular radios capable of switching off the equipment remotely, raising serious concerns about grid security, according to Reuters.

They were found inside power inverters manufactured by unnamed Chinese companies.

Power inverters are the key links between solar or wind farms and the rest of the power system, converting their electricity so the wider grid can use it.

One source told Reuters that compromising such equipment would give Beijing the ability to inflict blackouts on the West, claiming it would create “a built-in way to physically destroy the grid”.

China has dismissed the claims as a smear. But the discovery has sounded alarm bells within the US Government and is likely to prompt a similar scramble in Britain.

Andrew Bowie, the Shadow Energy Minister, on Thursday said the “worrying revelations” should spark serious concern for Mr Miliband and called for an urgent investigation.

He said: “We were already aware of concerns being raised by the Ministry of Defence and the security and intelligence services surrounding possible monitoring technology on Chinese-built wind turbines – but given the dominance of China in solar, these developments are equally if not even more worrying.

“Ed Miliband’s Made in China transition – clean power at the expense of everything else – is a threat to our national security and makes a mockery of his claims on energy security.

“It is essential that an immediate pause and review is carried out to ensure the safety and security of our energy system.”

One industry source on Thursday said that British solar farms used inverters from a variety of sources, including Chinese, American, German and Israeli suppliers.

A UK Government spokesman said: “We would never let anything get in the way of our national security, and while we would not comment on individual cases, our energy sector is subject to the highest levels of national security scrutiny.”

Keep reading

Rogue communication devices found in Chinese solar power inverters

U.S. energy officials are reassessing the risk posed by Chinese-made devices that play a critical role in renewable energy infrastructure after unexplained communication equipment was found inside some of them, two people familiar with the matter said.

Power inverters, which are predominantly produced in China, are used throughout the world to connect solar panels and wind turbines to electricity grids. They are also found in batteries, heat pumps and electric vehicle chargers.

While inverters are built to allow remote access for updates and maintenance, the utility companies that use them typically install firewalls to prevent direct communication back to China.

However, rogue communication devices not listed in product documents have been found in some Chinese solar power inverters by U.S experts who strip down equipment hooked up to grids to check for security issues, the two people said.

Over the past nine months, undocumented communication devices, including cellular radios, have also been found in some batteries from multiple Chinese suppliers, one of them said.

Reuters was unable to determine how many solar power inverters and batteries they have looked at.

Keep reading

Texas Bill Would Require Solar Power Plants to Have Gas and Coal Backup

A bill working its way through the Texas legislature has caused some double takes with language that requires solar plants to provide power in the dark.

State bill S.B. 715 passed the Senate this week, and if adopted by the Texas house it would require any renewable power providers to buy backup power, typically from coal or gas plants, the Hill reported.

Texas consultant and energy expert Doug Lewin wrote in his analysis of the legislation that the measure would require solar plants to buy backup power to “match their output at night — a time when no one expects them to produce energy and when demand is typically at its lowest anyway.”

Double takes aside, the legislation is part of three Republican bills advancing through the state legislature that could offset Texas’ green energy progress and give fossil fuels an advantage in the state’s energy market, Reason reported. Texas generates the most renewable energy in the nation.

The bill is supported by a conservative think tank called the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which argues traditional power sources are still needed to make up for the unpredictability of wind and solar power. As Breitbart reported, Texas faced power shortages and rolling blackouts in 2021 as cold weather and ice froze the state’s wind turbines.

A state business lobby group disagrees, evoking the same fear of blackouts. The Texas Association of Business (TAB) predicted the measure would lead to unpredictable supply, costing the state $5.2 billion more per year and individual consumers on average $225 more per year in power costs. In addition to cost increases, the TAB analysis asserted, Texans would also face a higher risk of blackouts in the heat of summer or in future ice storms.

Keep reading

UK government plans to mandate new homes have solar panels and also plans to block sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface; the two do not go together

The UK’s Future Homes Standard aims to ensure that new homes built from 2025 produce 75-80% fewer carbon emissions compared to homes built under the current Building Regulations. It will require new homes to have very high levels of energy efficiency and low-carbon heating systems, ensuring they contribute to the UK’s net-zero carbon emissions target.

The standard includes specific performance requirements for building elements like external walls, roofs, floors, windows and doors, as well as minimum efficiencies for heating systems, ventilation and lighting.  It also demands that people’s homes be adorned with solar panels.

“The so-called Future Homes Standard regulations is due to be unveiled ‘soon’, billed as ensuring that properties are ‘highly efficient’ and do not have fossil fuel boilers by 2030,” the Daily Mail reported.  “The latest version of the blueprint could see four-fifths of new homes required to have solar panels covering 40 per cent of their footprint.”

A Ministry of Housing spokesman said, “Through the Future Homes Standard we plan to maximise the installation of solar panels on new homes, as part of our ambition to ensure all new homes are energy efficient, and will set out final plans in due course.”

