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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.
Ooops, for 648 MW. Now THAT is a bargain. 40% off.
It's the first 648 MW that are expensive. After that, the price keeps dropping! Well, until nightfall.
Let's see, 648K kwh * $.08 per kwh * 8 hours in a day * 365 days in a year = $151M per year. So it pays for itself in under 5 years. Yup, not bad.
Maybe half that? I'm guessing the numbers are peak output.
Not sure of your point - India has an energy problem, and a pollution problem. Here's a plant that will produce energy, and little to zero pollution from day 1 of its operation. I'm amazed but glad that it's actually begun to operate.
A nuclear plant would of course, supply energy when the sun goes down, but given the circumstances, what odds would you give of a nuclear plant being in any way cheap, safe, or reliable?
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
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!
It is not a bargain at all. Also that price is construction only, and fails to include all owner's costs in development, not to mention the capacity factor is far below conventional power plants.
Well yeah, it's a PV Solar plant of course it has a lower capacity factor than a conventional plant, you might as well just say "It's dark at night"
But given this is India, expecting them to build a modern combined cycle plant without natural gas infrastructure, or nuclear power without experience is too much.
You mean like the Sugen combined-cycle power plant in Gujarat, India? Or one of the 22 nuclear reactors in operation at seven sites that generate about 25% of India's electricity?
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.)
Well, the estimate assumed 8 hours a day, so 4 hours either side of noon. Assuming that power varies as the cosine of the angle, averaging between -/+ 60 degrees gives sqrt(3)/(2*pi/3)=82.7% of peak.
Averaging over -/+ 90 degrees (i.e. 12 hours) gives 63.7% of peak, i.e. the equivalent of 7.6 hours of peak output per day. So the 8 hr/day figure seems a reasonable ballpark estimate.
Doesn't account for latitude, season or weather, YMMV, contents may have settled during transit, etc.
Or one of the 22 nuclear reactors in operation at seven sites that generate about 25% of India's electricity?
I stand corrected. Teach me to post before thinking. Still right about pollution, though.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
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.
Hopefully, this can be replicated in every state in India so that as many dark areas of the country are covered
648 MW ... .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.
That's a hell of a lot of land for
Your numbers are way off.
648MW / .0007% = 92 TW
All of human civilization consumes about 500 exajoules of energy per year, which is only about 16 TW. (Of which electricity is only a fraction, BTW)
Covering 1/5 of India with solar panels would actually potentially generate enough energy to power the entire planet several times over.
When I was a child, our field trips were to actual fields, where we helped plant the potatoes and bale hay. I was three when I got my first mule and we used to plow five acres before breakfast. Once I reached five years of age, we ate the mule and I pulled the plow my damn self.
No sir, we didn't have any fancy "field trips" where you visit some industrial park and have some pencil neck tell you how you too can grow up and sit in a cubicle picking pencil shavings out of your ass.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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
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.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Well, yeah, it is a bargain, actually. For comparison, the new nuclear power plants that the US is building cost roughly 5x as much per megawatt.
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...
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.
True, but we won't be around to see it, because of the black hole that will be created by the mass of all of the disco records we'll have produced by then.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Yet they don't pretend they do and pontificate about "capacity factor" instead of understanding that some things you want to run all of the time and some things you only need every now and again.
Errrr, if you didn't mean to belittle him, then why add "Didn't you people do field trips when you were children?"
Perhaps you meant to say "I do mean to belittle you" or "I am about to belittle you" or "I will try to belittle you"?
My pics.
His math works out, averaged over a year:
500e18 J/(356*24*3600 s) = 15.85e12 W
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.
Yes, if you ignore all maintenance costs
According to the summary, the maintenance is done by robots. Other than occasionally flushing off the dust, there isn't much to do.
and solar panel degradation.
The panels on my roof are warrantied at 80% capacity for 25 years.
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.
And in just 8 months.
How can people still claim that coal is competitive ? It takes an average of 5 years to build a coal plant - and that's assuming it finishes on schedule, which they never do.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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.
In America, per capita electrical energy consumption peaked in 2007, is now 6.4% lower, and is continuing to decline. If this trend continues, in 2000 years, the fission of a single atom of U-235 will supply all of our energy needs.
... 500 exajoules of energy per year ...
Your slip is showing. First of all, joules are energy and TW are power ...
He said "joules per year" ... which is power. There is nothing wrong with his units or his math.
Considering they invested in robotic maintenance - they clearly did consider it, and made it as cheap as possible.
