Canada to Build 40MW Solar Power Plant 402
IceDiver writes "According to an article in the Toronto Star, an Ontario company has been given approval to build a 40MW solar power plant near Sarnia in Southwestern Ontario. This is enough power for about 10,000 homes. The plant will cover 365 hectares (1.4 sq. miles) and is to be operational by 2010. OptiSolar, the company building the plant, claims to have developed a way to mass produce the solar panels at a dramatically reduced cost, making the plant competitive with other forms of power generation. 'Compared to coal, nuclear power, even wind, solar's squeaky-clean image comes at a high price. OptiSolar is selling the electricity to the province under its new standard offer program, which pays a premium for electricity that comes from small-scale renewable projects. In the case of wind, it's 11 cents per kilowatt-hour. Solar fetches 42 cents per kilowatt hour, nearly four times as much.'"
Shame (Score:4, Insightful)
Ratio's (Score:5, Insightful)
It appears the footprint per house of the solar panels is actually less than the footprint of a house by itself. Surely it should be mandatory/make sense for compulsary solar panelling on houses?
Re:Shame (Score:5, Insightful)
Cheap, efficient, easily maintianable solar is not hard at all. All you need is mirrors, some slow electric motors, a working fluid, and a conventional turbine. Oh, and a lot of land not near NIMBYs, who for some reason will find a reason to be scared of everything.
or evertything else... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not impressed (Score:2, Insightful)
I especially don't want to pay those rates for a dead-end technology. It's one thing to build a pilot plant at subsidized rates if it can realistically be expected to scale... but we know enough about conventional PV cells that we can state, with some confidence, that only a major research breakthrough is ever going to make them a viable large-scale power source.
Is it possible to use only renewable sources? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Ratio's (Score:2, Insightful)
Excuse, me, I'm dyslexic apparently. $.42/kwh = $604.80
Are they insane?
$70-80 million for a 10mw install, this one is expected to run $300 millon.
$80 million for 10mw = $8 a watt, in Canada I'd expect availability to limit the production factor to, at most, 40%
Let's beat the nuclear drum a bit.
Nuclear power = $1-2/watt, for a production factor that's above 80% today.
For around four times what they're predicting this to cost, they could set up a nuclear power plant that could cover 250,000 homes insteal of 10,000. 25 times as many, for 4 times the cost. Invest(or don't borrow) the rest and you'll save enough money to handle the increased continued maintenance. Figure 5-10 times and you could have a reactor that can burn other plant's wastes and actually make money as the plants enter a bidding war to sell you their waste.
Re:Biggest Shame: Emotion Trumps Science (Score:2, Insightful)
Well (Score:5, Insightful)
But think about it for a moment : in the long run (as in next 10-20 years), what form of energy is subject to the biggest reduction in costs?
Solar : You make the panels. As soon as the technology stabilizes and we finally agree on a dirt cheap, efficient form of panel (there's about 20 different methods talked about) you build a plant that makes acres of it all day long. Every piece exactly like all the others. Fully automated. You truck them to a spot in barren wasteland, and dump them. Plug them in. A simple robot washes the grit off every now and then.
I don't think it is unreasonable to expect a factor of TEN reduction in cost. After all, the raw materials are low grade silicon wafers and energy (which can be supplied by panels produced by the plant itself...)
As for land : I calculated that at 10% net efficiency, we would need a 200x200 mile area of Arizona to power the entire United States. That includes all the energy used for transportation, and losses used in spinning up energy accumulator devices. That land currently sits idle, and while is a lot of area, there's still plenty of Arizona left (I used google earth to check this)
Nuclear : while solar requires only a handful of educated people, and can't be screwed up catostrophically, nuclear will ALWAYS require a lot of skilled labor to handle and high liability. Even the most dummy proof pebble ped reactor design would still need all sorts of care to handle the fuel and maintainence on the plant. You can't cut corners on nuclear. You can't mass produce
the plants as easily.
Everything that comes into proximity of the reactor becomes nuclear waste. It all has to be carefully handled. There's hazardous environments, especially for a plant that does reprocessing, where hot spent fuel has to be handled and worked with.
I like nuclear power : it's complex and cool and involves all sorts of neat things. Fusion is even cooler. But realistically, for the forseeable future solar is a MUCH better prospect. I believe had a few billion been sunk into a robotic factory to manufacture solar panels, we would not even be having this debate.