This mandate is expected to add between £3,000 and £4,000 to the cost of building a home.

Meanwhile, war criminal and former Prime Minister Tony Blair has said that the government’s net zero targets are “unrealistic” which has caused the Labour Party to descend into bitter infighting, with some Members of Parliament and unions urging a re-evaluation of net zero policies while others are defending them.

A day after issuing his comments, Blair, who has advised Sir Keir informally, backed down and insisted he supported Labour’s plan to reach net zero by 2050.

Blair wasn’t criticising the false “climate change” premise on which net zero policies are built. He merely criticised the current net zero approach as “doomed to fail” and called for a pragmatic “reset,” arguing that people in developed countries are unwilling to make financial sacrifices and lifestyle changes when their impact on global emissions is minimal.

Keep reading

Boiling Point: Farewell to Ivanpah, the world’s ugliest solar plant

Sometimes, government makes a bad bet.

Case in point: the Ivanpah solar project. Maybe you’ve seen the unsightly, blindingly bright towers while traveling from L.A. to Las Vegas, in the Mojave Desert near the California-Nevada state line. Maybe you’ve read about birds getting fried to death as they fly through the sunlight directed to the tops of the towers by fields of mirrors.

When state officials agreed to let Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison buy power from Ivanpah roughly 15 years ago, they saw this type of technology — known as “concentrated solar power” — as the future of renewable energy. It was expensive, but it would get cheaper over time — and therefore it made sense to let PG&E and Edison customers pay for it through their electric rates, state officials decided.

Federal officials made a similar bet, helping finance Ivanpah through $1.6 billion in loan guarantees.

They were all wrong. Ivanpah’s concentrated solar technology, which uses sunlight to heat a fluid and generate steam, never worked as well as expected. Meanwhile, solar photovoltaic panels that convert sunlight directly to electricity got super cheap. Ivanpah quickly became known as an expensive, bird-killing eyesore.

All of which led to PG&E’s surprise announcement this month that it had struck a deal with the plant’s owners to stop buying electricity from Ivanpah. Assuming that state officials sign off — which they most likely will, because the deal will lead to lower bills for PG&E customers — two of the three towers will shut down come 2026.

Ivanpah’s owners haven’t paid off the project’s $1.6-billion federal loan, and it’s unclear whether they’ll be able to do so. Houston-based NRG Energy, which operates Ivanpah and is a co-owner with Kelvin Energy and Google, said that federal officials took part in the negotiations to close PG&E’s towers and that the closure agreement will allow the federal government “to maximize the recovery of its loans.”

It’s possible Ivanpah’s third and final tower will close, too. An Edison spokesperson told me the utility is in “ongoing discussions” with the project’s owners and the federal government over ending the utility’s contract.

It might be tempting to conclude government should stop placing bets and just let the market decide.

Keep reading

How Many More Ridiculous Green Energy Projects Will Fail?

The answer is all of them, in due time. Here are the latest spectacular failures.

Birds Fry Every Two Minutes

It took 10 years, and hundreds-of-thousands of dead birds, before the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in California would meet its fate.

The Wall Street Journal explains in ‘A Prolific Executioner of Wildlife’

An Obama-era monument to green delusions finally faces extinction.

Longtime readers may recall a 2014 Journal editorial about California’s “bird-fryer” solar plant, a taxpayer-backed venture that was hell on local animals. Turns out it was also hell on electricity ratepayers. But as with so many politically favored green ventures, waiting for official acknowledgment of failure can feel like an eternity.

Now finally here in 2025 it seems the reckoning has begun. The Las Vegas Review-Journal notes in an editorial that “a major California utility —  Pacific Gas & Electric — announced that it will no longer buy power from the Ivanpah solar plant off Interstate 15 near the Nevada-California border. As a result, two of the plant’s three towers will shut down next year — and the third will probably follow.”

The plant might have functioned merely as the world’s most expensive backyard bug zapper. But it was just too lethal. The Review-Journal’s Emerson Drewes reported last month:

Federal wildlife officials said Ivanpah might act as a “mega-trap” for wildlife, with the bright light of the plant attracting insects, which in turn attract insect-eating birds that fly to their deaths in the intensely focused light rays.

So many birds have been victims of the plant’s concentrated sun rays that workers referred to them as “streamers,” for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair. When federal wildlife investigators visited the plant around 10 years ago, they reported an average of one “streamer” every two minutes.

Performance has proven so poor that PG&E has exercised its right to terminate the contract, about which negotiations have been completed; there is no doubt that towers 1 and 3 will cease operations within roughly a year. And it appears to be the case that Edison too wants out: “the utility is in ‘ongoing discussions’ with the project’s owners and the federal government over ending the utility’s contract.”

