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India Unveils the World's Largest Solar Power Plant (aljazeera.com)
Kamuthi in Tamil Nadu, India is now home to the world's largest solar plant that adds 648 MW to the country's generating capacity. Previously, the Topaz Solar Farm in California, which was completed two years ago and has a capacity of 550 MW, held the title. Aljazeera reports: The solar plant, built in an impressive eight months, is cleaned every day by a robotic system, charged by its own solar panels. At full capacity, it is estimated to produce enough electricity to power about 150,000 homes. The project is comprised of 2.5 million individual solar modules, and cost $679 million to build. The new plant has helped nudge India's total installed solar capacity across the 10 GW mark, according to a statement by research firm Bridge to India, joining only a handful of countries that can make this claim. As solar power increases, India is expected to become the world's third-biggest solar market from next year onwards, after China and the U.S.
$679 million for 550MW. A bargain.
now all they need is an electrically based system for dealing with the mountains of human excrement they produce, every day. on the street.
With the fact that solar panels require more energy to make frames, fab the PV junctions, and make the inverters, then move to a site and install, than they ever will gain back in their usable (20 year) lifespan, how is this a net gain?
Do they still have rotting corpses floating down the Ganges river?
"648 MW", they say.
Is that peak output? Average output when operating? Average output over 24 hours? It looks like it's PV, so do they have any sort of storage backing it up, or will other plants be taking up the load at night? What sort of plants? How much land area does the plant occupy, and what activity is being displaced by the plant? (farming, natural habitat, etc.) .. okay, a quick search says 1270 acres of land for the panels. That's 5.1 million square metres, for 127 watts per square metre. The average insolation for Tamil Nadu is around 5 kWh/square metre/day, so that seems about right for peak output (rather than average), taking into account PV inefficiencies.
That's a hell of a lot of land for .0007% of India's electricity consumption, based upon 2011 figures... at that rate, they'd need to cover a fifth of the country with PV panels, never mind night time load.
So that's the largest solar plant in the world and it only outputs 648 MW?
I'm having trouble finding something to compare this to since the nuclear plant near me generates 846 MW with one unit (total 1824 MW) course it was built back in 1974 at a cost of $901,500,000 so about $494,243 per MW (Back in 1974) about $2,423,384 per MW in today's dollars and this project only cost $1,047,839 per MW. Hmmmm. I wonder if you could find a way to make solar panels work at night for less than 2 mil per MW?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
The costs are always in the maintenance, an important part of operations that Eastern cultures usually ignore, anyway.
I don't want to belittle this because India is one of the places where solar actually makes sense. But even there its capacity factor is only about 20%. Compared to 14.5% for the continental U.S. and about 10% in Germany. Capacity factor is the ratio of actual electricity produced (after taking into account night, weather, angle of the sun, downtime due to maintenance, etc) to nameplate (maximum) capacity.
So while it's capacity is 648 MW, its average electrical generation over a year will only be about 20% that, or a more modest 130 MW. Electricity costs about 8 cents/kWh in India. So payback time (excluding operational expenses and interest on loans) will be
($679 million) / (0.2 * 648 MW * 3600 sec/hour * 8766 hours/year * $0.08/kWh) = 7.47 years
India is one of the better places for solar. (The 150,000 home figure seems a little screwy, since 648 MW / 150,000 homes = 4320 Watts, which is about 3.5x the electricity consumption of the average U.S. home. I suspect the 150,000 homes figure already took into account capacity factor, and is not "at full capacity" as TFA claims.)
I've never understood how that could be correct it wasn't manufactured for free all resources used in its manufacture had to be paid for and the company that made them made a profit.
Are they manufactured in some mythical land where electricity is free?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Yes but that's a base load solution.
This solar plant is a peak load solution.
You need both.
Having a nuke idle all night is a very expensive waste.
I don't mean to belittle you but by definition everything used to cover demand peaks is going to have a low capacity factor because it is not used all of the time.
It's a depressingly common mistake. There are a huge number of people posting here who know less than the average high schooler about electricity generation and supply.
Didn't you people do field trips when you were children?
Yeah, how dare they not include the cost of stellar fusioning in their energy budget!
Let's see, 24 hours at 2.5-3 billion Kelvin...
heat salt with the sun and you get a base load capacity (throughout the night)
that combined with mini nuclear reactors seem to hold the answer to power generation... critiques ?
John
It really puts into scale Doc Brown's 1.21GW.
With the fact that solar panels require more energy to make frames, fab the PV junctions, and make the inverters, then move to a site and install, than they ever will gain back in their usable (20 year) lifespan, how is this a net gain?
