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World's Largest Solar Power Plant To Supply Enough Energy For 1.1 Million People (computerworld.com)
Lucas123 writes: The world's largest solar power plant is now live and will eventually provide 1.1 million people in Morocco with power and cut carbon emissions by 760,000 tons a year. Phase 1 of the Noor concentrated solar power (CSP) plant went live last week, providing 140 megawatts (MW) of power to Morocco. Phases 2 and 3 will be completed by 2018 when the plant is expected to generate more than 500MW of power. The Noor plant, located in south-central Morocco, will cover 6,178 acres and produce so much energy, that Morocco may eventually start exporting the clean energy to the European market.
The solar plant will not produce any more people, so your moronic attempt at first post is moronic.
Maybe the price of land. Maybe Morocco gets fewer cloudy days. being that close to one another does not mean they have the same conditions, Maybe the cost of labor to keep the mirrors clean. And just maybe Morocco had the will to build it while Spain did not.
I am very sceptical of the claims of solar but this is interesting. I hope it works out well.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
So these types are systems are interesting in the long run only if the energy storage question is answered, permitting a shift between the time the solar panels are producing and the when the energy is consumed. So to me the big "Green" energy question is not Wind or Solar or whatever your favorite renewable is, but how to store large amount (We're talking GWh at least on the scale of a country) energy and release it when needed
D.
If you read TFA* you would see that this is a solar/thermal and not solar/voltaic power station and that there is energy storage via thermal mass already built into the system.
*You did read TFA didn't you?
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Actually, it's a solar thermal plant. So it works in the dark too. Morocco doesn't need a lot of heating, but in some parts of the world it can provide carbon free heat too.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
To put it into perspective, it's nearly 10 square miles. Pretty big, but in context it's a tiny part of the country.
This is apparently it, although it looks like this is older photography from before construction:
https://www.google.com/maps/@3...
Do you have ESP?
pretty sure it's in the desert, 0 vegetation there.
500 MW is pretty small. Morocco needs much more than that. How can they think about exporting?
Well then, that's the problem. God only wants us to produce energy via fossil fuels. The use of non-CO2 emitting fuels is evil Communist plotting. WE should immediately execute anyone who wants to use any source of energy other than oil, they are subhuman fiends. We should pass a law allowing the good citizens of this God-fearing country to anally rape anyone who dares even think about solar panels. Solar panels are Satan's work, and only the righteous use of oil and coal forever can keep the forces of wickedness at bay.
Oh, and we need to kill every single Climatologist, except Roy Spencer, who should be given a quadrillion dollars and fifty hookers ever day. He is practically Jesus Christ.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You are comparing a developing technology with a very mature (and still highly subsidised) one. Much of the investment in this plant will be paid back by exporting the experience, knowledge and technology developed for it.
Plus, Morocco can't just decide to build a nuclear plant. It has to rely on foreign assistance for the designs, the knowledge, the fuel, handling the spent fuel and the clean up. Moroccans see how much money they have to export to get the nuclear they do have and figure they could develop their own clean energy source and start having people send them money instead.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
What does it matter if population changes?
The only things that would invalidate the numbers are if the same number of people started using more or less electricity, or competing electricity production methods started producing less carbon.
If these things did not change and Morocco's population doubled this year, the plant would still provide 1.1 million people power and cut carbon emissions by 760,000 tons/yr compared to whatever production method was being compared here.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Nuclear power: 500MW is considered a "small/compact" nuclear plant, costing about $1.5 billion with a footprint of a few acres with a lifetime of approx. 40 years.
So where did you get your costs from? My quick google pops up the current cost of a nuke plant as up to $9B nowadays.
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So they're destroying 6,178 acres of vegetation and covering it with solar panels and/or other collectors, which are made from caustic chemicals and other non-biodegradeable materials, in order to generate power.... How is that "green"?
Until you compare that 6000 acres with the equivalent area effected by a coal mine or a uranium mine or a bunch or natural gas wells, plus all the area needed for the ancillary equipment to process and supply those fuels to their respective power station types, then your complaint of this solar plant not being green is meaningless.
Care to try for round 2?
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Why was this modded down? It's true
"The wicked and lazy master was the one who buried his talent in the ground and didn’t do anything to multiply it... That’s essentially what those who say we need to stop using oil, coal and natural gas are telling us to do. Just leave those resources buried in the ground, rather than pulling them out and multiplying their value for human benefit."
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Obviously if 1.7 million people all try to get electricity from this solar plant, all the light will be sucked out of the sun and the sun will become a black hole killing all life on earth.
