Contest #633: Cerro Prieto Geothermal Power Station, Mexico

Cerro Prieto sits on top of a large geothermal field associated with the Cerro Prieto volcano. The whole thing sits on the southern end of the San Andreas fault system.

The power station is the largest (in size) geothermal complex in the world, producing about 850MW of electricity.

The verified users who found it were:

  • Walter_V_R
  • Martin de Bock
  • Phil Ower
  • hhgygy
  • Paul Voestermans
  • Luciano P.
  • Andreas Meister
  • Lighthouse
  • Hans1789
  • MuThDdDe
  • John Gospel IV
  • Garfield
  • René De La Carte
  • Nancy Barbato

And after the hint:

  • Rob de Wolff

Rule Change starting #633

We have had a large number of correct answers (17 in the last 2 games) coming from non-verifiable e-mail addresses. These answers appear to be coming to us via anonymizing services such as TOR and/or VPNs, and judging from the structure of the answers and the fact that a large number of them seem to be from people with famous names, we strongly suspect they are coming from the same person or small group of persons. Why they are doing this is beyond us — there doesn’t appear to be any financial gain to be had from this, it just appears to be someone having their idea of “fun”.

This is a problem because we have had so many suspect answers that it is diluting the hard work that you wonderful people put in.

In an effort to combat this, we are instituting a slight rule change effective immediately. This change may or may not make a difference, but we feel we owe it to our regular players to at least try to combat this stuff.

So, here we go:

  • For a player to be recognized in the reveal, leaderboard or past winners page, they will need to provide a verifiable e-mail address and respond to a verification e-mail following their first contest entry following this post with the following exception:
    • Anyone who has played prior to Contest #630 and is in our database of players prior to Contest #630 will be considered to be verified already.

Contest #632 — Noor III CSP, Ouarzazate Solar Power Station, Morrocco

Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) refers to electricity generation by reflection and concentration of sunlight on a target, either a trough or a tower, heating that target and using that heat to run generators (boil water -> steam, etc).

The Ouarzazate Power Station has 3 CSP nodes, Noor I and Noor II are “trough” CSPs and Noor III, the image in the contest, is the world’s second tower CSP with storage (the first being Crescent Dunes in Nevada, USA). The sunlight heats a molten salt tank at the top, which stores the energy through the non-sunlight hours.

The sustained power generation from this site is about 150MW.

Those who got lit by these mirrors before the hint were:

  • Garfield
  • Paul Voestermans
  • Martin de Bock
  • Lighthouse
  • Walter_V_R
  • Phil Ower
  • hhgygy
  • Glenmorren
  • Gillian B
  • Rob de Wolff
  • Chris Nason
  • Andreas Meister
  • Yusef Yakub Hoca Fendi
  • Luís Filipe Miguel
  • Nancy Barbato
  • MC Solaar
  • John Gospel IV
  • Teemu Pukki
  • MiranDese-12
  • krenek
  • Luciano P.
  • pizzaro_12
  • Riel L
  • J.V. Conyers

And after the hint:

  • VliegendeHollander999
  • Elrober
  • Robin
  • David Kozina
  • MuThDdDe
  • Root007-1
  • Wista