Slashdot Mirror
Canada to Build 40MW Solar Power Plant
IceDiver writes "According to an article in the Toronto Star, an Ontario company has been given approval to build a 40MW solar power plant near Sarnia in Southwestern Ontario. This is enough power for about 10,000 homes. The plant will cover 365 hectares (1.4 sq. miles) and is to be operational by 2010. OptiSolar, the company building the plant, claims to have developed a way to mass produce the solar panels at a dramatically reduced cost, making the plant competitive with other forms of power generation. 'Compared to coal, nuclear power, even wind, solar's squeaky-clean image comes at a high price. OptiSolar is selling the electricity to the province under its new standard offer program, which pays a premium for electricity that comes from small-scale renewable projects. In the case of wind, it's 11 cents per kilowatt-hour. Solar fetches 42 cents per kilowatt hour, nearly four times as much.'"
I was shopping for home improvement stuff today and I put my hand on a 8x3 huge sheet of granite and was amazed at how much energy and heat was in that relatively thin piece. It got me to thinking why there has never been a real push for solar energy technology. Yes, in the past it has been cost prohibitive, but I guess I am asking why there has never been a "nuclear" level push behind solar tech and why isn't there a real push now that we have the technology available? I mean, come on, it's free, endless* energy! :)
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
"to power 10,000 homes ... the plant will cover 365 hectares"
It appears the footprint per house of the solar panels is actually less than the footprint of a house by itself. Surely it should be mandatory/make sense for compulsary solar panelling on houses?
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
If I converted to this, it would ramp my annual bill from $480 to $3200. Since we haven't had a significant nuclear accident since the Carter administration, which even then affected roughly NO ONE, I'll stick with my current supplier, thanks.
Photovoltaic is an appropriate technology for the private rooftops of wealthy environmentally-minded people. They don't mind a 20 year ROI, because they're installing the panels to feel good about making a difference. I, as a consumer of electricity, do not want to pay $0.42/kWh: that's probably one of the most expensive electricity sources in north america.
I especially don't want to pay those rates for a dead-end technology. It's one thing to build a pilot plant at subsidized rates if it can realistically be expected to scale... but we know enough about conventional PV cells that we can state, with some confidence, that only a major research breakthrough is ever going to make them a viable large-scale power source.
The question that has been bugging me for a long time is: Is it even possible for us to use only renewable energy sources? I'm almost convinced we will never get enough energy out of renewable sources. Even now there are stories in the newspapers about locals having not enough food and water because their resources are being used for the production of alcohol for car fuel. Only a tiny amount of the earth's car poulation uses alcohol as (constituent of) its fuel. What if every car on earth has to run on bio fuel? We won't have any land left for producing food. Covering the roof of your house in solar panels gives you just enough energy to power only your house, or maybe a bit more. Covering the roof of an appartment- or office building in solar panels will give nowhere near enough energy to power the building. We will have to start making energy-efficient appliances fast, and start to use our resources sparingly, or we will have big problems in the future.
-- Cheers!
Still, there's the little problem regarding nuclear waste. What the hell are we going to do with it?
Error: No error occurred
I think I need to inject some common sense into the arguments here. Yes, with current technology and costs, nuclear power may be cheaper.
But think about it for a moment : in the long run (as in next 10-20 years), what form of energy is subject to the biggest reduction in costs?
Solar : You make the panels. As soon as the technology stabilizes and we finally agree on a dirt cheap, efficient form of panel (there's about 20 different methods talked about) you build a plant that makes acres of it all day long. Every piece exactly like all the others. Fully automated. You truck them to a spot in barren wasteland, and dump them. Plug them in. A simple robot washes the grit off every now and then.
I don't think it is unreasonable to expect a factor of TEN reduction in cost. After all, the raw materials are low grade silicon wafers and energy (which can be supplied by panels produced by the plant itself...)
As for land : I calculated that at 10% net efficiency, we would need a 200x200 mile area of Arizona to power the entire United States. That includes all the energy used for transportation, and losses used in spinning up energy accumulator devices. That land currently sits idle, and while is a lot of area, there's still plenty of Arizona left (I used google earth to check this)
Nuclear : while solar requires only a handful of educated people, and can't be screwed up catostrophically, nuclear will ALWAYS require a lot of skilled labor to handle and high liability. Even the most dummy proof pebble ped reactor design would still need all sorts of care to handle the fuel and maintainence on the plant. You can't cut corners on nuclear. You can't mass produce
the plants as easily.
Everything that comes into proximity of the reactor becomes nuclear waste. It all has to be carefully handled. There's hazardous environments, especially for a plant that does reprocessing, where hot spent fuel has to be handled and worked with.
I like nuclear power : it's complex and cool and involves all sorts of neat things. Fusion is even cooler. But realistically, for the forseeable future solar is a MUCH better prospect. I believe had a few billion been sunk into a robotic factory to manufacture solar panels, we would not even be having this debate.
(when I say forseeable...I mean it. There's actually a VASTLY more efficient way to do interplanetary, and even interstellar, travel that doesn't involve fusion or fission plants...)
Nuclear power serves mainly as a red herring that people who don't want to change anything wave around to criticize environmentalists.
When people start dying from exposure walking from their driveway to their front door in Cornwall, I would expect power consumption to start going up.