World's Largest Solar Plants Planned In California

Pickens writes "Two photovoltaic solar power plants will be built in San Luis Obispo County in California, covering 12.5 square miles, that together will generate about 800 megawatts of power, the latest indication that solar energy is starting to achieve significant scale. 'If you're going to make a difference, you've got to do it big,' said Randy Goldstein, the chief executive of OptiSolar. OptiSolar will employ enough of its amorphous silicon thin-film solar panels at its Topaz Solar Farm project to generate 550 MW. Meanwhile, SunPower will install mechanical tracking for its more expensive 250 MW-worth of crystalline silicon photovoltaics at High Plains Ranch II in a bid to boost their efficiency by 30 percent from following the sun across the sky. The power will be sold to Pacific Gas & Electric, which is under a state mandate to get 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010. The utility said that it expected the new plants to be competitive with other renewable energy sources, including wind turbines and solar thermal plants. 'These landmark agreements signal the arrival of utility-scale PV solar power that may be cost-competitive with solar thermal and wind energy,' said Jack Keenan, chief operating officer and senior vice president for PG&E." Reader thefickler notes some related news that researchers have developed a method of collecting infrared rays at night to supplement day-time solar power.

Comments

Nuke Plants More Dense

[Anonymous Coward]

A nuclear plant could produce twice that on about ten acres.

Re:Nuke Plants More Dense

[Anonymous Coward]

But how could you place a nuclear power plant in a desert without a river to cool it?

There are simply only few places where a power plant can be built at all, even if no humans lived everywhere and had something against it.

In the summer last year multiple nuclear plants in Europe had to get special permissions to make the rivers boil or they had switched off, just because there was not enough cool enough water in the rivers. So limiting a nuclear power plant to the area is takes itself it just absurd, you need much more place.

Re:Nuke Plants More Dense

[EricTheMad]

You're right that it's really a problem inherent in the specific plant design. For instance, a Pebble Bed Reactor is much safer, and doesn't require water for cooling. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor

Re:Nuke Plants More Dense

[Firethorn]

And we wave away the pesky protection and isolation of waste while it cools for a time longer than our history of recognizable civilization.

I believe that this is the first time I've heard of 'wave away' being used to disparage recycling. With recycling the waste is split 90/10 into usable fuel and waste that only needs to be stored for a couple hundred years - much more doable.

Re:Nuke Plants More Dense

[QuoteMstr]

This is another example of the environmentalist's fallacy.

First, why focus on nuclear waste while ignoring all kinds of other long-lived, harmful industrial outputs from processes like semiconductor manufacturing or steel refining?

Second, the volume of nuclear waste is tiny. The waste produced by a nuclear plant in a decade might fill a house. And by reprocessing the waste, we can reduce its volume by 90%. Compared to other forms of power generation, nuclear plants are practically clean.

Third, the waste that is produced is not all that dangerous: the way radioisotopes work, the more radiation a substance produces, the shorter its half-life. Long-lived waste products will be low-radioactivity and inert.

Re:Nuke Plants More Dense

[Detritus]

Get yourself a good chemistry/physics reference book and look up the isotopes of plutonium and the other radioactive elements. If it's "hot", it has a relative short half-life. Contrary to popular belief and anti-nuke propaganda, plutonium is not the most toxic substance on Earth. It's nasty stuff, but so are many other elements and compounds. If you want something that will give you nightmares, check out dimethylmercury. It makes plutonium look like health food.

Re:Nuke Plants More Dense

[Free the Cowards]

Plutonium is not very radioactive. Its activity is fairly low. The half life of Plutonium 239 is approximately 24,100 years, meaning that any given atom probably lasts a very long time before decaying. In turn this means that the number of atoms decaying at any given moment is quite small. Furthermore, Plutonium decays in the form of alpha particles, which don't penetrate at all. Alpha particles are stopped by human skin, still in the dead bits, and thus are completely harmless when external to the human body. You can hold a big lump of Plutonium in your hand all day and not have the slightest ill effect. It only becomes dangerous when ingested, and even then it tends not to be absorbed by the body except in certain forms, for example fine particles breathed into the lungs.

As for toxicity, it's pretty bad, but not nearly as evil as it's made out to be. I'd certainly rather have a little more Plutonium around than live with the many tons of mercury per year emitted straight into the atmosphere by the average coal plant, given the choice between the two.

Lastly, consider that several tons of Plutonium have been released straight into the atmosphere as a result of nuclear bomb testing, and there hasn't been any real environmental harm from this. It's certainly no good thing, but on the other hand this is vastly worse than what happens with nuclear waste, which is safely stored rather than being vaporized and released into the air.

Re:Nuke Plants More Dense

[Atario]

account for the silicon extraction and production as well.

