RUNNING THE INLAND EMPIRE ON SOLAR AND WIND ENERGY

Is nothing new....Although most people associate Solar and wind power as rather modern day creations, that is not really true....Wind power, in the form of small wind mills has been used in the desert southwest for over 400 years.....It is today, that we see the new modern evolution of giant Wind machines capable of producing enough energy to power 100 homes for a year....But it takes hundreds of them to power a city or geographic area.

In the Banning pass on the way to Palm Springs and the Southern Deserts you will see what is effectively the 2nd and 3rd generation of giant wind machines.....The first ones built in the 1960's were small and rather ineffective....In fact most of the companies that built them went bankrupt.....It wasn't until government subsidies and modern technology combined to create the new generation of wind machines seen today that are able to supply the power needs of most of the Riverside County area of the Desert.

Close to 4000 windmills provide electricity from the wind that blows though the area.......The blades of the windmills are driven by the high winds that are created by the canyons walls that make up the 11,000 foot high Mt Jacinto on the south and Mt Gagoreno to the north.....These steep canyons crowd the wind into the Banning Pass that in some areas is not more than 3 miles wide....These same winds will blow for hours, sometimes reaching speeds of 50 to 70 mph, while the wind in other areas is quite.........The windmills come in all sizes ranging from 50 foot towers to some that are 120 feet tall......The larger ones have blades that reach fifty yards in length.........Palm Springs has more wind mills in this one area than any other place in the world, including the wind mill farms of the Tehachapi Pass Area.

Back in the early 1700's the original Spanish Settlers of the area needed some way to bring water up from under ground to water crops and for personal use....Small wind mills solved that need and many of them can still can be found through out the IE, especially the Orange and Vineyards that still exist.

Then Concrete water culverts were built by a concrete factory in Etiwanda in this area and in White Water where the modern day rock quarries are located along the 10 freeway.....These concrete culverts were buried in the ground and connected to a series of wind mills through out the area.

Today, Just west of Palm Springs is a sight that is sometimes referred to as the windmill farm, and even the windmill forest, along both sides of highway 10.....It is fascinating to sit out on one of the side streets, especially when the winds are really blowing and watch the mills turn....And if you can find a spot under the wind mills you can hear the soft purr of thousands of wind mills turbines running and the swish swish of the blades as they move in the winds....In fact, I have been known to fall asleep and had to be beeped so they could tell me to go back to sleep.

Now to the northern desert community of Barstow where the first ever Solar Farm was completed in 1981, just to the east of the city, in Dagget....It was the first test of a large scale thermal solar tower plant....Solar One was designed by the Department of Energy, SCE, LADWP and The California Energy commission.

Solar One's method of collecting energy was based on concentrating the suns energy on to a common focal point to produce heat to run a steam powered generator.....It has hundreds of mirrors that track the sun, reflecting the solar energy onto a tower where a black receiver absorbed the heat.....A fluid was supper heated and this carried the energy to a boiler on the ground where the steam was used to spin a series of turbines, something akin of how a traditional power plant operates.

Solar one was operational from 1981 to 1986 when it was taken off line and redesigned and expanded to now cover 72 acre's with over 3,000 mirrors....During dust storms beams of light are reflected off of the dust to create a unique and erie atmospheric pheromones.....These beams of light were used in several signs, a painting and the movie Bagdad Cafe, which was filmed in nearby Dagget.....100 miles a way in Nevada, a much newer Solar farm uses several thousand thermal parabolic panels in a trough system which was completed just this past September and will generate 64 MW of power.

In 1995 solar one was converted into a much more powerful farm by adding a second outer ring of 108 larger heliostats around the existing farm giving it a total coverage of 891,000 feet redirecting what is equal to 600 suns shinning 24/7 and the ability to produce more than 10 megawatts.....This new unit uses molten salt because molten salt can store energy when it is cloudy and cold and energy levels are down.

Solar two was shut down and rebuilt as a giant telescope in 2001 for UC Davis....It measures Gamma rays hitting the planet....Its new name is now C.A.C.T.U.S,

Due to the success of Solar Two, a commercial power plant, called Solar Tres Power Tower, is being built in Spain using Solar One and Solar Two's technology for commercial electrical production of 15 MW......Solar Tres will be three times larger than Solar Two with 2,493 heliostats, each with a reflective surface of 96 m².......The total reflective area will be 240,000 m² (2.6 million ft²)......They will be made of a highly reflective glass with metal back to cut costs by about 45%......A larger storage tank will be used giving the plant the ability to store 600 MWh, allowing the plant to run continuously during the summer.

Solar thermal power plants are big and seem to use a lot of land, but when looking at electricity output versus total size, they use less land than hydroelectric dams (including the size of the lake behind the dam) or coal plants, including the amount of land required for mining and excavation of the coal......While all power plants require land and have an environmental impact, the best locations for solar power plants are on land such as deserts, for which there might be few other uses.

As a note of interest PETA filed a lawsuit against the use of Solar Farms because they might harm desert Turtles and also against the wind farms located in Palm Springs and Tehachapi, because birds might fly into the blades....On the East Coast Senator Ted Kennedy has filed a Lawsuit against the builders of 100 wind machines located 25 miles out to sea....He says the wind machines will bring down the values of his property.

So much for environmentally friendly advocates.

Gary Hall, the ghostpainter