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Large Scale 24/7 Solar Power Plant To Be Built in Nevada
RayTomes writes "The Obama administration has provided a loan guarantee of $737 million to construct the first large-scale solar power plant that stores energy and provides electricity 24 hours a day, 7 days a week."
This solar power project, a heliostat rather than a photovoltaic system, with a molten salt system to store power as heat for times when the sun isn't shining, will be constructed in Nevada and, says the article, is expected to create "600 construction jobs and 45 permanent positions."
They should totally name this the HELIOS One.
Nevada will have no problem selling power to California. In state power generation is not always consumed in state, intrastate power transmission is very common.
Yeah, but when metal spoons explodes (like they do all the time)....you can just walk over and pick up the pieces.....right then, no need to evacuate for 500 years.
They are over nine thousand dollars.
1st, the loan is 737m. That's not the total cost.
2nd, you are looking at capital costs. What is going to be the running costs and lifespan of the project? Drop that into a spreadsheet to calculate the IRR and cost per Watt. [and what the heck - one could be generous and throw in some type of carbon credit / R&D thing too.]
And personal photovoltaic setups cost (or at least once did) $10k+ per home, capital costs don't have to be made back in a month you know.
Maybe I'm troll food, but your calculation there is with a payback immediately, i would guess a more reasonable payback would be 15 years, which puts the average annual cost per household at $800 dollars (just a WAG, I understand there's interest involved and such) which is pretty reasonable. This is also the first one, which usually means a substantial premium. So you get the jobs, and the power plant, and if the power plants lifetime is similar to that of a coal plant it would seem to be a really good first step. Better than funding intelligence agencies to build a repository of metaphors for instance.
Molten salt has been used before. Spain opened the Andasol Solar Power Station in 2009. The Wikipedia article says it basically doubles the output of the plant, and the thermal reserve can keep it generating electricity for almost 8 hours in total darkness.
More interesting is that it takes twice as much water (per kwh) to run as a normal power plant, and that could end up being a problem in Nevada.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
It's estimated that Lake Mead will go up ~30 feet this year due to the extreme amount of snowfall we had last winter. Nature will solve this problem for us!
Thank God for Global Warming(tm)!
It's a loan guarantee, meaning we cosigned with the bank for them. The taxpayers are only out if this thing can not pay back it's loan.
No sir I dont like it.
an hydro dam is a dangerous thing: more dangerous than a nuclear plant looking at history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
a coal plant is a dangerous thing but it's a sort of low level constant danger.
http://www.ecomall.com/greenshopping/cleanair.htm
drilling a hole for gas or geothermal is a dangerous thing
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Locals_Block_Work_At_Indonesian_Mud_Volcano_999.html
etc etc
Every energy source has dangers and problems.
So it makes sense to simply pick the ones which kill the fewest people overall.
So the plant is suppose to produce 480,000 MWh per year which works out to an average capacity of 55 MW. So we get 0.8 permanent employees per MW. http://www.tonopahsolar.com/
At slashdot's favorite nuclear power plant Vermont Yankee, there are more that 650 employees for a plant that does not manage to run at 620 MW all that well. Let's give them 80% up time. That is 1.3 employees per MW.
Nuclear power seems less efficient than solar power by this measure. Maybe nuclear power is just a "make work" type jobs program which actually hurts the economy overall.
Of course the second it actually works the greens will be dead set against it. Gotta be some obscure critter living out in that desert ya know,
Because, just like Slashdotters, "The Greens" isn't a homogeneous group of people with identical opinions, nor is "environmentalists".
You can be an "environmentalist" and only care about the aesthetic appearance of countryside during your own lifetime (therefore opposed to onshore wind turbines).
Or you can be an "environmentalist" and only care about CO2 emissions and their long term effect (probably in favour of onshore wind turbines)
Or any of hundreds of differing viewpoints.
I 'm not certain about the numbers involved, but I'm happy to see the government doing what I believe it should: promoting things that are good for us that we wouldn't otherwise get. By that I mean buffering the long-term payoff on things that cost too much for the market to provide now.
