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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.'"
No misunderstand the program. It isn't end-consumers who pay the $0.42/KWh, its the Province of Ontario, through the Ontario Power Authority. It simple gets pumped into the grid, and the consumers continue to pay the standard rate. The contract with the Province is good for 20 years.
The idea is to spur development of renewable energy sources, while fossil fuel based plants are taken offline. It's a pretty sweet deal for the microgenerators (the program is only open to projects that generate a maximum of 10MW at a voltage of 50kV or less).
Note that during peak periods, an extra 3.52/KWh is paid out, and the contract is indexed to inflation. And anyone in Ontario can apply to have their renewable resource microgenerator included in the program simply by filling out an online form.
IMO, this is an excellent program. Ontario has been rebuilding nuclear capacity, has a lot of hydroelectric generation, and has been taking fossil fuel based plants offline (slowly). My family has some holiday property in central Ontario that goes unused for much of the year, and I've long thought that we should invest in some solar panels and a small wind turbine hooked into the power grid to generate some revenue. A program like this could very well make it worth it in the long run. Every such project, no matter how small, is that much less reliance needed on a fossil fuel-based plant somewhere.
Yaz.
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.