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Florida To Build Solar-Powered City
Mike writes "The sunny state of Florida just announced that they will begin construction this year on the world's first solar-powered city. A collaboration between Florida Power & Light and development firm Kitson & Partners, the 17,000 acre city will generate all of its electrical needs via a 75 megawatt, $300 million solar-powered generator. The city will also use smart grid technology to manage its power and allow all inhabitants of the community to monitor their energy consumption."
I would like to live in what seems to be an Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow.
Do I understand correctly? They want to build a city from scratch?
In that case, why build a massive solar generator instead of fitting the rooftops with solar panels from the start? It would have the added advantage that one 'incident' at the generator site would nut shut down the whole city.
And it would probably save massive amounts of space.
will it be like one of those crazy retirement communities in florida where everyone drives golf carts? what will happen at night when all of those old farts plug their golf carts in? 8)
stephen
Unfortunately the sunniest places are also some of the hottest, requiring quite a lot of power-hungry air conditioning.
Hopefully they'll take advantage of highly-efficient ground source heat pumps since the water table is probably very high in the Ft. Meyers area.
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Okay, solar-powered city!
But let's see how much this is going to cost John Q. Resident.
$300 million divided by say 20,000 residents is $15K/resident. Add in the cost of money and amortization and you're talking at least $2,200 a year.
Plus they need to build a regular power station to handle 100% of the load for when it gets cloudy and rainy, which in Florida is a non-negligible part of the time. Plus the power lines to bring in all that power to the city. No, you can't assume the rest of their system has that much extra capacity in lines or generators.
It's not a terribly attractive deal for the actual ratepayers.
This is about 10-15 miles from my home in Arcadia, FL.
Most of the Babcock Ranch is swamp land, nature preserve (They do tours there, alligators, FL. panthers, etc..). I am guessing that is why the requirement for Solar power there, as there was a lot of stink locally when it was sold about what they would actually be allowed to do with the land. I look forward to moving there (if I can afford it!)
Several reasons:
(1) Installation on the ground is less expensive than on rooftops.
(2) If you put them on rooftops, all the houses would have to point in the same direction and have the same roof angles to get best efficiency
(3) In hurricane country, you might want to reset the panels horizontal in a storm to avoid damage
I assume they will be tied to the rest of the grid as backup, and to cover cloudy days, ie the city will generate its own power on average, but not necessarily at any given moment.
Start with wooden buildings and dirt roads. Add some cows, some pigs, chickens...
The almighty sun will make the plants grow and with those you can feed the animals and the people.
And you got a solar powered city.
You can have bees for the candles to read at night. The honey is a bonus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_storage
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Why not gas from all the decomposing old people?
is that it would be cheaper to that place to run a solar THERMAL generator. It would allow easy storage of heat (they use OIL for transfer medium; relatively trivial to store). But instead, they are taking the most expensive form of electricity there is; Solar PV.
I would love to know why dems are pushing wind and solar PV, when Solar PV is the most expensive option and wind can not be used as base power except with EXPENSIVE storage. Geo-thermal can serve as base power and solar thermal allows relatively cheap base power (solar thermal is cheaper than coal, but once you add storage, it is more expensive; but not by much).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Isn't thermal storage one of the options? One that actually makes sense in case of a solar power plant? (With the obvious requirement of ditching photovoltaics for solar thermal power generator, of course.)
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But the beez fly around crazy when you light them and don't last very long at all. Perhaps it would be smarter to use the wax, that burns. If you put some kind of wick in it you could have a very controable burn. Might patent it!
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You would indeed have to generate thermal solar power, store it and convert it into electricity later on. The main drawback with using molten salt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_energy_storage#Molten_salt_technology), which is one of the few viable options for electricity generation, is its high maintenance (as it's rather corrosive), and if it solidifies you're fucked as it takes a long time to liquify the entire circulation.
Another option is vanadium redox-flow batteries, (http://www.vrbpower.com/docs/casestudies/VRB%20-%20Installation%20at%20Riso%20for%20characterisation%20measurements.pdf), but they are not really commercially viable for such large projects and are still in the demo phase.
What I think'll happen is that they produce (during the daytime) enough energy to cover the average daily use (thereby feeding energy into the grid), and at night draw power from the normal electricity grid.
If they don't do that they're likely to be a bunch of PR-people making up stories.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
While overall this being a good idea, with so many vacancies in FL now, do they really need more real estate?
Why build a new city in Florida when all the ones they already have are chock full of empty, foreclosed houses? Its a lot more green to live in the places you've already built than it is to build new places. Putting solar panels on your new city doesn't change that equation.
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Perhaps Florida should plan for hydro power instead, given the projected rise in sea level? http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/florida.shtml
Florida is a hurricane-prone area, and the houses aren't built to-code. Thus, every few years a hurricane comes along and blows roofs off, making more work (and more money) for the contractors. If the original builder's code violations aren't caught, it's a net-win for everyone except the homeowner and insurance company.
Florida offers a double-edged sword, as the code is poor to begin with, and is almost always not followed. Corrupt building inspectors allow this sort of crap to continue unabated. Just take a look at this damaging report from 1998.
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So now, they want to put panels costing tens of thousands of dollars on said crappy roof? You'd have to be nuts to agree to such a stupid idea. But they're already crazy in Florida, as this whole code-violation situation is accepted as-normal, so I'm sure you'll find some takers.
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