Yep. But it's a gamble.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
A lot of it is probably insurance. Nobody really wants to be liable for the costs of a solar spill.
And then there's the extra construction cost, due to the workers all having to wear SPF 5000 sunscreen. Extra security, because of all the monotheists who will be protesting the false god Apollo. Fuel costs. MirrorUniverseWalls. You can't imagine all the expensive problems involved in a project like this.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
It's a loan guarantee, meaning we cosigned with the bank for them. The taxpayers are only out if this thing can not pay back it's loan.
But if it made financial sense, it probably wouldn't need loan guarantees.
Exactly. Reactor size is important. A relatively small reactor, like the one recently hit by a Tsunami, may cause problems to a few tens, maybe hundreds, of square kilometres, if it explodes. A reactor the size of the Sun, however, will cause devastation in a sphere several AUs in diameter. Even in normal operation, it is likely to leak dangerous radiation over almost half of the planet, causing skin cancer. The Sun is therefore obviously too dangerous to use for power generation, and should be decommissioned as soon as possible.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
These "Greens" are not one big group sharing a hive brain. There are lots of viewpoints. Personally I would love to see something like this take off. We have lots of deserts that are pretty much unlivable and would be finally put to good use. At the same time I think we should prevent any new coal plants from being built. Nuclear might have a little issue every couple decades, but coal kills people and destroys air quality all the time. Then for extra fun every couple decades it destroys large area when a slurry ponds break.
No nuclear plant has yet caused a 500 year evacuation.
And should a nuclear disaster happen yesterday, there won't be a 500-year evacuation caused by that particular nuclear disaster for about... oh... say, another 500 years.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Exactly - everything has a cost associated with it. Why do I not like nuclear? A few reasons. First, it still relies on mining and shipping of feedstock. Second, there is a long term cost associated with storing its waste products. Third, the US has made it abundantly clear that this is not a global solution - we will actively block many nations from obtaining this source of power. Fourth, the last numbers I heard were if all the power generated across the globe was replaced by nuclear power, we could mine enough to last the world about 3 years (I do need to redo the research, as I don't recall the original sources - and I know many will not take what I learned in a college course as a reliable source). I often wonder what our wind and solar technology would be like in the US if they didn't pull the Production Tax Credit every few years (which causes the industry to collapse after a period of strong growth), and wonder if other energy production systems lost their government backing what would have happened to their viability in terms of cost....
This will use a combined solar thermal collector/salt storage, powering a thermal engine. Not a problem. However, what that does is use the solar thermal to heat the storage and then power it all nightlong. So, for example, if you want a 100 MW output 24x7, you will need 300-400 MW tower (a lot more money). Not an issue. BUT, the storage is what is important. It would be better for the companies going into this, to split out the storage portion and make it distributed. In particular, America has a large number of OLD coal-based power plants that are going to go away over the next 20-30 years. Many of these are currently inside of cities. They are typically 50-100 MW in size (which was large monsters in the day). They have power lines that emanate from them. They also have cooling plants (typically, water), combined with steam engines/generators. But all that is really needed to be changed is that piping re-upped, and the coal boiler dropped. Instead, put in a high temp salt storage system, and use electricity to bring the temp up. With this approach, you can have a large CHEAP battery. The argument against it will be the inefficiency of it. There will be a loss of energy of roughly 50%. However, current tech with CASE, Hydro, batteries, etc. all have losses of 20-40% or so, but have many drawbacks. Hydro and Case can only be used in certain areas and are expensive. Batteries are VERY expensive to install, though they have the advantage of going anywhere.
In the end, the question should not be how efficient it is, but how economical it is. A thermal storage that has little costs to set-up, but will last for 20-30 years (within 10-15 years, ultra-caps will become the dominant form of new storage, and would then replace this). That approach extends this equipment for very little costs. More importantly, it would enable ALL FORMS of Alternative Energy to provide power as they can, since the salt storage would act as a buffer for demand systems. Right now, America loses something like 12 GW yearly because they have to feather wind generators at night. Likewise, we have gas turbine generator that are built to handle the demand, esp. when AE falls. With a thermal storage, it provide our demand system, while allowing AE to run at full power.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If you RTFA, then you would notice that the US government doesn't actually pay for this. It's a private enterprise that takes the loan... all the US government does is guarantee that this (admittedly high risk) investment will be paid back.