You're kidding, right?

Uranium's average concentration in the Earth's crust is (depending on the reference) 2 to 4 parts per million.

Most uranium mining is very volume-intensive, and thus tends to be undertaken as open-pit mining. It is also undertaken in only a small number of countries of the world, as the resource is relatively rarely found.

Measured by mass, silicon makes up 25.7% of the Earth's crust and is the second most abundant element on Earth, after oxygen.

"Silicon mining", I couldn't find anything about. They seem to just find the nearest sand and scoop some up.

So, yeah, let's hold silicon's feet to the fire! Stop silicon mining now! <eyeroll />

800 MW?

[Anonymous Coward]

12.5 square miles of silicon, and it still generates less than a single average sized block of a nuclear power plant (~1000 MW).

Re:800 MW?

[Ironsides]

OP:

12.5 square miles of silicon, and it still generates less than a single average sized block of a nuclear power plant (~1000 MW).

You:

is that counting all the space taken for the railways to bring in and store the coal? (or for the mine for the coal)

Me: Since when does Nuclear or Solar require Coal?

Re:Hail?

[rthille]

Hail?

No, coastal CA. The last time I remember hail was about 4 years ago. The pieces were less than 1cm. And that's living ~5 hours north of SLO County. When I lived 2 hours south of SLO (for 35 years), I remember hail maybe 3 times, all the same small pieces.

Re:Split some atoms

[swillden]

If space is your concern, think about the square miles needed to permanently store the nuclear waste.

It's tiny compared to solar plant scales, even without reprocessing, and if we'd ever fix the political problem we have with breeder reactors, we'd reduce the waste volume by two orders of magnitude.

Uranium also doesn't grow on trees, you know?

Again, reprocessing vastly increases the power obtainable from a given amount of uranium, and use of breeders also means that we can use lots of other radioactive elements, many of which are far more common than uranium.

The power plant that you can see four miles from your house is just a tiny part of the whole complex.

A fact that is even more true of PV solar plants.

Fission is the cheapest, cleanest energy technology we have, and one of the safest as well. Unfortunately, it's bound up in nearly-intractable political problems. Eventually, though, oil and coal will be expensive enough, and we'll have seen that solar, wind, wave, etc. technologies simply aren't workable on a sufficiently large scale, and then the political obstacles will disappear.

Scale Required (boring statistics within)

[bill_mcgonigle]

So, what would it cost to replace California's carbon point sources with 'renewable' (I know it costs energy to make these things) energy? I'll share my math, others can expand:

It says here that California in 2007 used 230,931 of 'non-renewable' energy. It says here that California's peak demand was 52,863 MW when total usage was 265,000 GWH (2002). Adjusting to the current levels, a 14% increase, we get a current peak of 60,264 MW.

So, if these solar plants can produce a combined 800MW, you'd need 75 of these projects to handle peak energy generation. If we factor in 10% for transmission losses, and another 14% increase over the next six years (while they get built) then you're looking at 94 of these projects, which is really two projects, so 188 plants, or by 2020, 214 plants, using 1,338 square miles of desert. That's only 5% of the Mojave Desert, ignoring mountains, ignoring environmentalist lawsuits preventing destruction of desert habitat, not thinking about what happens when Joshua trees want to grow up under solar panels (Monsanto Roundup?).

So, that's 18 plants a year to build. It's probably possible, though what that would cost in rare earth elements, and what would the construction of such project do to the market prices of those rare elements? I don't know, except to think it would be bad.

OK, so how about replacing natural gas, outside of electricity generation? Using the information from here it says that half of the natural gas is consumed for electricity generation, so we can double that part of the number for the total energy budget of electricity and natural gas. That increases the GWH total to 298,962 GWH, or a 29% increase. So, we're up to 276 solar projects.

So, how about converting all the motor vehicles to plug-ins? It says here that CA uses about 24 Billion gallons of transportation fuels a year. This calculator puts that at 3,032,000,000 GW, or if divided by the number of hours in the year, gives 345,881 GWH (TODO: check units?). So, add to our current total and multiply by 2.16 and get 596 solar projects, at 3725 square miles, or about 15% of the Mojave Desert, and 50 of these solar projects a year to get CA largely carbon-neutral by 2020.

Now, this is a bit of a simplification. This is meeting peak demand with current generation. There might be some opportunity for storage, though demand somewhat parallels light availability. What is the quoted efficiency, average (during what time period) or max? This doesn't count wind power as I don't know the rules of thumb for standby generation (I heard recently 90% standby needed to be in production for wind to account for variability and startup time). I'm assuming no new hydro will be built (probably safe). I'm assuming solar won't get more efficient (it will). I'm assuming the installed solar won't lose efficiency over time (it will). I don't know what the proper rule of thumb is for calculating demand based on time-of-day usage. etc. So, it's much complicated, but I wanted to understand what scope people were talking about when they advocate an all-solar solution.