Indeed- considering the low cost of labour in India, it is rare for mechanisation to be more cost-effective there (for now anyway), this would be an example where that is true. The only maintenance remaining are highly-skilled jobs like replacing panels that go faulty.
Of course, what you lot always forget is that it's perfectly valid to ignore maintenance costs - since they exist for *all* power plants, coal and nuclear need constant maintencance too, by more highly trained people than solar needs, and more of them - so generally their maintenance costs are higher (and thats without factoring in the costs of spare parts, replacing parts in hazardous conditions etc. etc. etc. - what you think the bearings in a steam turbine don't wear out like every other bearing in every other machine ever built ?)
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I think the correct reading is: "It's not my intention to belittle you, but I just did anyway". Like, it was a collateral damage belittling.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
And in 400 years we will have literally boiled the oceans, and the earth will become unlivable on much sooner than that.
Ultimately we will *have* to get much of our energy from solar if we wish to continue to live on the planet. Thermodynamics is a bitch.
It is not a bargain at all. Also that price is construction only, and fails to include all owner's costs in development, not to mention the capacity factor is far below conventional power plants.
Look, a school of red herrings! (Why does anyone think these things aren't considered in economy analyses?)
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
It's best not to base it on "hours per day", and instead just look at capacity factors. Capacity factors on commercial scale solar plants range from under 15% to over 30%, depending on the tracking tech (none, single axis, dual axis) and plant design (as well as the most critical aspect, of course - location).
A nice thing about solar is that it tends to align pretty well with the demand curve, so up to a point adding actually makes grid operators' jobs easier, not harder. It also runs contrary to wind, which tends to blow stronger at night, and periods of low sun tend to most often be high wind and vice versa.
People said I was dumb, but I proved them.
English: I don't mean to belittle you.
American: I mean to belittle you.
English: With all due respect.
American: With no respect.
English: You're almost right.
American: You are completely wrong in every possible way.
English: I'm sorry but...
American: I'm not sorry, this is your fault.
I hope this helps.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Exactly my reaction. If they say the project cost $679m to build, then it means just that: the project cost $679m to build. Not "one aspect of it" cost $679m.
A price of just over $1 a watt is superb. That's about what it costs to build a typical fossil plant - except that the cost to build a fossil plant is dwarfed by the cost of running it. Now, a fossil plant will have a 3x higher capacity factor, but still, this is highly competitive power. To put it in perspective, some of the new nuclear plants they're building in Europe cost over $10 per watt. Just to build, not counting operations and decommissioning.
Now, up to a given level of penetration, solar aides the grid by boosting the supply curve when demand is highest (the middle of bright sunny summer days). So up to that point, the baseload vs. intermittent supply argument is moot, and even the capacity factor doesn't play in (in a sunny location, at least), because the only capacity you need is to fill in those daytime peaks. At high levels of penetration however you start having to factor in increasing levels of peaking and/or storage. This can be somewhat offset by geographic smoothing and diversity of energy sources (solar + wind + others), but nonetheless your cost effectiveness will decline once your market penetration becomes large. Still, these are some superb numbers that bode very well for the future of solar.
People said I was dumb, but I proved them.
Your calculation is a just bit too simple and optimistic.
Madurai (about 50km away from the power plant) has an average global horizontal irradiance of 224W/m**2.
At 9 degree latitude North, the optimum tilt angle is pretty close to horizontal : 10 degree tilt only brings 2% more irradiance over the year
Total insolation is year * average irradiance ~ 1960kWh
The performance ratio of such a power plant could be around 85%, with cable losses, inverter losses and automated cleaning.
The nominal power of the installation is 648MWp, tested under an irradiance of 1000W/m**2.
So your expected yield is :
1960kWh/(m**2*year)*85%*648MW/(1000W/m**2) ~ 1.1 TWh/year
compared to your result of 1.9 TWh/year.
The plant should pay for itself in less than 8 years, and your calculation wasn't too far off.
Why are you acting shocked that the plant's power rating is nameplate (aka peak) rather than average? Power plants are always reported by nameplate capacity. If you want to know the capacity factor, that's a different statistic: capacity factor.
Re, India's power consumption: India consumes 1106 TWh/year. Assuming a capacity factor of 0.22 here then this plant would generate 1,25TWh/year, or 0,11% of India's consumption, not 0,0007%. 0.00015% of India's land for 0,11% of its consumption, aka 0,13% of India's land for 100% of its consumption. In terms of wildlife health and agricultural output effects relative to generating power from polluting sources (pollution hurts animals and reduces crop yields), that's a no-brainer - all issues of climate change aside. It's also worth noting that solar plants tend to be more energy dense sources of energy than hydroelectricity (when the reservoir is counted), sometimes by large margins, and many orders of magnitude more energy dense than growing plants for biofuels, per unit energy therein. PV plants also require no cooling water, meaning huge benefits for rivers, and more water availability for agriculture. Lastly, PV plants can be built on marginal lands unsuitable for agriculture on their own - and the shade they provide reduces evaporation from the underlying soil, increasing water availability downstream.
