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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.
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)
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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.
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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?
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.
It's not a lot of power by American standards but it seems totally reasonable for Morocco. When I visited a decade ago, electricity was used primarily for lighting, and virtually all bulbs were compact-fluorescent. Space heaters generally used propane or kerosene, not electricity. Power-hungry appliances like clothes dryers and dishwashers were not at all common, and their cuisine depends far less on refrigeration than ours does.
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.
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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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