And please note that the high risk doesn't so much come from the technology, but more from the regulations and utilities (like cables and the electricity network which will need a 110 MW upgrade at certain places). So, that guarantee means in practice that power lines will be built/improved at a fraction of the cost of the power plant, and regulations will be made... The US government is not gonna pay all that money.
If you have a business case which gets the 'fucking' water back in that lake (and will make profit), then I'm sure you will get a guarantee from the government too.
Yeah, it's a common scam: The electric current they send you through one wire, they get back through the other. Therefore they don't need to produce new current, they just sell the same current over and over again. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
You're an idiot if you believe that.
I would probably be classed as a green, in that I would rather we didn't f*** up the environment whilst using industrialised processes. I certainly like the price of the fuel for green energy - after all we spend millions of $ per year on the sun. Oh no - that's right it's free.
But I'm also a realist. I like my car, but I would prefer an electric one, especially if the power used was produced with green energy.
I like having the conveniences of cities, although I prefer a smaller town to a larger one.
I certainly don't oppose factories, the stuff I like to have around me is often produced in one.
I'm not opposed to big businesses, but I am opposed to big businesses who think that because they are big, they can pollute the environment without consequence - because it's "all about the jobs". Never mind the fact that it will pollute the river the factory uses, so no one can use the water for anything else.
Loan guarantee, not subsidy. It can create those jobs for 0$ in government money spend, or it can waste the full amount in government money or anything in between (if the company goes bankrupt but government wants to see it finished rather than just paying of the debt and forgetting about it, it could chose to pay for the cost overruns to finish it to recoup some losses).
Dude, this is Nevada we are talking about. Even I know that the people living there use air conditioning at the time of peak solar, so a solar power plant is essentialy a good idea there.
Power generation for the night hours is an additional bonus, low power production meets low power demand.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Granted - in Nevada they will need to ship lots of water out to the plant to keep the mirrors clean. But its still cheaper than coal or oil. But it won't be subject in any meaningful way to the whims of the coal or oil markets.
I remember reading about plants like this on Slashdot a while ago. A lot of people said that was a good idea, and we should start building them!
Well now that we're actually doing it, suddenly it's a bad idea. Why is that?
Maybe you should have taken classes beyond 101?
It's a lot more complex then that; especially when you are talking about peoples lives.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You seem to have thought this out a lot though your point 4 I'd challenge.
Professors can be wrong sometimes or simply misleading.
16% of the worlds energy already comes from nuclear.
There is apparently a 230-year estimate supply extractable at today's consumption rate with current technologyat current market prices at current rates of use.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last
36.8 years if tomorrow every single plant was replaced with nuclear if you don't use breeder reactors.
With breeder reactors you could multiply that by something like 50-100
Long enough that it's not a significant worry.
Current market prices is also important: if you increase the price, say double it, then that dramatically increases while not significantly increasing the price of running a nuclear plant as the fuel is very cheap compared to building the reactor.
Now there's claims that it is possible to extract uranium from seawater for about 5 or 6 times the current market price which effectively sets an upper limit on the price of uranium and would supply it forever but I'll wait till I see any kind of large scale operation.
point 2 is valid though it's also true of most industry, hazardous waste can be a serious long term issue even if it's not radioactive, it just doesn't get the same media attention.
point 3 is the most significant one for much of the human race and extremely valid.
Not true. Banker don't like to make loans into now established items. You could literal have a proven way to build a perfect fision/fusion machine with no waste and all the power anyone could ever want. You would STILL need to get a loan guarantee.
Of course, that example was to illustrate a point. This project, like all large project, has a risk.
