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.
How many acres of desert ecosystem are plunged into permanent shade to provide this 64 megawatts of power?
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.
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.
Solar Tower - Large Scale Renewable Energy Animation
also take a look at this discovery channel video - @ about 3mins in
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
62MW of Solar power. That's laughable, when your average gas turbine peaker cranks out a few hundred MW, and a big coal or nuclear station can crank out a 1000. Look at the energy portfolio of the USA, and its obvious, you need to have nuclear power if you want to get rid of coal.
I would further dispute the idea that there is a "cost" of global warming that should be recovered by the government by raising taxes on carbon. If that is not a liberal act of theft, I don't know what is. "Hi, your act imbalances the environment, so give me and my friends some money." That's what these messages are.
The real reason liberals are against nuclear power as a solution to global warming, rather than carbon taxes, is because, at the end of the day, they just want to steal your money for adding no value to the economy, just like they always do. I'm not disputing the science, but the salespeople pushing this are a bunch of fricking crooks.
Let's say for a minute, that global warming does come to pass, antarctica and iceland melt, the oceans rise, and even a billion people drown. My answer is: so what. The world population will still be higher than it is today, and, if it isn't, that's not a bad thing either. If the oceans rise up, sure, a bunch of people will have to move from the coastlines, but, look at all the construction jobs you'll get, and you'll have cities built with better transportation and newer technology. New York, London, and other coastal cities are all old anyway and its time to just move on.
Besides, you could take all of those disasters, and I'd almost rather have that, turning the whole world upside down, than give an extremist socialist liberal one thin dime. Let's see. Give the liberals money, or trash the planet. Sorry Earth.
It's just a no brainer. Better Dead than Red, means something to this day!
This is my sig.
They have the idea that they're going to store heat in huge steam accumulators. As TFA points out, however, it hasn't been proven that those would actually be workable at the necessary scale.
Since most of those captured photons will eventually be converted back into photons, via low pressure neon tubes.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The anti-coal fanatics need to get a grip. New environmental implementations on coal plants make these units very environmentally friendly. The united States is the Saudi Arabia of coal - If we want to reduce our foreign dependence on fossil fuels - we have an answer in coal. Coal plant construction is at an all time high - so statements that we are "running away from coal as fast as we can" are ridiculous. Wind and solar are good ideas in concept - but are not ready to supply even a fraction of the energy requirements used by the US. We enjoy relatively low cost energy in the united states - if we keep up the process that make it hard to build the necessary capacity to serve the needs - we WILL see energy prices increase drastically.
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
No they don't. Coal produces the most carbon-dioxide of any major fuel. This is elementary chemistry, because coal is mostly carbon.
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.
The right question to ask is where that infrastructure can be built:
Some 30 billion pounds of steam every year flow beneath the streets of Manhattan from the Battery to 96th Street. While it is unknown to most New Yorkers, Con Edison's subterranean steam system is the biggest steam district in the world, larger than the next four largest U.S. steam systems combined and boasting an annual steam production more than double that of Paris, Europe's largest system.
Rockefeller Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the United Nations [use steam] for heating and cooling - along with some 2,000 other customers and 100,000 buildings, from residential low-rises to commercial skyscrapers. All are in Manhattan, primarily because steam is most efficient and cost effective for high-rise buildings.
The number of steam customers has not increased in the past few years. "A lot of people don't know about it or don't know it's an option, or building owners don't want to go through the conversion process and don't want to spend the money to convert."
And so, for now at least, steam remains New York's neglected power source. "The steam system is a great asset to the city and delivers clean energy. We can clearly be doing more with it." Steam [2003]
Manhatten is a compact island with a population density of 67,000 people per square mile.
Manhatten is not hurting for lack of water - one gallon of water equals about eight pounds of steam.
The steam system is fueled by oil and natural gas. Manhatten draws its electricity from enormous hydroelectric plants upstate and in Canada.
The first system referred to in the article is at Kramer Junction in the Mojave Desert. Links: 1, 2. Angelenos, next time you're passing by that way, keep an eye peeled. It's really cool.