(when I say forseeable...I mean it. There's actually a VASTLY more efficient way to do interplanetary, and even interstellar, travel that doesn't involve fusion or fission plants...)
Re:I'm not impressed (Score:2, Insightful)
It is nice if there is a single missing cause, and if we find and solve it we have cost-effective solar power. It is very rare for technology to work that way. Take chips. The transistor on a chip was a breakthrough, sure, but it took an awful long time to get me a 3 GHz Mac. All the time I've been buying technology that wasn't that good. Do you really think that if no one had bought computers until now, that we could have bought the computer with its current specs?
Solar has to follow the path of wind energy. Slowly we've been learning more about the wind, improving various technologies (materials, shapes, transmission) and scaling up, as a result of which the cost of wind power comes down. This path is only possible if people are willing to pay a little more to allow companies to earn money. How would investors react if a company said it would start investing $500M in research without certainty that a break through would be made?
Old technology is the status quo, has had decades to improve. It is the old (coal etc.) that is the dead-end technology.
Not willing to invest in the best available clean electricity is like not willing to sow to harvest. Betting on one horse is also not wise.
Here in the Netherlands, over a decade ago, I've pestered electricity companies to allow me to pay MORE for my electricity, if only they generated it more cleanly. This has actually been introduced (interestingly first by the "dirty Joe" of the electricity companies for a reason I'd overlooked: They didn't care about so much about the environment as well as making money, and there was a market there of environmentally conscious consumers willing to pay a bit more). Green electricity is a success here, I think, especially since the tax break for green electricity. Most of the additional money is spent on wind power and biomass, some of it on solar. For each of those technologies goes, what is currently is being installed is better than what was installed 5 years ago. If we'd waited for 5 years and done nothing, we couldn't have installed the current state of the art technology because it wouldn't have been developed and put to practice.
Personally I get a bit squeezy in the stomach reading comments like yours. Old technology is slowly but steadily running us in big trouble, so some action should be taken. And taking action timely and gradually is generally better than a dropping-from-airplane-without-parachute-but-in-d
Bert
Re:or evertything else... (Score:2, Insightful)
Glad to hear that the Province of Ontario no longer has ANY taxation of its citizens! Wonderful news - I'll move there immediately!
Oh wait, they still have to tax the population to pay for things like health, education, roads, power subsidies?
Somewhere this solar power plant is getting its $0.42/kWh, and if it's coming from the government, it's coming from your taxes. Essentially your tax dollars are funding this private company - you're paying $0.42/kWh minimum, whether it shows on your power bill or not.
I'd rather have the company directly bill me $0.42/kWh rather than the government collect it via taxes, because at least there isn't the typical middle-man/government-overhead charge tacked on, raising the actual cost even higher (probably closer to $0.50/kWh if the Province runs like most large governments).
Re:Ratio's (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:or evertything else... (Score:5, Insightful)
A better way to encourage renewable energy sources would be a tax on electricity based on its environmental damage. If would make renewable energy more viable and force people into using less electricity. But this wouldn't involve as many opportunities for back-handers.
Re:Biggest Shame: Emotion Trumps Science (Score:3, Insightful)
Nuclear power serves mainly as a red herring that people who don't want to change anything wave around to criticize environmentalists.
Re:Well (Score:3, Insightful)
Power generation should follow what works best in an area. Solar* might work well in the south and southwest. Wind and water in the Rockies and west. Nuclear in the northeast.
*Overbuild solar plants by 60%. Use excess power to pump water out of abandoned wells, quaries and mines during the day. At night, let the water back into the wells and mines, generating power.
Re:or evertything else... (Score:3, Insightful)
These comparisons of various power generation techniques -- coal, gas, nuclear, solar, wind -- do a good job of comparing current operating cost and construction costs but generally seem to ignore the lifetime costs.
Is coal still a good economic decision if you figure in the cost to restore the open pit mine, remove the carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxides from the air, and remove the silt and pollution from the local streams and rivers? How about nuclear? If you figure in the lifetime monitoring of Yucca mountain is nuclear still a viable option? On the other side of the equation, what's the disposal cost of a silicon-based solar array?
These are serious questions and I honestly don't know the answer.
Was it snowing in Cornwall 2 weeks ago? (Score:3, Insightful)