And it's a good program. The question isn't the technology, it's the company.
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$1/watt is a sensible target price for PV panels. Installed systems, with mounting hardware, inverters, etc. will obviously cost more. Also, this system generates power throughout a larger fraction of the day, and a bunch of mirrors pointed at a big concrete tower probably have a useful service life many times as long as PV panels -- replace the turbines and possibly some tanks and pipes every now and then, and it's hard to see why this system couldn't last practically forever.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
Well, for one thing this isn't about financial sense. The market has failed to provide the best solution as usual and so the best solution turns out to not be the cheapest.
I realize that there's a lot of free market believers out there, but the free market at best provides the cheapest solution to a problem, and rarely if ever is the cheapest solution the best. And frequently it isn't even the cheapest solution as huge amounts of money go to paying the executives to rob the consumers blind.
First, the $737M loan is not from the government, it's from private investors. The Feds are just insuring the debt. They will only pay out if the project fails.
Second, yes, $737M/75,000 houses is $9826. Assuming the facility lasts for 15 years (which seems exceptionally short), it would take $54 per month per household to pay off the principal. No feedstock to purchase, but the article mentions 60 jobs and likely some materials for maintenance. so if you figure it has a $5M-10M annual opperating budget (assuming staffing costs average 40-80k per head and having money for maintenance) you'd have to add on another $5-11 to the customers' monthly bill.
So yeah, $737M sounds like a lot, but it means the median power bill can be right around $100/month for 75k consumers, and it'll be turning a nice profit.
My local power is primarily coal with a smidge of wind, and I pay roughly $100 per MWh (last bill was ~$65 for ~700KWh). So this really doesn't seem to out of the realm of possible. Especially if they keep opperating costs low.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Definitely an issue for Nevada, however, air cooling and hybrid cooling systems that reduce water consumption by 50% to 85% have already been studied. Either option would bring water consumption inline or lower than coal fired plants and possibly even in the range of gas fired plants.
http://www.quora.com/Solar-Towers/How-much-water-for-evaporative-cooling-do-solar-thermal-power-generators-need-per-watt-hour-generated
I guess we'll have to wait for the design details before we know if they go for the low capital cost water cooling option or the low water consumption air or hybrid cooling option.
3 - Proliferation - Ya, we're clearly stopping openly-hostile, fundamentalist Iran from building nuclear power plants. That's totally happening. If you call Stuxnet on this, you're crazier than Ahmadinejad.
Not entirely true. We don't have a problem with them having nuclear plants. We have a problem with them refining nuclear fuel. There is a huge difference. The US, Russia, and France, have all offered extremely cost effective fuel delivery and disposal solutions to Iran. They don't want it because it means they can't refine nuclear weapon grade fuels.
Nuclear power isn't a problem. Nuclear fuel is. It just so happens, the details of Iran's fuel refine is also the best path for nuclear weapons grade fuel. This is why everyone is sure, contrary to Iran's objections, they absolutely intend to develop nuclear weapons....if they are not already doing so.
That gives us only 20 years more to hold out until we solve the fusion break-even problem.
The problem with fusion, we are hundreds of years from having a viable solution, short of many, massive breakthroughs. Breakeven is one of five or six required breakthroughs of even technological significance. It is pure fantasy to say we are anywhere near twenty years from fusion power. And likely, its fantasy to say we are twenty years from breakeven.
If we have fusion power in less than two hundred years, several technological miracles have occurred. That's reality. Anyone who says otherwise is looking for a grant or hoping to sell you a bridge.
5 - Solar and wind production in the US - At the APPA conference in Nashville this spring, one of the foremost investors in "renewable" energy in the country outright stated that they would have put absolutely nothing into solar/wind/geothermal if they didn't receive federal grants for it. It'd've simply've been a waste of time and money. Federal support is the only reason we have anything like this project.
That's not surprising at all considering the US tax payers have been paying for infrastructure support and maintenance and have received little to none of what has already been paid for. The seem companies are now waiting in line for a second handout, in the neighborhood of a hundreds of billions of dollars, to fix everything they've already been paid for.
