A day trip worth taking...

First of all, my apologies for letting my life interfere with regular postings here.  It was an unusually busy week and yesterday, Saturday, is usually a day that I can catch up on things - including some  posts here. But yesterday turned out to be the day that the Palm Beach County Planning Congress took a day trip to the Barley Barber swamp near Indiantown.  The trip also included a tour of the recently completed solar hybrid power plant that FPL has nearby.  In fact, the Barley Barber swamp is on property owned by FPL and is surrounded on three sides by the cooling pond for the power plant.  The slideshow above includes pictures from both places.

The Barley Barber swamp was closed after 9/11 for security purposes due to its proximity to the large power plant which supplies power to over 1 million homes.  It reopened last November to the public.  Tours are free and are available from October to May, Wednesday through Sunday - beginning at 8:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.  Reservations are required and can be made by calling the Seminole Inn in Indiantown.  The property was saved from becoming just a part of the power plant colling pond in 1972 by a group of people that happened to be in the right positions at the right time.  The boardwalk that runs in a figure eight through the 455 acre property was built in 1980.  By walking through the area, it brings you back to a primordial Florida - complete with 900 year old cypress trees to alligators and other wildlife.  It's a very popular attraction for birdwatchers.

The power plant is a hybrid - the largest part of it is fueled by natural gas but it is supplemented by the solar array.  Mirrors concentrate the suns heat on to a pipe with super-heated fluid that in turn runs a turbine, which in turn generates electricity.  Here is a FPL produced video explaining it more:

Being urban planners, we also talked about the relative benefits of utility-scale solar facilities versus "distributed generation."   Distributed generation is where individual homeowners and businesses have installed their own photo-voltaic or solar heating equipment.  There are perspectives on both sides - the utilities obviously favor reliance on the large scale solar facilities as it preserves their revenue from a monopoly on energy generation.  But their large purchasing power does provide economies of scale and drives down the per unit cost of solar equipment, which then creates more favorable return on investment equations which may encourage more individual installations.  Distributed generation is much more of a "Democratic" distribution of power (both electric and political), without the reliance on large super structures - utility companies.  We also discussed the concept of "feed in tariffs" which amount to subsidies to private property owners from government or utilities.  Essentially, the discussion goes like this - if a $250 million power plant is needed, would it make more sense to distribute that money to people who want to install solar equipment on their properties and achieve the same power production without requiring the construction of a conventional power plant.  The distribution of the money would come through a buyback agreement between the utility and the property owner at a higher than market rate - thereby improving the payback equation for the private customer.  The counter argument goes that there might be a part of the public that does not want to have solar equipment on their properties but they would still end up paying for it through higher rates springing from these agreements.  The City of Lake Worth is thinking about such a system.

Anyway, I highly recommend going to tour the swamp - the solar plant tours are limited to organizations and are a little more complicated in terms of releases of liability and the like, so I don't think that is an option for the general public.