Orrrrrrrrr! The other .6 million people will get power from gas or coal or nuclear or whatever, Instead of using coal to produce 700MW of power and 1064000 tons of carbon, the end result will be using coal to produce 200MW of power and 304000 tons of carbon, a reduction of 760000.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
If the eventual 500 Mw plant will provide power for 1.1 million people that means that the average person uses 455 watts. That is not a lot of power.
The solar plant is near Ouarzazate, which I estimate is about 300 miles from the southern tip of Spain. It's on the edge of the Sahara Desert, which should be a good location for more sunshine. Ouarzazate gets a little over 3,400 hours of sunshine per year while Gibraltar gets about 400 hours less. Also, as you go poleward, the sunlight is spread over a wider area, meaning that it's less intense at any given location. Gibraltar is at the southern tip of Spain, so this gets more pronounced if you go farther north. If you go north to Madrid, you can subtract roughly another 200-250 hours of sunlight each year while being nearly ten degrees latitude farther north. There's also a whole lot less seasonal variation in the amount of sunlight at Ouarzazate than at either location in Spain, making it more suitable for a constant supply of electricity that doesn't require being supplemented by something else.
The solar plant is actually at a great location, so it probably makes sense for Spain to by their electricity from Morocco than to build their own solar plant. In cold enough climates, the electricity demand might be high enough during winter that, if it can't be met with solar, it would be necessary to build another type of plant to supplement it or to buy the electricity from another country. It's much more cost-effective to have the plant in Morocco.
By the way, the original plan was to build the plant with European funding and supply the electricity to Europe, but the partners in Europe pulled out requiring the African Development Bank and the government of Morocco to save the project. Obviously the approach made sense to Europe at one point and, now that the plant is being built, might still be lucrative to them.
I hate all anonymous shitbags. Log in, you filthy bastards.
If Morocco is just across from Spain, why would Spain pay for the energy (i.e. cost of production, plus payoff of initial outlay, plus transportation, plus the company profits) rather than just build their own?
A good question and the answers are mostly fairly straightforward. In no particular order here is a non-exhaustive list of reasons why they might decide not to build their own. Not all of these might be the case here but all are possible.
1) If they build there own it might result in overcapacity which would make the economics not work
2) Spain isn't in great financial shape so the financing might be a problem
3) Exchange rate risk. Currently the Euro is relatively strong versus the Morrocan Dirham. This means that 1 Euro can buy relatively more KWh.
4) Cost of land might be significantly higher in Spain. Spain has about 5/7 the land area with about 4/3 the population.
5) Politics (need I say more?)
6) NIMBY
Nuclear waste and Accidents remain a problem, perhaps even an increasing one in the days of terrorists and unstable gov't. Sure maybe in the US this is a lower problem, not negligible, but where does a small country park its waste?
When there's a huge solar energy spill it's called "a good day."
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Wow, $3.9 Billion for a plant that can produce only up to 160MW, and less than that for a good part of the day. It seems they would have saved money going with solar panels and batteries.
An interesting tidbit. Despite its desert location, this plant needs 1.7 million m3 of water per year to keep the reflectors clean.
This CSP plant appears to be even more expensive than Ivanpah, which is still not running to its promised capacity, and requires the burning of natural gas keep operating. Has Ivanpah even reached much more than 50% of its promised output yet?
it takes 6k acres to power 1M people. So it should take 42M acres to power 7B people.
You'd need 1/1000th of land dedicated to power production. The nice thing is, you don't need arible land to make power. Put it in deserts and such. The other thing is, that though you need 1/100th of the land area to power the planet, you could instead use 1/2000th of the water area. That may end up the better solution, as the napkin numbers I gave are based on the power usage from TFA (low for USA level over-consumption) and morocco level power generation (higher than you'd get in Alaska).
Despite your assertion, 5.3*RI sized plant to power Europe would be a good thing, especially if you are using Sahara land to do it. Land not used to grow crops, house people, or do much of anything.
Learn to love Alaska
Nuclear power: 500MW is considered a "small/compact" nuclear plant, costing about $1.5 billion with a footprint of a few acres with a lifetime of approx. 40 years.
A nuke plant will cost far more than what you are claiming. Costs currently are running between $5000-8000/KW. And that is just to build it - you didn't consider operating costs at all which are far more substantial for a nuke plant than a solar one. The waste disposal alone is a huge cost that doesn't exist with solar.
Why the hell are people investing in solar? The economics make absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Really? You can't figure this out? Solar has no failure modes that can render a location uninhabitable. Solar has no serious fuel waste disposal problem. Solar has no weapon proliferation risk. Solar is insurable by private companies rather than nation states. Solar doesn't require getting fuel from elsewhere. Frankly solar has quite a lot to recommend it over nuclear in many (though not all) cases. Nuclear has its advantages but let's not pretend that it doesn't have some very substantial drawbacks.