I'm also counting nuclear as 'non-renewable' in this calculation as folks who want all-solar usually are anti-nuclear. If you factor in the existing nuclear generation it gets a bit better. If you wanted to power CA on all-nuclear instead you'd need about 300 reactors covering 22 square miles of land, if they're like the 1.6GW one they proposed in Fresno. Or you could use newer, safer technologies instead and clean up our existing nuclear waste by feeding stuff currently bound for Yucca Mountain into these reactors and

Re:NUCLEAR IS NEVER THE ANSWER

[MJOverkill]

Canada uses CANDU nuclear reactors, which do not promote nuclear weapons since they use regular unenriched uranium. Canada also has no nuclear weapons. The idea that nuclear power is tied to nuclear weapons is absurd.

Re:Hail?

[BigDaddyOttawa]

Most panels are able to withstand hail stones of up to 1" in diameter , or more with a thin (0.188") acrylic cover sheet.

The damage, if any, will likely just occur to the glass cover, which could possibly be replaced without replacing the whole panel.

Re:NUCLEAR IS NEVER THE ANSWER

[Solandri]

In defense of the 'nutter', nuclear power is so expensive it's not really worth investing in, unless you are planning to build some nukes.

Nuclear power is the cheapest power source, cheaper than all but the cheapest coal plants, cheaper than hydro and wind, much cheaper than solar.
Swedish power company's power generation costs
IEA survey on electricity generation costs (PDF, page 46 fig 3.10, page 57, fig 4.6 and 4.7)

Nuclear is also the safest in terms of fatalities per MWh generated (yes, even including Chernobyl).
Stats on all significant power generation accidents 1969-1996 (PDF, page 240, fig 7.2.6)

There are lots of other neat stats in the two PDFs, including injury rates (nuclear is about the same as hydro, only coal is safer), wind generation is much cheaper in the U.S. (maybe because the U.S. is only building it when it makes economic sense instead of where ever environmentalists want it?), solar costs almost 10x as much as other power sources

Re:NUCLEAR IS NEVER THE ANSWER

[WalksOnDirt]

According to your link, the new Advanced CANDU Reactor does used enriched fuel.

Re:NUCLEAR IS NEVER THE ANSWER

[Average]

Perhaps the only country you can think of. But, countries with commercial nuclear power but no nuclear weapons program are:

Japan (your caveat noted)
South Korea (including domestic designs)
Canada (including domestic designs)
Spain
Belgium
Germany
Taiwan (similar to your caveat on Japan, though)
Ukraine (built in Soviet days, though)
Czech Republic
Switzerland
Bulgaria
Finland
Slovakia
Brazil
South Africa (they had nuclear weapons at one time, though)
Hungary
Romania
Mexico
Lithuania (again, built in Soviet days)
Argentina
Slovenia
Netherlands
and Armenia

Re:NUCLEAR IS NEVER THE ANSWER

[dakameleon]

Also important to remember: in most nuclear power generating countries new plants where never outlawed. If any company wanted to build one they could. The fact that they haven't says something about the cost/benefit analysis.

Wikipedia begs to differ: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants#New_plants_under_construction

Re:Why would anyone put capitol at risk in Califor

[evilviper]

California is a third world country that does not know it yet.

Nice troll. It's always in the run-up to an election that the right-wing shills come out in-force.

How many 3rd world countries do you know that have a larger economy than all but 8 (out of 190) countries (ironically, including the USA) around the world?

There isn't ONE state, country, city, municipality, etc., that hasn't, at one time or another, done something a bit unfair and/or short-sighted. Just try and name one.

Re:NUCLEAR IS NEVER THE ANSWER

[BlueParrot]

Naaa, Sweden's policy is even worse than the US one. Not only are we on a once through cycle, we also have a law prohibiting construction of newer more modern plants, meaning the lifetime of the old ones had to be extended.

The disposal has been handled a bit better here however. The authorities were smart enough to choose a repository site right next to one of the existing nuclear sites. The people who live there are largely positive to the plant and plans for a repository, possibly because they benefit from it in terms of energy and jobs, but also because they are used to the idea of having nuclear infrastructure nearby. Compare this to the US approach where the dump was located in a state that benefits very little from the industry that generates the waste. Public relations disaster... Also, in Sweden we have an interim storage facility that is already operating, so we're not in a rush to deploy a final repository in order to be able to accept waste from the utilities. As a consequence our regoluatory institutes have had plenty of time to asses and research the possible sites and technologies that could be used.