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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.'"
6 cents.
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.
The nearby nuclear power plant here has three reactors, each of which can generate over 1100MW (one reactor is currently off-line but is on schedule to be on-line next month, now capable of up to 1280MW). Even closer to my house is the dam that can generate over 140MW.
Building a solar-panel power station is "cool", "neat", and "oh, so hip". However, it makes no economic sense. Solar power is about 3x the cost of the most expensive nuclear power.
Nuclear power is the way to go.
Oops -- I forgot the URL to the programs website, for the interested:
http://www.powerauthority.on.ca/sop/
Yaz.
Why use photovoltaic panels for a power plant? They're nice for small applications, or for homes, but if you're building a power plant, something like the Solar Energy Generating Systems in the Mojave Desert makes more sense. They make 165MW and I believe only take 1,000 acres (only slightly more than the 365 hectares of this one). They've already been in operation over 20 years, but there doesn't seem to be anyone doing something similar.
SEGS
I sure hope that they didn't enable disasters or the space monster might take the solar plant out. Anyway, it'll fall down in exactly 10 years, so what's the point?
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...)
The advantage solar power brings is that peak usage is during the day, which happens to be just exactly when solar power is being produced. So, the coal powered plants don't have to work at as high of an output, and during the night, it still operates normally (in most areas, traditional plants operating at minimal levels (they can't be fully shut down on a nightly basis) produce more than enough electricity to meet night demands). Solar plants, unless combined with a storage mechanism (hydrogen production, batteries, etc.) do not replace traditional power, but instead augments it.
Building a solar-panel power station is "cool", "neat", and "oh, so hip". However, it makes no economic sense. Solar power is about 3x the cost of the most expensive nuclear power.
Nuclear power is the way to go.
Ok, its not quite as simple as that.
Nuclear power by standard technology requires enrichment. Thats because they require a much higher percentage of U235 in order to sustain a reaction than occurs naturally.
U235 is only 0.7% of uranium (as it has a half life about one tenth of U238). You need 4% or more to do a conventional nuclear reactor.
Enrichment also means throwing away a lot of U238, which will never be used in a conventional reactor.
Now we can use U238 in a breeder reactor (and Thorium, which converts to U233). But if you do that, its a whole different technology, and the costs aren't as clear cut.
If you were to try and run the world on conventional reactors, the supply of uranium would last us 20 years or so. If you can use breeders, you will get maybe a 100 years (depends how much we use). If you add in thorium, several hundred years.
So the only price that is relevant is the breeder reactor price of electricity. Because there isn't enough U235 in the world to really get serious about using it this way.
Breeder reactor technology is real, we can do it. Its a bit more expensive, but will no doubt get cheaper with use. Guess what? So will solar power.
And, at the risk of being doom and gloom, guess which one will still be plentiful in the year 3000? There is a finite amount of fissile material on the planet. The sun should be good for about 500 million years or so, as opposed to 500 years.
I know that there are energy storage issues for baseload, but there are solutions such as solar towers. And open battery storage.
I'm not opposed to nuclear power, but in the longer run, its also a stop gap for solar energy (including wind & hydro as being solar in origin), geothermal and tidal energy. So that is where we need to spend the big dollars.
My 2c worth.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
Take a look at this map:
http://www.solar4power.com/map2-global-solar-power .html
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I just have to say that I agree with you. That's one of the points I've tried to make: There are limits to funding, economies, etc... While the supply is not fixed, there are processes that are more efficient than others.
A 40MW plant of solar is unlikely to enable the takedown of even a single coal plant. Even ten of them is unlikely to. Ten of these solar plants would cost $3Billion dollars, which, depending upon which figures you use, would result in 1-3GW of new nuclear plant capacity, which would enable the shutting down of a number of coal plants.
Is it just me, or does it appear that somebody's being awfully free with the troll mod on anybody being down on solar power, or this install of it?
I don't read AC A human right
We measure in NASCAR race tracks hereabout these days.
Using Homestead Speedway as a baseline at 600 acres,
that there solar plant will take 1.5 Nascars of space.
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
The problem I have with nuclear power is that it is woefully inefficient. Using nuclear fission to generate steam that drives a turbine to produce electricity seems wasteful to me.
As our understanding of the physical world increases, it should be possible to extract electrons directly from the items undergoing fission. Then I'd consider it efficient use.