"That space of land could feed over 6,000 people [farmlandlp.com] if properly arable, or house 2.8 million people. "
But it is not arable and no one lives on it.
I personally am pro nuclear and I am even getting optimistic about fusion thanks to the Lockheed High Beta reactor and the Pollywell.
BTW this is a thermal solar plant and not photovoltaic.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
"If Morocco is just across from Spain, why would Spain pay for the energy (i.e. cost of production, plus payoff of initial outlay, plus transportation, plus the company profits) rather than just build their own?"
What makes you think Spain doesn't have their own facilities?
With regards of why paying others instead of doing yourself, you could ask the same basically about everything else. And the answer is, of course, always the same: because of circunstances.
In this case:
* Morocco is at a lower latitude, therefore more sun.
* Morocco is less populated, therefore more land.
* Morocco has lower labor costs, therefore cheaper to build.
* Morocco has already built it so, from now on it's a sunk cost. Given that, about electricity, you basically use it or throw it away paying even a penny per kilowatt hour would rent more than not selling it, so that can undercut local production prices even more.
* And last but not least: basically because with electricity you use it or throw it away, buying and selling over large grids is an everyday no-event. Spain buys and sells from/to France and Portugal to stabilize its own grid. Morocco having the ability to enter that grid not only gives them confidence on their ability to grow in the future but will introduce euros into its economy since it will be probably net exporter in the mid term (being his electricity cheap and on surplus).
You are also wrong about Morocco being "just" 40km of ocean at best. That would put the electricity on Cadiz, at best. Santander, for instance, is another 1000Km to the North.
Solar power: 6,178 Acres to generate 500MW and will cost nearly $10 billion dollars and has a lifetime of approx. 15 years.
Nuclear power: 500MW is considered a "small/compact" nuclear plant, costing about $1.5 billion with a footprint of a few acres with a lifetime of approx. 40 years.
Why the hell are people investing in solar? The economics make absolutely no sense whatsoever.
So tell me, how are solar sales going in the town of Chernobyl? Oh, that's right, I almost forgot. The ground is still fucking glowing there.
Oh and speaking of economics, let's not forget about the Chernobyl Shelter Fund, which drove over three dozen countries to become members or contribute over a billion fucking dollars just to try and build a new cover for the damaged site.
In case you needed a rather obvious reminder as to the benefits of solar. We don't have to talk in measurements of half-lives or billions of dollars when humans fuck up, which is only a matter of time.
The next step for solar power is storage? Good new from TFA :
Offering a local environment of cleaner Air, and possible cheaper reliable energy, may attract additional people in the area. As well these people may be healthier thus have a better reproduction rate.
Or all that solar radiation might sterilize them!
I would like to know How many trees will need to be knocked down to build the solar farm.
Read the story, it's in Morocco, a place renowned for it's abundant forests.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Trotting out Chernobyl as a reason for not building modern nuclear plants is as dumb as using the Hindenburg as a reason to not build 787s.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
If you have 1.7 million people and they need 700MW of power and you're still only producing 500MW of power, you have a problem.
...
No you have not. The power plants producing power for the actual living 1.1 millions do not magically disappear and are still capable of producing the power for the suddenly popping up 0.6 million
Also it is not unheared of that you can upgrade a plant to produce more power or add a second plant.
Finally: what would you do in a situation where the solar plant does not exist and you have "suddenly" demand for power for 600,000 more people?
I don't see why the fact that this plant is a solar plant does in any way have any impact on population development.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You might think that the unit "(mega)people" is standardized, but in fact there's still quite a difference between an American person and an African person [a bit like swallows, I guess.] Concretely, an American uses 12,954 kWh per year[1], while an average Moroccon uses 875 kWh. Thus, the electricity used by 1.1M Moroccons equals the electricity used by 70 thousand Americans. So, while the unit might sound like everyone can relate to it, it's pretty horribly inaccurate.
The Computerworld article doesn't even give total expected production, only MW capacity, which is probably peak capacity, ie only achieved during the day. Wiki [2] gives a production of 370 GWh per year, which is enough to provide energy to just over 400 thousand Moroccans, consistent with providing juice for 1.1M is capacity is roughly tripled. However, if Moroccans start getting up to first-world levels of energy use, the number of people served will swiftly drop by an order of magnitude, even if they don't go all the way to American energy use (e.g. Holland has about half the US energy use, probably due to less need for airco and higher electricity costs)
The water use sounds very problematic, according to wiki it uses 1.7 million m3 per year or 4.6 liters per kWh . To compare, desalination requires 3 kWh/m3, i.e. it would cost about 5GWh to desalinize the amount of water used annually, compared to 370GWh of electrticity produced. So, even if the water draw is compensated by desalinizing water elsewhere, it still comes out ahead.
