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Tesla To Power Gigafactory With World's Largest Solar Rooftop Installation (inhabitat.com)
Last week, Tesla announced that its Gigafactory has begun mass production of lithium-ion battery cells in Nevada. But the company failed to mention one thrilling detail in their January 4 announcement: the Gigafactory could be powered by the world's largest solar rooftop installation. According to an investor handout, a 70-megawatt (MW) solar array along with ground solar panels could let the factory operate entirely on clean energy. Inhabitat reports: The 70 MW solar array would be around seven times larger than any rooftop arrays currently installed, according to Tesla's exciting handout released by Electrek and confirmed as genuine by The Verge. The rooftop array currently boasting the title of world's largest is a 11.5 MW installation in India. The United States' biggest rooftop array is a 10 MW array atop a California Whirlpool distribution center. SolarCity will likely manufacture the solar panels, according to The Verge, as Tesla acquired the solar energy company in November. Powerpacks will store any excess energy generated by the vast solar installation. Tesla said in the handout the "all-electric" factory will be able to run with greater efficiency and will produce zero carbon emissions. Heating and water use at the Gigafactory will also be sustainable. In the handout, Tesla said a large part of heating for the building would come from waste heat obtained from production processes. Also, "Gigafactory's closed-loop water supply system uses six different treatment systems to efficiently re-circulate about 1.5 million liters (that's around 400,000 gallons) of water, representing an 80 percent reduction in fresh water usage compared with standard processes." Tesla even said they're building a recycling facility at the Gigafactory that will be able to "safely reprocess" battery cells, packs, and modules to obtain metal usable in new cells.
The Dutch Railways are now completely wind powered as of Jan 1 2017. Apparently they don't need baseload power plants.
>Sure it's a bit better now, but not by much. ZA has a fvckton of coal, it will be burning it for some time.
Don't be so sure of this. Coal comes in different varieties and a coal plant must be designed for a specific variety. And we have a problem here in ZA. Until around 2010 the coal we used in our plants had little export value, while the coal Europe used was exactly the coal we didn't need. So Eskom could get very low rates on the coal they needed - because the mines could make lovely profits selling the rest to Europe.
Since 2010 the European market has been shrinking fast, it's not a viable export market anymore. China on the other hand is growing rapidly and is now our major coal export market. Only problem: China's plants use the same coal variety we do. So suddenly the mines are very unhappy about selling coal at R5 a tonne to Eskom when they SAME coal can get R50 a tonne from China.
Part of why Eskom helped the Guptas to buy that coal mine is because the mine was about to go bankrupt. The owners are in a long-term cheap coal supply with Eskom and had decided they would rather close that mine and focus on the others (from where they could export the coal to China) than keep operating the one they had to sell so cheaply it was making a loss.
Helping the Guptas buy it was partly motivated by the risk that if the mine closes Eskom would face a critical shortage. That nobody was willing to buy it without kickbacks and help tells you a lot.
Either way, none of this is relevant to American coal-miners, we've never imported coal from them and we never will - since their coal won't work in our power plants and, like you said, we have plenty of coal anyway.
It's definitely in ZA's best interest to move away from coal - not least because the economics around mining and burning have changed and it's now a lot harder to do it economically. The answer isn't the ridiculous nuclear plan either.
The problem with nuclear is that it is extremely expensive and takes a long time to get online. A minimum of a decade - and nuclear plants are notorious for going extremely over budget and over time - look how late Kusile and Medupi already are, there's no practical way a nuclear project will produce a single KW/H of power in South Africa in under 30 years. We can't afford to wait that long.
Our answer must be solar - we can bring the same power as the nuclear project online with solar in 2 years for 10% of the capital costs. And the cost of the power is far cheaper as well. Even with storage factored in it remains the cheapest power source of all, and we are particularly suited to it what with being such a high sunshine country.
The best studies right now pegs the total cost per kw/h of coal at about R120, nuclear is at about R1.05. Wind is around 85c - solar is 55c.
Less than half the cost of coal.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
But if oil and gas can have the huge subsidies they've gotten
What huge subsidies are you referring to? All of the articles I've seen about fossil fuel subsidies are mostly bullshit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Pick which ones you want to debunk.
I'll make note that of the renewables, the major subsidy there is for fuel ethanol, which most people that are interested in renewable energy don't want.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.