Slashdot Mirror
Future Looks Bright for Large Scale Solar Farms
Hugh Pickens writes "The economist reports that Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) systems that capture and focus the sun's rays to heat a working fluid and drive a turbine, are making a comeback. Although the world's largest solar farm was built over twenty years ago, until recently no new plants have been built. Now with the combination of federal energy credits, the enactment of renewable energy standards in many states, and public antipathy to coal fired power plant, the first such plant to be built in decades started providing 64 megawatts of electricity to Las Vegas this summer. Electricity from the Nevada plant costs an estimated 17 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh), but projections suggest that CSP power could fall to below ten cents per kWh as the technology improves. Coal power costs just 2-3 cents per kWh but that will likely rise if regulation eventually factors in the environmental costs of the carbon coal produces."
Concentrated solar power isn't competing with coal for cost-efficiency. Coal isn't an option, and we are (or should be) working to run the hell away from coal as quickly as possible.
The real competition is other forms of clean power generation, like nuclear. Nuclear's costs are about the same as coal; why build a concentrated solar plant when you can just build a nuke plant?
We're actually going to start charging industries for the environmental cleanups that tax payers have to pay for? What a novel concept.
Solar is practical once we tax all of its competitors and mandate its use. No thanks.
Uranium ore is also a finite resource, and like coal will eventually run out. Also, utilizing several technologies at once to produce power has its benefits. Relying on a single energy source for power doesn't have the same inherent security of having many different kinds of energy sources. My opinion is we should spend the mega billions needed for building a large Nuclear power network when you could spend that and develop a large, multi-pronged sustainable energy system that requires no imports.
Once we dispose of existing waste, we can dispose of new waste the same way.
Probably 1 acre would be 1 acre too much for the Earth First types.
Can't use coal because it's a CO2 producer.
Can't use nuclear because radioactive waste is scary.
Can't use hydro because those damns endanger the snail darter minnow.
Can't use tidal because it disrupts the spawning cycles of the crab.
And now we can't use solar because it puts areas under shade.
Sorry, but those costs suck donkey dick. Consumers aren't going to be very happy about doubling or tripling the cost of electricity, no matter how much better it makes people feel about screwing up the environment.
This sounds like a waste of money on a technology without much hope of being economically viable. I'm quite certain that photo-voltaic is a lot cheaper than this, and wind power definately is. It sounds like there's a good reason why this technology was abandoned.
AccountKiller
Coal has hidden costs, such as the effect of the additional carbon in the atmosphere and the pollution from the plants. We should un-hide those costs, and put them right in the purchase price so people can make informed decisions when choosing their energy sources.
Anything less is willful ignorance.
Blar.
Head over to West Virginia some time and take a look at the absolute devastation wrought on a once vibrant ecosystem there to support our appetite for coal. Entire mountains topped off and dumped into the valleys. Then consider the square miles taken up by all the power plants burning that coal. And we haven't even considered the pollution caused by burning the coal.
Now take a trip to the desert southwest - where you can drive for hours in any direction and see nothing but bare rock and hardpan. The power has to come from somewhere - 100 miles^2 of desert seems a pretty good trade to me.
Let me quote http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power:
"A British Wind Energy Association report gives an average generation cost of onshore wind power of around 3.2 pence per kilowatt hour (2005). Cost per unit of energy produced was estimated in 2006 to be comparable to the cost of new generating capacity in the United States for coal and natural gas: wind cost was estimated at $55.80 per MWh, coal at $53.10/MWh and natural gas at $52.50."
3.2 pence is 6.4 cents. So why build a plant with technology that can only do 17 cents with hope that it might scale down to 10 cents?
You don't, you co-locate industries which might make use of the high temperature waste steam on site. Including things like adsorption chillers.
Then you pipe the rest of the heat as hot water to homes and businesses which want to use it for space or water heating.
Tell your "engineering friend" to look up "District Heating" on Wikipedia or Google. It's been in practice for more than a century and is widespread in places like Iceland, Denmark and New York.
Deleted
In principle I agree that coal is not a fuel of first choice (or second or third...) from an environmental perspective. It's dirty, dangerous to mine, hard to clean and has other problems besides. Unfortunately the two biggest manufacturing economies in the world (China & the USA) have HUGE coal reserves and are relatively poor in most other economically competitive fuels. (note the word relatively, obviously both have access to oil, gas, uranium and any other fuel you care to mention) Coal's simple abundance and the installed base of coal fired power plants means it's not going away any time soon. I'm fully in favor of regulating coal to be as clean as technology allows, even at some economic cost. But hoping that the worlds biggest economy will turn its back on a cheap, abundant energy supply, even if it is dirty and undesirable, is just not realistic.
Depending on where you get your figures, as much of 50% of US nuclear power is generated from recycled Soviet uranium, either extracted from decommissioned warheads or excess manufactured product that was in the pipeline at the time of collapse. The US also has a large number of vintage-era nuclear weapons that are no longer considered militarily viable (the trigger mechanisms decay quite a bit) and so could be recycled. Finally, if the going ever gets really bad, we can always reprocess our spent fuel for Plutonium and/or use breeder reactors to make the stuff - this is the primary mode in which the Japanese nuclear industry sustains itself without outside supply, although the cheap price of Uranium makes them feel kind of dumb.