Find free books.
According to TFA the improvements are in simpler and more robust construction methods. Also, the manufacture of semiconductors is extremely toxic and high-energy; CSP plants use less toxic raw materials and more conventional manufacturing techniques. The manufacturing capacity to cover thousands of acres with PV cells would have to be developed; the capacity to cover thousands of acres with CSP exists already.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
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.
I think the most promising future energy sources, beginning with the best, are. . .
1. Aneutronic fusion / IEC Polywell reactors. If this works -- as seems likely, based on experimental results thus far -- it could begin displacing *all* other forms of power generation within 15 years. The potential is mind-boggling. This could make coal, fission, natural gas, wind, and the majority of solar power and petroleum fuels hopelessly obsolete. Rapidly.
2. Enhanced geothermal. According to a study from MIT, a relatively small R&D investment could open up enhanced geothermal energy production, at competitive costs, over wide geographical areas, including large parts of the USA. It could scale to meet a very large portion of electrical demand. An enhanced geothermal plant is conceptually similar to a nuclear plant, except that the atomic pile is safely tucked away under the earth's crust.
3. Nuclear fission. If fusion doesn't work out, there's good old fission, and you can build it anywhere, even places where enhanced geothermal won't work. We've learned a fair bit about designing and managing fission reactors, but very little has been put into practice in the USA since we haven't broken ground on any new nuclear plants for several decades. We need to start building *now* just to hold our ground as aging plants come up for decommissioning.
4. Solar. It's intermittent, expensive, and requires large amounts of land. And yet, the hype around solar is scary. Nuclear and geothermal have so many practical advantages, I have a hard time imagining solar providing most of the world's energy -- something all the faithful sun-worshippers expect. Still and all. . . Solar technology is being researched, progress is being made, and there's no question it will work at some price level. It may be useful for rooftop systems and assisting peak power demand, at the very least.
5. Biofuels. This is an inefficient method of gathering solar energy, and it competes with food production for the same resources. Realistically, we're not going to power our whole industrial society off this stuff. However, it does produce concentrated liquid fuels, which are highly useful for certain tasks. There will probably be some kind of long-term role for biofuels -- especially if we can get away from food crops and move to cellulose or algae.
>> Since when does C02 drive weather anyway? they ignore basic high school science. I found it amusing to watch a show the other night harping on about increased C02 raising sea water acidity, when in fact a warming ocean results in c02 ESCAPING the water.
.1 lower than it was at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, even as the oceans have been warming. According to your vast geochemical knowledge, shouldn't the opposite be happening?
You've clearly forgotten high school chemistry. Yet you're arrogant enough to believe that climate scientists are the ones who have forgotten.
If you have a system with water and a CO2 atmosphere in equilibrium, some concentration of CO2 will be dissolved in the water. Now, what happens if you double the CO2 in the atmosphere? More of it gets dissolved in the water. That's where the increased acidity comes from.
And yes, it's coming. pH is
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
It is kind of deceptive to compare a new solar plant (built today) with an old coal plant. The correct comparision is with new coal capacity which may come in closer to $0.04/kWh. With carbon capture and sequestration, $0.08/kWh might be expected. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070504151722.htm. Further, at present, solar competes with gas rather than coal because gas is used to meet peak demand. Gas costs less for construction than either coal or solar but it has volitile are rising fuel costs owing to declining production in North America. Over the long term, $0.15/kWh probably compares favorably with gas. Several recent studies have also noticed that coal energy (though not volume) production is declining in the US owing to substitution of lower grades of coal: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/05/three-cornered-ghost.html. This video on the coal resource is even more startling: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTUcxYdMmj4. If, within the lifetime of the new solar power plant, coal becomes scarce as gas is already doing, then the cost of power from the solar plant will be quite competitive. It is not that we lack coal but rather that we have begun to exhaust the coal that is cheap to mine. This is why salvage operations like the one that led to the disaster in Utah are becoming more common. Higher coal prices make these marginal operations more economical.
--
Rent solar power for your home: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users-selling-solar.html