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."

Comments

Nuclear power isn't all bright...

[Bananatree3]

Nuclear power, though promising in terms of cutting emissions, does carry a lot of other hidden costs. Nuclear power for the US at a large level would require importing Uranium from other countries, as the US only has a small amount of Uranium ore. Whereas solar/wind/etc. would be generating the electricity right here on American soil without foreign imports.

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.

Nuclear waste

[Mike Van Pelt]

But solving the nuclear waste issue (or, more accurately, permitting one of the solutions to the nuclear waste problem to be implemented) is not optional. We have to do it to dispose of the waste we've already got. So one of the solutions to disposing of this waste will ultimately be implemented, even if it's just shipping it all to France, where they are disposing of the waste quite handily, thank you very much.

Once we dispose of existing waste, we can dispose of new waste the same way.

Greedy greedy greedy

[FatSean]

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.

Re:If they sold the "waste" heat

[Colin Smith]

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.

Re:Used

[Wrath0fb0b]

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

Re:Missing information in story

[An Onerous Coward]

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.