Keep reading

China plans to build enormous solar array in space — and it could collect more energy in a year than ‘all the oil on Earth’

Chinese scientists have announced a plan to build an enormous, 0.6 mile (1 kilometer) wide solar power station in space that will beam continuous energy back to Earth via microwaves.

The project, which will see its components lofted to a geostationary orbit above Earth using super-heavy rockets, has been dubbed “another Three Gorges Dam project above the Earth.”

The Three Gorges Dam, located in the middle of the Yangtze river in central China, is the world’s largest hydropower project and generates 100 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year. According to one NASA scientist, the dam is so large that, if completely filled, the mass of the water contained within would lengthen Earth’s days by 0.06 microseconds.

The new project, according to lead scientist Long Lehao, the chief designer of China’s Long March rockets, would be “as significant as moving the Three Gorges Dam to a geostationary orbit 36,000km (22,370 miles) above the Earth.”

“This is an incredible project to look forward to,” Long added during a lecture in October hosted by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), as reported by the South China Morning Post. “The energy collected in one year would be equivalent to the total amount of oil that can be extracted from the Earth.”

Despite recent advances in the cheapness and efficiency of solar power, the technology still faces some fundamental limitations — such as intermittent cloud cover and most of the atmosphere absorbing solar radiation before it hits the ground.

Keep reading

The Real Costs of Solar and Wind Show How Insane the “Energy Transition” Is and Foretell the End of the Road for Net Zero

The Fraser Institute just reported some startling data regarding the real costs of electricity produced from solar and wind facilities, compared to other energy sources. Here are the money paragraphs (emphasis added):

Often, when proponents claim that wind and solar sources are cheaper than fossil fuels, they ignore [backup energy] costs. A recent study published in Energy, a peer-reviewed energy and engineering journal, found that—after accounting for backup, energy storage and associated indirect costs—solar power costs skyrocket from US$36 per megawatt hour (MWh) to as high as US$1,548 and wind generation costs increase from US$40 to up to US$504 per MWh.

Which is why when governments phase out fossil fuels to expand the role of renewable sources in the electricity grid, electricity become more expensive. In fact, a study by University of Chicago economists showed that between 1990 and 2015, U.S. states that mandated minimum renewable power sources experienced significant electricity price increases after accounting for backup infrastructure and other costs. Specifically, in those states electricity prices increased by an average of 11 per cent, costing consumers an additional $30 billion annually. The study also found that electricity prices grew more expensive over time, and by the twelfth year, electricity prices were 17 per cent higher (on average).

None of this is a surprise to anyone paying attention to the facts of what’s happened in Germany, for example, but the renewables industry and its promoters are fond of citing levelized costs analyses that don’t account for the myriad problems of intermittency when it comes to solar and wind. The two studies cited above do account for these costs and the results put an end to any suggestion green energy is affordable, let alone even close to competitive.

Keep reading

Home Solar Systems Explode in Beirut, Lebanon Following Walkie-Talkie and Pager Blasts, Officials Say

Lebanon officials are now reporting that multiple home solar energy systems have reportedly exploded in various neighborhoods across Beirut.

This attack follows closely on the heels of Tuesday’s pager blasts, which claimed the lives of 12 and left nearly 4,000 wounded in what is rapidly becoming an unparalleled security nightmare for the terrorist organization.

On Wednesday, walkie-talkies exploded simultaneously at various Hezbollah-controlled locations across the country.

Now, reports emerged from Lebanon’s Official News Agency detailing how home solar systems—often touted as the solution to climate change—were also going up in flames.

Al Jazeera reported, “Several blasts took place simultaneously, Hashem said, similar to what happened on Tuesday. “But this time, it was mostly walkie-talkies or radios [that exploded],” he said, adding that reports suggested that solar devices and some batteries in cars also exploded. Lebanon’s official news agency reported that home solar energy systems exploded in several areas of Beirut.”

Keep reading

PHOTON ENERGY SYSTEM THAT GENERATES 60 TIMES MORE POWER THAN SOLAR PANELS COULD POWER AN ELECTRIC CAR WITHOUT A BATTERY

New York-based tech company Wavja says the third generation of its proprietary Photon Energy System (PES), which employs tiny spheres to collect photonic energy, generates over 60 times the output of similarly sized traditional solar panels. According to a new video released by the company, the next generation of the PES could soon be powerful enough to run an electric car without a battery.

The company says its system can also capture light energy from artificial sources, including LED lighting, and convert it to usable electricity, offering both indoor and outdoor applications.

“Our system generates remarkable luminosity by utilizing multiple layers of cutting-edge materials and specialized spheres,” explains Shereen Chen, co-founder and executive director of Wavja USA, in the recently posted video. “This luminosity is then seamlessly converted to electricity using our proprietary technology.”

“It revolutionizes how we harvest sunlight,” Chen adds.

Keep reading