[1] http://data.worldbank.org/indi.... Note that kWh per year is a pretty stupid unit, too...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
/., where slightly more moronic is normal.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
True, but the Government can declared that land "nature reserve." It's different when you build a gigantic industrial factory over the entire span of land, milling down trees and compacting the soil until there's nothing left.
We already lock up millions of acres of land as protected in the United States; since we see this as an important management action, it makes sense to position nuclear generation facilities in areas where we're semi-confident we'd like to protect that land. That is: treat protected land as non-binary, recognize land that we only barely accept for development (because of its importance as undeveloped land), and then put a nuclear plant there. Then the land is both protected *and* developed: it's left in its natural state, but used as a nuclear buffer zone.
This assumes the risk of a nuclear accident has larger general consequences than the (partial) loss of the protected land surrounding the plant.
Still, a 7,000MW plant takes up 1,100 acres; a 160MW plant takes up 6,100 acres. Every 25 acres around that nuclear plant represents one of those 6,100 acre solar plants; 6100 acres of land consumed by nuclear would represent almost 243 of those solar generation facilities.
So it would require 1/243 of the land area; and we can partially discount most of that area by declaring it nature reserve, with the discount relative to the degree to which we would have considered the land an important nature reserve otherwise.
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I think you're trying to use US costs for Morocco. Labor is way cheaper, there's a lot more sun (the flux), and it's a net benefit there. The panels even provide shade for grazing animals.
(yes, I've been to Morocco)
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Everyone's answer is to put it in deserts. Why don't we just cut down rain forests and put it there? The sun's better.
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The first and third photos show parabolic reflectors used to focus light on pipes running the length of the mirrors. The second photo shows a bunch of flat reflectors all focusing light on giant towers. Maybe there are also PV panels on the left side of the image--it's hard to tell.
Which is it? Or are there multiple parts of Noor, using different technologies?
The Desert Sunlight Solar Farm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_Sunlight_Solar_Farm) is in California and produces 550MW. The Topaz Solar Farm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topaz_Solar_Farm) also in California produces 550MW. CVSR produces 250MW, IVSP produces 99MW, MSS produces 265MW, and the Blythe Solar Power Project will produce 480MW when completed. So in a very small area of California, we have nearly two gigawatts of capacity, far more than this project will reach upon completion, despite the sinister machination of the "Greens of California."
Yes, but there are a *lot* of roof spaces.
The problems with deploying on roof spaces are numerous. Wide-spread management incurs higher total cost. Interference with roof operations (e.g. repair) increases total cost. Up-front costs are placed on consumers, instead of amortized through service from a generation facility (i.e. poor folk can't install solar panels; rich folk can, and *extremely* rich folk can front the money for installation of solar panels to supply poor folk). Up-front costs are higher in total, due to the need to shuffle electricians around. Regulatory compliance makes the ROI for any given individual low, as roof space is smaller. Regulations to minimize roof space exist because solar panels provide a serious hazard when firefighters try to vent heat and toxic gases via a cut on the roof.
The problems with deploying in wide area are large. Land use is inefficient. Transmission to point-of-use incurs more loss. Start-up costs and risks are both large, thus deployment is difficult to back.
When you spread it out - as is the optimal arrangement for solar power anyway - it virtually vanishes.
That's another way of saying, "You close your eyes and pretend it's not there."
When insulating houses with rigid foam paneling, builders frequently use thermally-broken fasteners. That is: there is not a continuous connection between an outside-facing metal surface and an inside-facing metal surface. This is because they use one nail every 6 inches, or 4,800 nails to fasten rigid insulation to wooden sheathing across a 30 foot x 40 foot wall. That provides a six square foot radiator plugged directly into your house by a distributed 0.7 square foot metal rod. It's not much, but it is a six inch metal bridge into your house; you have to blow enough warm air across that to keep that six inches of your wall room-temperature constantly, which means you lose quite a bit of heat (up to 10% with steel, much less with stainless steel) out that hole (for every 0.1kW, it's 72kWh or $10-$15/month of loss; it can near a third or more of a kW in extremely low outdoor temperatures).
Do you want to cut down 5 million acres of forest or 5 million acres of forest? For that matter, do you want to cut down 5 million acres of forest in one spot, or do this in little pockets and cut away another 3 million acres of forest so they don't cast shade on your solar panels?
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