People said I was dumb, but I proved them.
Joules per year = energy over time = power
Your slip is showing.
People said I was dumb, but I proved them.
'jigga' is an acceptable pronunciation, even promulgated by the US NBS in the 1960s-1980s. It has since fallen out of widespread use.
"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.
You mean like the Sugen combined-cycle power plant in Gujarat, India? Or one of the 22 nuclear reactors in operation at seven sites that generate about 25% of India's electricity?
Shhhh we're bashing India right now. You can come back with a comment on India's various achievements next time there's a Trump article posted. Don't worry, there will be one soon enough.
Your slip is showing.
If you're going to make insults, you better make sure you're right.
First of all, joules are energy and TW are power,
No shit, Einstein.
so your conversion is nonsense.
Are you high?
Secondly, assuming you actually meant TWh, not TW,
You assume much, Grasshopper.
you are off by several orders of magnitude.
Nope, you're just highly confused.
The total worldwide electricity production in 2012 was 18,000 to 22,000 TWh
Why use a stupid unit like TWh/year? Hours/year is a dimensionless number. Just use the plain SI unit: 22,000 TWh/year == 2.5 TW. Which, as I said, is a fraction of the 16TW total energy use.
I call that the "if-current-trends-continue" fallacy. The thing is, they never do. If current trends continue, my teenage son will be 60 feet tall in another ten years.
Strictly speaking: a fossile plant designed to follow the load curve of the day, that means gradually powering up around 7:00 in the morning, reaching a measureable power output around 9:00 in the morning, going up to about 85% of max around 12:00 and shifting back and forth between 87% and 93% between 13:00 and 17:00 and then slowly perform the reverse shift in output: has the exact same CF as a solar plant. ... for the simple fact that no one needs their 'potential' power the rest of the day.
50% of all power plants in germany are load follwing. Their CF - in summer at least - is the exact same as a solar plant.
CFs are irrelevant.
Relevant is what purpose you want to fulfill with your plant: base load, load following, balancing power, reserve power etc.
Load following plants have CFs around 35%
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
So, apparently this cost does not include land costs.
Are you referring to a Disco Inferno?
India is just like your country.
It is dark at night and bright at daytime.
The power comes out of the outlet in the wall.
What 'dark areas' are you thinking about?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
679/648 = $1.05/Wp. That's actually slightly higher than new installs in the US and Europe, but I suspect that's simply because construction started some time ago.
PV is now the cheapest form of power in CAPEX terms, ever. Which is why ~60 GWp is going in this year.
> Yes, if you ignore all maintenance costs
Maintenance costs are part of OPEX. OPEX on PV is the lowest of any major power source, by far. No moving parts, your main component is a sheet of glass (they are SILICON cells) in an aluminum frame, and the power conversion doesn't even have a transformer any more. And no fuel, of course.
Do you really think it would be more expensive than, say, a nuclear plant? Nuclear fuel is very cheap, but you still have lots (and LOTS) of moving parts to contend with. And cheap fuel isn't as cheap as no fuel at all.
Absolutely. Coal has no maintenance costs. No fuel costs, No boiler scale, no generator wear, no waste clean-out. It's all magic free energy!
> The performance ratio of such a power plant could be around 85%, with cable losses, inverter losses and automated cleaning
A VERY minor nit-pick - modern utility scale systems are closer to 90% because they have far lower line losses and inverters with ~98% efficiency. Apple's system (in WV? I can't recall) was specced at 92%
I realize that has no real effect on the bottom line, but I did think it was worth putting out modern numbers.
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...
Thanks. I don't know much about the project, so I didn't pick the best performance ratio.
It might end up being over 90%. It also could end up much worse, with either shadowing, module mismatch, inverter mismatch or soiling.
I've seen big projects where almost a dozen inverters (out of many hundred) were either out of order or even not connected at all without anyone noticing for over a year.
The areas of the country - largely rural - that are largely untouched by electricity
Interesting blog, BTW.
Well, yeah, it is a bargain, actually. For comparison, the new nuclear power plants that the US is building cost roughly 5x as much per megawatt.