In short, the US does not need to import a single gram of fissile material to run indefinitely. Solar/Wind/etc. . are fine ideas for the long term but do not meet our power needs today. We should absolutely invest in these alternative technologies and, while we are at it, invest in conservation and efficiency. Unfortunately, right now, we are making almost 50% of our power from coal that is massively environmentally destructive from the second it is strip-mined out of the ground to its large final carbon contribution. Nuclear power is the only technology currently available that can put a dent in coal usage. If you show me an alternative that can scale to 400 TerraWattHours, I'll withdraw that claim.
References:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/epm_sum.html
http://www.usec.com/v2001_02/Content/News/NewsTemplate.asp?page=/v2001_02/Content/News/NewsFiles/04-13-03.htm
http://www.defencetalk.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-215.html
It's interesting how we have to be held captive to the whims of big capital players when such proven and ideal technologies are already in existence. You notice that SEGS was one of the links here. Doesn't the SEGS story seem a little strange? Doesn't it seem like part of the story is being left out?
If it worked so well and is still producing to this day with a parabolic revenue curve then why did they stop at 350MW peak? The answer is plain as day. The oil crisis ended. Back in the seventies when the first oil crisis hit, private investors decided to hop on the solar thermal gravy train. When the oil crisis turned out to be a big global confidence trick and the price collapsed, that was the end of the money for SEGS. Sure, you can argue that solar thermal competes with coal and natural gas rather than oil, but the truth is that energy markets aren't rational like that. Not then and not now either. The collapse of the oil in the eighties price killed off expansion funding for SEGS.
It's not that the technology failed or proved unworkable, the funding dried up because of the deflation of the seventies energy bubble.
This is a good example of how so-called free markets and energy policies don't match. Our market structures are predicated on the interests of corporate shareholders which is fine for some things, but that's no way to set a coherent long-term policy on vital core utilities. Corporations plan quarter by quarter not decade by decade. It's a simple fact of corporate accounting that the focus is three months at a time. Well that may be fine for Mattell and Pepsi, but energy policy is about a fundamental resource that every single citizen of the country is guaranteed to need for the rest of their lives and not just the latest marketing trend.
Think about the things that we do agree to pay for with taxes and compare them. Let's take education for instance. Does every member of the community benefit from the public school system? How about adults who have no kids? Why should they have to pay for public education? And yet those same people sure as hell do need electricity, don't they.
How about public funding for highways? Does it really make sense that we publicly fund the highway systems with tax dollars which clearly benefits both the auto and petroleum industries but we find it impossible to create a clean energy system using tax financing? Why is that?
Let's not even mention direct tax dollar funding for oil companies.
If we don't direct public money towards this direction, I can predict the future. The oil thing blows away. All the paranoid bullshit about peak oil turns out to be just that, just as it was in the seventies. Oil drops and all the other energy markets do the same for no logical reason and th funding for solar thermal dries up and blows away for twenty years before we get back on this fucked up cycle. Let's put an end to this ridiculous game by funding energy policy with public monies to build out a nationwide solar thermal energy supply.
This is old and proven technology as there have been CSP systems in operation for over 20 years. They have increased efficiencies in the collection systems slightly over recent years with better glass insulators/collectors and better transmission fluids, along with heat storage mechanisms. But, those systems have been operating in the 90% efficiency range already yet the whole system runs at around 14% conversion efficiency. Fourteen percent is where Solar PV is and that number hasn't changed much in 20 years for CSP. Funding new CSP plants with tax $$$ is not what's needed and won't solve anything.
From what I've seen, these people backing the CSP systems like or insist on steam turbine generating systems because that is what's used for coal, gas, etc. The existing utilities know how to spec these generating systems and their TCO( total cost of ownership ) is well known. Unfortunately, these are not so efficient and there seems to be opposition to other technologies for conversion from heat to electricity. It's an old school mentality which will keep this out of mainstream use and that is really what the existing energy industry wants anyways.
So the only thing I have heard is that government funding making this an option because it is "green" technology. That is the wrong approach IMO. Until someone puts a $$$ value on carbon, health, environmental effects on a per KWh basis, this will remain more expensive than other energy industry owned power systems and remain a fringe and subsidized player. Again, just what the status quo wants. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
That's Jimmy Carter, the guy who was thrown up against an oil crisis and decided to do what any rational, thinking person would do: develop alternatives. And not start any wars. ;-)
Uh, Jimmy Carter invaded Iran. He went in with too few troops, and tried to micromanage things from Washington, and got our ass kicked. Of course you are correct in the sense that he did not start the war, the islamic fundamentalists started it and this same war is still going on today.
One of the more absurd objections to the Yucca Mountain site is "Las Vegas is growing, and before too long, it'll want to be encroaching on Yucca Mountain."
Hello, people, hello! There is something between Las Vegas and Yucca Mountain. That something is the Nevada Test Site, a moonscape of radioactive holes in the ground, uncontained. That is already there. It is, by any rational measure, much more of an impediment to Las Vegas growing in that direction than the Yucca Mountain waste repository would ever be.
The long-term (tens of thousands of years) issue is only true if the plutonium is buried with the waste, instead of burned in new fuel rods, the way any sane fuel cycle will do.
It just goes to show that you anti-environmental types are happy to believe whatever absurd caricature allows you to feel justified in keeping your Hummers.
Show me one frakking environmental group that has come out in opposition to solar or wind energy. C'mon, just one.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!