Largest US Power Storing Solar Array Goes Live 377
Lucas123 writes "A solar power array that covers three square miles with 3,200 mirrored parabolic collectors went live this week, creating enough energy to power 70,000 homes in Arizona. The Solana Solar Power Plant, located 70 miles southwest of Phoenix, was built at a cost of $2 billion, and financed in large part by a U.S. Department of Energy loan guarantee. The array is the world's largest parabolic trough plant, meaning it uses parabolic shaped mirrors mounted on moving structures that track the sun and concentrate its heat. A first: a thermal energy storage system at the plant can provide electricity for six hours without the concurrent use of the solar field. Because it can store electricity, the plant can continue to provide power during the night and inclement weather."
Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
The plant doesn't really store electricity. It can however, store heated salts that can be used to generate electricity well after sunset.
Re:6 hours? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:pricing (Score:5, Insightful)
Covering your home in solar panels in Arizona can save you about $100/mo on your power bill, which for a single-family-residence runs about $200 in the winter and about $400 in the summer.
Those panels aren't free. They can take 10+ years to pay for themselves.
If it takes Solana 10 years to break even, that's $3,000 per year, per home served, or on par with their current power bills, and doesn't involve burning any fossils.
Re:pricing (Score:2, Insightful)
So I'm not going to respond to the first post because it makes no sense. But I'll happily use the "first reply" spot, thank you very much, to actually say something.
This $2 billion plant breaks down to close to $30,000 per home serviced. Seems a wee bit exc essive, considering the average home electric bill in Arizona runs something like $200 (I researched the web for a few minutes to estimate this).
Consider that installing a home solar system would run something like $10-$20k at most in a sunny place like Arizona (considerably less w various tax incentives).
Looking like a bit of a boondoggle?
This is not how investment in technology works. Solar thermal is still moving down the cost curve and hasn't been deployed to nearly the scale of rooftop PV, but has the potential to massively undercut (at the utility scale, with thermal storage). These investments help the technology reach that point.
Re:6 hours? (Score:4, Insightful)
And since they're selling the power to APS at 14c/kWh, it seems like a good plan...
Re:pricing (Score:2, Insightful)
You don't actually have enough information to say. Do the home systems provide electricity after the sun goes down? What is the efficiency after 10 years? What is the expected lifetime of the home systems? What is the expected lifetime of the power plant? How do the costs compare to a conventional power plant? What are the pollution costs? How does it affect the wildlife around the plant? How does that compare to a conventional plant?
You haven't scratched the surface of how this compares to anything else and w/o that you don't provide enough info to say whether it's a boondoggle or not.
Re:WTF (Score:0, Insightful)
it also seems stupid to use a turbine that requires water in the middle of a desert and is subject to the energy lost in conversion. I'm a fan of the "by all means necessary" approach to solving our energy problems but this is just a huge waste IMO. Perhaps it has use as a prototype, otherwise I'm not convinced it's a good idea, at all.
Re:6 hours? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nighttime lasts longer than that.
Or more likely, they did some demand modeling and found some value that made the economic sense?
Electricity demand follows a predictable pattern, with the lowest demand between 10pm and 7am. If surplus power (to storage) were to transition from positive to negative in the early evening, then 6 hours of stored capacity might work out pretty well.
Re:Three square miles of pristine desert? Bad huma (Score:4, Insightful)
As an Arizonan, I assure you, we have no use for any of the land between Phoenix and Yuma sans that which the Palo Verde nuclear plant sits on -- and there's a lot of it.
Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:pricing (Score:5, Insightful)
We've already got one fairly awesome nuclear plant -- located fairly close to these solar arrays, by the way -- but I wonder if the $5300/hW figure includes long-term storage and disposal costs.
I suppose salt tanks might, but there's also the pleasure of knowing that (a) your solar system can't go into meltdown, and (b) you can destroy people with your laser array.
Re:pricing (Score:5, Insightful)
PV is popular because it can be done at small scales and has been in continuous use since the 1970s. Solar thermal requires great big turbines etc, so a large capital cost, before you can get one watt out of the things so it is very unpopular with those who don't wish to invest (just about everyone in charge of budgets).
Wait, what?! (Score:5, Insightful)
China 2007:
Tianwan Nuclear Power Plant
$3.3 Billion for 2,120 MW
$1.56 Million/MW
US 2013:
Solana Solar Power Plant
$2 Billion for 280 MW
$7.1 Million/MW
And we wonder why we keep having to borrow money from them?!
Re:pricing (Score:2, Insightful)
Can that one awesome nuke plant handle the middle-of-the-night baseline loads by itself? If so, fantastic combination with the solar.
At least in summer, Arizona and California need lots of power when the sun is shining, and not nearly as much in the middle of the night. Solar can't provide all energy needs but Arizona is a great place to build a lot of it.
Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wait, what?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, you have to add in the billion and billions in decommissioning fees and nuclear waste storage and uranium mining and transportation and security and....
Re:WTF (Score:2, Insightful)
Technically nothing stores electricity except for super-cooled superconductors.
Depends on how you define electricty I suppose. If "static" electricity isn't really electricity, then you have a point. We refer a lot to "electrical flow" as if there is a thing called "electricity" that is made up of electrons, rather than electricity being the flow itself. If you think of electricity as an "electron fluid" then it's still electricity even when it's just has a potential to flow as in static electricity. If you think of it the way you're thinking of it (which is more technically correct) then only actual flow of charged particles (which don't just have to be electrons) is electricity.
Still, you're ignoring ways other than superconductors that you can "store" electricity. Cyclotrons, for example. Or natural magnetic artifacts like the Van Allen belts. For that matter, I'm not sure there's such a thing as a perfect insulator, so "static" elecricity isn't really truly static, it's just that the flow is very slow. So capacitors and Leydon jars, etc. can be said to be "storing" electricity by slowing it down, just as pretty much any vessel "storing" water actually allows the water to flow out of it very, very slowly.
In any case, it's always tricky to talk in absolutes. You always find yourself having to invent arbitrary constants and cutoffs or applying "I know it when I see it" style reasoning.
Re:Thats a shitload of money (Score:5, Insightful)
No matter what the power plant... No matter how clean and low-impact it is, some moron ALWAYS has to find something stupid to bitch about.
Are you suggesting that a nuclear power plant would be a scenic tourist attraction, right at home inside Yellowstone? How about a coal power plant, along with the huge open-pit mine where the coal comes from? Or maybe some nice tar sands right outside your back yard?
If you don't like the fact that electricity generation is going to use some land, then cut the power lines coming into your house and live in the nice, scenic, non-blighted dark and cold.