Maybe they'll build a solar panel factory right next to it. 648MW ought to be good for a few solar panels per day.
No sig today...
The payback time is around half a year, worst case up to three years.
And it NEVER was longer than 10 years, and that was over 40 years ago!!!
You must be both:
- stone old
- and never reading new since your birth
(how did you end up here on /. ? )
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
So it cost a good fraction of a billion dollars BUT it's a magical machine that basically spits out money so who cares? Except, does anyone know how long a modern solar panel like the one they'd be using lasts before it expires or degrades or whatever? Or even what the overall maintenance expense is? Because to me solar panels seem like a class AAA rated bond on steroid when it comes to ROI.
I'm all for exploring alternative forms of generating electricity. The continued investment in these technologies will be very helpful in building a future that generates more power with less pollution. I also think that it is useful to look at these numbers in context. The state of Tamil Nadu generates around 23,000 MW of electricity using many types of fuels and technologies. Coal fired power plants account for about 10,000 MW making it the single largest source of power for the state. This is similar to many developing areas. What is impressive is that they are able to use so many different means of producing power. Hydro electric in Tamil Nadu is 2,200 MW, Nuclear is 1,000 MW, and 'other renewable' a hefty 8,000 MW. In comparison the Three Gorges Dam, located in China has a capacity of 22,500 MW. It is the largest power station in the world, also the largest construction project ever.
The belief that the EROEI ratio of solar panels is less than one is pretty common. Also common is the belief that they only last ten years.
One of the issues for UK solar PV is the initial cost which is unlikely to be recovered on selling the house, so given the typical house move frequency in the UK it's marginal on whether reduced energy costs will offset the capital cost, given that feed in tariffs have been slashed. The other alternative is to essentially rent your roof out, but this can make it hard to sell at all. That leaves older people less likely to move as a prime market, but they may be less informed of the benefits. None of it is insurmountable, of course
I recall hearing a calculation on the radio: if we keep expanding our energy use at the present rate, in 2000 years, we will need more energy than all the stars in our galaxy produce.
You can find all sorts of absurd naive extrapolations if you bother to look for them. Doesn't make them true.
"we can't/shouldn't do anything about global warming because India and China aren't doing anything."
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
I suspect from reading the article that the quoted number of 648 MW is actually 648 MWPeak, (about 2.5 million solar panels at 260 kWp).
That number is the peak production of the panels. To get to the actual production you'll have to multiply that by the total numbers of full sun hours that the installation receives. Here in het Netherlands that is in the order of 930-1000 hours yearly. I suspect that India has a higher number of these, being closer to the equator.
That puts the actual production in kWh of this installation at about 648.000.000 kWh/annum. Wholesale prices of electricity are pretty low, meaning that you'd get about $0,07 (~ 5 Rs) per kWh (assuming that production during the day is actually peak load and therefore more expensive).
That would mean that the plant (under high electricity wholesale prices but low projected production) would make about 45 M$/year.
679 M$ / 45 M$ =~ 30 years.
However, I suspect that there are fiscal policies and subsidies that also lead to cash flow for this plant. Those make a big difference.
And how much of that 679 M$ is actually 'lost'? It's quote possible that the project was built by Tata solar, an indian company that has to pay taxes and employs many people in india.
And of course, the externalities (no smog, no need for fuel, less death from pollution, having the biggest plant on the planet and investing in technological improvement, local jobs) have to be considered in the cost of this plant. So it's not quite so clear-cut that this is a winning or a losing proposition.
... but they still haven't caught me yet!
would be small solar panels and solar lamps for villages. Give power to the people.
Kind of sad that they feel it is cheaper to have the panels cleaned by robots than by the hundreds of millions of underemployed poor Indians...
Not by magic, but how about we talk about real things and not magic? In reality when demand peaks available sources such as wind or solar farms are brought on line. It does mean they are idle most of the time, but that is life when you have demand that changes and wish to match that demand.
Utter bullshit.
What a nasty little person you are with that pathetic attempted bullying.
Does anyone know average electricity prices in India? How much the average Indian home uses for power and approximate maintenance of this entire plant? (I'd assume, robots or no, they have at least 30 staff?)
I want to believe in solar, heck I do believe in solar but the cost right now,...
If only the god damn panels didn't degrade (assuming that's not some kind of republican myth?) if the panels were consistently reliable or lived for 100 years, it would make much more sense economically.
"Free" power sounds fantastic, especially if it's not damaging the planet.