There are literally cities in the US who have less power quality than many second world countries. Power reliability and general availability has been on a steady decline since the early 80's with *every* indication things will continue to decline. The power companies are literally, at tax payer and utility payer expense, paid to destroy power infrastructure while concurrently paid to do the exact opposite.
If the government does not hold these companies accountable, literally, in the next forty to sixty years, the US will become a second world country. Or more likely, the US tax payer will be charged a second time to bail out these companies, for perform the work we've all already paid for.
I don't really get that kind of measurement. 100MW a 5 cents a KW is 250K dollars and hour. So it pays for itself in 3000 hours.
", there's no way the power plant will be as valuable as the money being laid out for it and I don't see the power producer paying off the loan."
Why not? it's over 20 years, so it's not a lot of money. It certainly isn't a gimmick.
No, this is a great investment. For clarification, it's not a fiscal investment, an infrastructure investment. And infrastructure is an on going rising cost. always has been, Always will be.
"Who knows.."
well, the government knows, and if you bothered you could find out. But that would mean dealing in facts that might challenge your preconceived notions.
I'm sure you can't handle that,
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Somebody posted a link to the plans in a comment below....
http://www.tonopahsolar.com/pdfs/Tonopah_Crescent_Dunes_POD_2009_11_23.pdf
They will be utilizing a hybrid cooling system so the water consumption and usage will be in the range of a gas fired plant.
It will be a 110 Megawatt facility and the plans expect total water consumption of 600 Acre Feet per year. Assuming only an 80% utilization rate that would be around 253 gallons / MWh as compared to around 500 gallons / MWh for coal and nuclear and 200 gallons / MWh for gas.
so only one group is allowed to make snarky unsubstantiated remarks based on cherry picked data to prove conspiracy?
You are aware, are you not, that increased temperatures means more evaporation, right? And you do realize that when water goes up, it doesn't just vanish, or stay there forever. Eventually it comes down somewhere. Therefore, increased temperatures, while drying up some parts of the world, will necessarily mean increased precipitation in some form in other parts of the world.
I'm not saying that an increased snowfall is proof of global warming, just that attempting to use it to shoot down global warming simply shows how little you understand the subject you're ridiculing.
I never said it doesn't take energy (in fact, where did you get that idea?), but that also happens to be freely available for the taking, solar and wave, for instance.. On the other hand, all the resistance seems to ignore the negatives of the present situation, which I find rather odd, to say the least. We shouldn't let economists decide how we use our resources... They want control, not abundance..
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
It's an even worse scam than that. It's AC, so they send the electricity out and suck it back in before it even gets to the consumer. The consumer only thinks they're getting power. All electrical appliances are just the placebo effect.
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It's not complex in this case. If most homeowners still find it affordable to frequently water their (non-xeriscaped) lawns, then the utility isn't charging enough for he water -- at least, not while this is coincident with an upcoming water shortage.
(But what about the poor? Fine, only charge for water used above some threshold, or pay everyone the cost of the water up to that limit so you preserve the incentive to save.)
And yes, it would also help to have clearly defined, tradeable usage rights for underground water, so that it can go where it's most needed and farms have an incentive to use less water-intense crops. It makes no sense for cities to be running out of water when they're willing to pay $700/acre-foot while farmers get to splurge by paying only $50/acre-foot.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
You are likely referring to quarters of the financial year. In those periods, public companies are required to report earnings and other information about their company. That's a regulation, not a facet of a free-market system.
The free market, in and of itself, does not work on three month plans. It works for maximization of profit. When the actors are required to do certain things at certain intervals, then the maximization of profit will tend to occur inside the intervals that are introduced into the equation.
Much like sinking a ship that eventually becomes a coral reef, any external regulation or barrier introduced into a system can, and most likely will, develop an ecosystem of its own. If you want to understand how the ocean works, staring at an artificial coral reef will only go so far because that reef may well have been colonized through natural processes, but it only exists in its current form because of artificial intervention.