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The World's Largest Solar Farm Rises in the Remote Egyptian Desert (latimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In 1913 on the outskirts of Cairo, an inventor from Philadelphia named Frank Shuman built the world's first solar thermal power station, using the abundant Egyptian sunshine to pump 6,000 gallons of water a minute from the Nile to irrigate a nearby cotton field. World War I and the discovery of cheap oil derailed Shuman's dream of replicating his "sun power plant" on a grand scale and eventually producing enough energy to challenge the world's dependence on coal.
More than a century later, that vision has been resurrected. The world's largest solar park, the $2.8-billion Benban complex, is set to open next year 400 miles south of Cairo in Egypt's Western Desert. It will single-handedly put Egypt on the clean energy map. That is no small feat for a country that's been hobbled by its longtime addiction to cheap, state-subsidized fossil fuels and currently gets more than 90% of its electricity from oil and natural gas. [...] The Benban complex, which will be operated by major energy companies from around the world, is expected to generate as much as 1.8 gigawatts of electricity, or enough to power hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses. It will consist of 30 separate solar plants, the first of which began running in December, and employ 4,000 workers.
More than a century later, that vision has been resurrected. The world's largest solar park, the $2.8-billion Benban complex, is set to open next year 400 miles south of Cairo in Egypt's Western Desert. It will single-handedly put Egypt on the clean energy map. That is no small feat for a country that's been hobbled by its longtime addiction to cheap, state-subsidized fossil fuels and currently gets more than 90% of its electricity from oil and natural gas. [...] The Benban complex, which will be operated by major energy companies from around the world, is expected to generate as much as 1.8 gigawatts of electricity, or enough to power hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses. It will consist of 30 separate solar plants, the first of which began running in December, and employ 4,000 workers.
So. they're going to get 1.8GW of the ~25GW they produce in total? For 12 hours per day, or less, of course.
That seems to translate to maybe 4% of their electricity production.
Color me unimpressed....
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration the US currently generates 1.4 percent of it's energy from solar, Egypt is about to cover 4% of it's energy needs from solar in one fell swoop. I'd say that's rather impressive, especially since the Egyptians have by now probably caught on to the fact that (A) sunlight, unlike oil and gas, carries no extraction costs with it, (B) it comes with no geopolitical baggage and (C) Egypt has a fantastic abundance of both sunlight and cheap desert land to put solar plants on. Meanwhile in the US, the nation's president thinks the future of the nation's energy generation lies in coal and natural gas of which one is being out competed price wise by Wind and Solar and the other soon will be.
- "But night!!"
- "But this won't immediately cover all electricity generation, so it's useless."
- "Nuclear is the only answer. Please ignore the multiple nuclear plants under construction that have been abandoned in multiple countries."
- "I suddenly really, really, really care about birds, yet have completely forgotten about harm to birds from pollution."
- "What we really need is a physically impossible electrical grid that covers (insert very large geographic area here)."
- Elon Musk is a hero or a villain.
- "My calculations based on retail power costs in a different place, as well as a massive overestimate of the maintenance costs, indicate this plant could never possibly be profitable."
No extraction costs? What do you call the $2.8 billion to build the thing? That doesn't even count transmission.
No extraction costs? What do you call the $2.8 billion to build the thing?
I'm not a geologist or anything, but I call that a construction cost. Which applies to any power generation station.
Really, this isn't hard. Most of the same costs like construction and transmission will apply to any power generation station. But with things like solar, wind, and hydro, you only need to build them in the right location, you do not need to pay to get the fuel.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
No extraction costs? What do you call the $2.8 billion to build the thing? That doesn't even count transmission.
What do you call $X billion to extract the oil and then $Y billion to build a refinery to process it into a usable state and/or ship it to the consumer? ... which is the process with oil, natural gas and coal. You don't have to dig up the sunlight, you don't have to refine it, you don't have to ship it to the power-plant, it just shines down on you from the sky, onto your solar panels allowing you to go straight to the convert-it-into-electric-enery step.