... and the gas industry knows it.
Any ignorant Texas politician who disagreed would probably face a back-room "reeducation" by blunt object. That might not change what they tell their gullible constituents, but they'd certainly never say "NO" to the likes of Elon Musk, Waren Buffet, Jeff Bezos, or Google.
Projects like this will only prolong our dependence on natural gas and do nothing in the long run to reduce the total amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses humans eventually dump into the atmosphere.
The best capacity factors claimed for large solar projects in the California deserts is 28%. (This is probably an exaggeration.) This means solar is unable to meet electrical demand 72% of the time. California burns gas when the sun isn't shining.
The capacity factors for typical home solar power systems in California is less than 20%, often much less.
Wind and solar power alone are not economically viable without fossil fuels, especially natural gas.
The actual useful output of this scheme is not equivalent to an 875 megawatt nuclear or fossil fuel plant running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, as this article implies. The carbon intensity of the overall hybrid system is at best about 4/5 that of a purely natural gas fueled system. This project is 875 megawatts of intermittent solar power applied to 875 megawatts of filthy fossil fuel power as greenwash.
If google built an actual 875 megawatt nuclear power plant they wouldn't need the fossil fuel or solar power plants and their carbon intensity would be vastly reduced.
That is an entirely different nightmare, of course. Would nuclear powered Artificial Intelligence actually make our world a better place?
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