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.'"
Photovoltaic vs. SEGS (Score:4, Interesting)
SEGS [solel.com]
Only for a very few homes, though. (Score:3, Interesting)
The nuclear plant could give far, far many more homes carbon-neutral power -- the wind plant is going to give it to just a few, while the rest are still going to be stuck on highly polluting fossil fuel generation. When you factor all that fossil fuel into the "solar" column, which you need to, in order to produce the same amount of power from a finite investment in plants, it's not very clean at all.
It's nothing but a very expensive feel-good measure.
Re:Photovoltaic vs. SEGS (Score:4, Interesting)
Mirrors+water+sun=very cheap and effective. I wouldn't be surprised if this becomes a major generation method. For a large scale app you would want a turbine, but on a small scale you could probably do some interesting things with just the steam itself.
After all, the first solar app I saw as a kid was just to heat water for the home. Pipes+black paint+water pump=fewer oil deliveries. Why don't more people do this?
Re:Biggest Shame: Emotion Trumps Science (Score:5, Interesting)
Nuclear power is the way to go.
Ok, its not quite as simple as that.
Nuclear power by standard technology requires enrichment. Thats because they require a much higher percentage of U235 [wikipedia.org] in order to sustain a reaction than occurs naturally.
U235 is only 0.7% of uranium (as it has a half life about one tenth of U238 [wikipedia.org]). You need 4% or more to do a conventional nuclear reactor.
Enrichment also means throwing away a lot of U238, which will never be used in a conventional reactor.
Now we can use U238 in a breeder reactor [wikipedia.org] (and Thorium, which converts to U233). But if you do that, its a whole different technology, and the costs [wikipedia.org] aren't as clear cut.
If you were to try and run the world on conventional reactors, the supply of uranium would last us 20 years or so. If you can use breeders, you will get maybe a 100 years (depends how much we use). If you add in thorium, several hundred years.
So the only price that is relevant is the breeder reactor price of electricity. Because there isn't enough U235 in the world to really get serious about using it this way.
Breeder reactor technology is real, we can do it. Its a bit more expensive, but will no doubt get cheaper with use. Guess what? So will solar power.
And, at the risk of being doom and gloom, guess which one will still be plentiful in the year 3000? There is a finite amount of fissile material on the planet. The sun should be good for about 500 million years or so, as opposed to 500 years.
I know that there are energy storage issues for baseload, but there are solutions such as solar towers [wikipedia.org]. And open battery [wikipedia.org] storage.
I'm not opposed to nuclear power, but in the longer run, its also a stop gap for solar energy (including wind & hydro as being solar in origin), geothermal and tidal energy. So that is where we need to spend the big dollars.
My 2c worth.
Michael
Re:or evertything else... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd tend to think that the taxpayers would rather pay to replace the plants with cheaper and more effective alternatives. For example, while this has a construction cost of $8 watt, with a power factor* likely between 30-40%
*Basically what percentage of the plant's rated capacity it actually averages. A 40MW plant with a power factor of 40% would actually average 16MW. A 1,000MW plant with a load factor of 90% would produce 900MW on average. It's what tends to really kill solar and wind, as solar can't break 50%, and wind only breaks 50% in some very rare locations.
Re:or evertything else... (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, even a hundred of these plants, with a combined cost of $30 billion dollars, wouldn't be able to replace Nanticoke. Meanwhile 4 Gigawatt nuclear reactors would cost ~4-8 Billion dollars and eliminate the need for nanticoke, complete with around a 30% increase in available power.
Projects like this one will create jobs, which is a net increase for the Province when it comes to overall tax collections.
Projects like this make sense if they increase economic activity, but building any kind of new power plant would do the same, and cheap power would help attract more new business than expensive power. Being miserly is the best way to increase business in many ways - providing the most services for the dollar.
I agree with you on the idea of eliminating pollution, just on the how.
Why start bitching about it just because in this case it's a green technology subsidy
Because it costs around 8 times as much as other clean technology? And people complain about Haliburton*.
*Not because I like fraud, but I also dislike waste. Rather than using this to 'spur' development, they'd be better off investing half directly into solar development and the other half building a few new nuclear reactors.
real cost (Score:2, Interesting)
Fischer-Tropsch Reactions [wikipedia.org]
The Ohio Coal Research Center at Ohio University [ohiou.edu], and their biosequestration project (bacteria eats the SOx and NOx out of the emissions, down to the PPB level (PDF warning) [ohiou.edu]
Coal Gasification plants are going in in Ohio and elsewhere in the country. [gasification.org] - PDF Warning
That seemed weird to me (Score:3, Interesting)
I suppose centralizing it makes maintenance easier, though. Things like this seem like they would make more sense in the southwestern US. I'm sure we could spare a few square miles of desert, and the power production would be much, much higher.
Re:Biggest Shame: Emotion Trumps Science (Score:4, Interesting)
As our understanding of the physical world increases, it should be possible to extract electrons directly from the items undergoing fission. Then I'd consider it efficient use.
We still need short term solution, i.e. fission (Score:2, Interesting)
Your points are valid, but sometimes we need to do what makes most sense now so that we can develop what makes most sense later. I don't think we'll be using U235 fission in the year 3000. Hopefully we'll have come up with fusion, or solar cells that are efficient enough not to take 1.4 sq miles of land for a measly 40 MW.
Solar can't provide enough power right now. So if we don't take on fission, we're going to end up burning coal. I think it's obvious which is worse in that equation.
Re:or evertything else... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:or evertything else... (Score:3, Interesting)