And nuclear plants generate over 5 times more electricity per day on average than equivalent KW capacity solar (capacity factor). Also, new nuclear is designed to last approx. 80 years with expectation of running for up to 100 years. So other operational costs are offset by the fact you don't have to replace the whole thing 3 or more times in that period.
But maybe the most overlooked aspect is that nuclear generates lost of high paying jobs, as opposed to solar where most of the money up front goes to Asia for panel purchases, and installers and maintenance workers are paid dirt cheap.
I'm amazed but glad that it's actually begun to operate.
How did they get the people who farmed the 2500 acres of land there to move out? That is the biggest problem setting up a large factory in India, the land rights are questionable.
Oh I Googled that for myself: Adani seeks to gag its lawyer after he claims 'violations', "In an unusual move, the Gujarat-based Adani Group of Companies has filed a petition in the Madras High Court seeking to gag its own lawyer after he allegedly threatened to expose "major violations", and name those involved in the purchase and funding of 1,800 acres of land for its solar power project in Tamil Nadu."
BTW Nat Geo video here of the Kamuthi solar plant.
Night time load is lower than day time load in a hot country where the major load is airconditioning. Solar provides the peak load electircity when its needed.
**Life is too short to be serious**
One of the nice things about solar from a long term cost perspective is that other than cleaning the panels periodically and fixing electrical problems you have almost no labor so operating costs are almost non-existent compared to fossil fuels. This often makes up for the lower capacity factor. Your average coal fired power plant has a round the clock (3 shifts) of dozens of people working in the plant feeding coal, removing ash, making repairs and monitoring the steam generators. Coal plants are massive mechanical engines and they require constant maintenance adding a significant labor component to the price along with the cost of the fuel.
$1 a watt for panel prices (not installed like this plant) was always the place that economists predicted that solar would be competitive with other forms of generation even with a lower capacity factor because their are almost no input costs to run. At $1 installed there is little other generating capacity other than wind (also no labor or fuel) that can compete effectively. The ROI on solar and wind now significantly exceed coal and other generation tech which is why so much money is flooding construction for these types of plants.
> It also could end up much worse, with either shadowing, module mismatch
Well the nice thing about utility scale is that you have some control over this. Shadowing? Call in the bulldozers and level the ground. Module mismatch? Demand the supplier stack them on the pallets in matched groups.
You and I don't have the same advantages, the pallet you get will be +/- ~3% and you get to install on whatever square you have. That said, I did get lucky - my 2 story garage gets shadowed only about 2% of the year, about an hour a day in late winter.
> Interesting blog, BTW.
Thanks! Not a lot of posts this year though, got a new kid.
Sure, planners can avoid those pitfalls easily. They might not always do so, though. ;)
The difference between practice and theory is bigger in practice than in theory
General versus specific. Different paragraphs. Plural versus singular.
It is a bit odd that you are attempting to give me English lessons after missing all of those things.
It all makes sense if you read the subject heading of the post prior to it.
Work on that attention span kiddies!
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.
Dumbed down to the maximum the comment should read that the poster made a mistake but it is a very common mistake. People should not think less of the poster for making such a common mistake.
Solar provides the peak load electircity when its needed.
Why does this get repeated so often when it is so easily proven false?
Solar power hits it's peak at local noon. Air conditioning load hits it's peak with air temperatures which is somewhere between local 14:00 and 18:00. This need for air conditioning continues beyond sunset.
I've seen people claim this problem is easily solved with some sort of energy storage device. This level of energy storage is not yet economical, with possible exceptions for those that live next to hydro electric dams. Assuming it did exist why limit it's use to solar power? Would not all energy sources gain from this?
Any other tactic to spread out demand to match the supply would also benefit any other source of electricity. Smart grids, efficiency gains, load shifting, etc. all benefit competing energy sources like nuclear, wind, natural gas, and even coal.
I used to be a fan of solar power too, until I saw so many people claiming we can use solar power to replace every other energy source. Solar power makes sense in moderation. Too much and it makes things worse. In many places in the world we've already seen solar power built up beyond what is reasonable. No doubt from wishful thinking, government subsidies, all from lobbying by people with heads in the clouds and hands in my pockets.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Short and to the point but I think this may be a little clearer for one of them.
The "With all due respect" comments are better thought of as meaning that it is assumed that the person is good at something and should be respected for it but has made a glaring mistake in the current case.
The rare extreme version "with the greatest possible respect" should be read as - that's utterly fucking insane and if I didn't already know you I'd assume you are a complete and utter nutter.
Back on thread I was not insulting the above poster merely pointing out a very common mistake that a huge number of people make on this site so he should not be thought any less of, they are just one of many making a mild false assumption while out of their depth.
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.