DubStyle311

Largest solar panel plant in US rises in Fla. - Yahoo! News

They just finished the largest solar power station in the US. 25MW for $150,000,000 on 180 acres. Thats just absurd. I do consulting for some of the largest power utilities in the world. Here are some stats for context. Based on this project, the solar facility has a cost of roughly $6,000,000 per MW. The most expensive steam generating plant costs AT MOST $2,500 per MW. It takes about 7 to 8 acres of land to generate a single MW of electricity. 7 acres....

Not only that, but as for the payback goes, this $150 million station will produce about $2 million worth of power per year (assuming a generous wholesale cost of 3 cents per kW-hr). We will all be dead before this operation shows a profit.

If you built a facility like this in every state, it still wouldnt even produce as much power as a single nuclear reactor.

I know its hard for for people to conceptualize how much electricity a MW is, but the entire generating capacity of the US is 1,087,791 MWs. A megawatt is nothing...

The fact of the matter is that solar can never replace a significant portion of the US power capacity. Not only are the economics of it shitty, but its simply not possible to get solar to generate a material amount of our energy needs. Not unless you want to go back to candlelight.

Another interesting power fact. To get solar (and/or wind) to 20% of our total capacity, we would need every steam gen plant in the country to be re-powered and not shut down so that they can be used to provide power when solar and wind cant run do to environmental factors or when we are in a situation that would need extra power. To get renewables to 33% of our total capacity, we would need roughly 40% additional steam capacity.

These news articles make everything sounds great, but when you know the energetics of our power system, it is simply not feasible.

Thoughts?

__________________
I may be wrong, but I doubt it.

JcP

Yet. And until we push for it instead of sitting on our hands and "settling" for more fossil fuel/non-renewable energy sources, it will never happen.

so you're right, Dub. Solar can't fix our energy problems at the moment. So instead of spending your time fighting for what we already have, why don't you fight for more funding for research to make green energy sources viable?

I think Nuclear power is an ok stop-gap, but it CANNOT be viewed as "acceptable." Nuclear power is methadone. It might help you wean off the hard stuff, but your goal and focus needs to be on getting CLEAN, not thinking methadone is the cure.

__________________

Just look out around us, people fightin their wars...
They think they'll be happy when they've settled their scores...
Let's lay down our weapons
and hold us apart
be still for just a minute
try to open our hearts
MORE LOVE.

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Rev It's not what you see, it's that you're looking.

Štulic

Every houshold could cut it's energy consumption by at least 40% if they only wanted to. You're throwing numbers around which may or may not be correct but do we have to use and waste so much electricity? No we don't.

When you talk about todays solar power harwesting technology, one would think according to you that we reached the limit of it's physical possibilities.
It's like if someone back in 1996 would've said a Pentium MMX processor is the top we could ever reach in clock speeds and microprocessing of digital information.
Now we have the same companu called Intel commercially producing CPU's with 10,000 times better and quicker performance, not to speak about the future with quantum computing etc...

Same thing with the solar cell, the computer technology revolutionised because of demand and because there wasn't a power-full power-hungry power-lobby that did everything to stall the development of PC's.

Who killed the electric car again?

The future is solar!

__________________

farmergiles

At present solar power is effective and economical for supplemental water heating on a house per house basis even in areas without that much sunlight.

Solar powered electricity generation is at present not efficient enough in terms of the energy requirement required to build the panels or whatever except in very sunny areas.

That is not to say the technology cannot be improved. Without large scale experiments like the one you mention then it would be hard to advance the technology or even assess its' viability.

How much money was spent on fission research before a single watt of power was produced from a fission generator?

Also dub, you have failed to factor in the cost of cleaning up after nuclear and fossil fuel power generation.

__________________
Cultivate a stoic calmness

Bearsy

Lengthy, but quite funny and very informative lecture on the future of Solar Power


Short film on the same subject

__________________

John F. Kerry

yea its not great yet. i agree.


but dude, we're talking about billions of years in the future here.


oil and coal will last for a few centuries tops,

maybe some kind of nuclear power will last indefinately, but the only things that are gonna last indefinately besies some amazing nuclear breakthru are solar and other renewables.


i read somewhere that the amount of sunlight that hits the earth every minute contains enough energy to power everything that has ever been powered by electricity in the history of mankind but that we just cant collect it well enough. anybody know if thats true?

anyway, computers in the 1950s fit in a warehouse, today they fit in a swallowable pill.

so im sure solar power tech will improve drastically in the short term future let alone the long term future. and its like one of our only choices if we want power for more than a few hundred years.

__________________
Nasa under Obama

msicidron

obviously no one could calculate that.

that movie said its the amount of sun that hits earth in a few hours is enough to power the earth for 1 year. but still even that is probably horribly inaccurate for the sake of being a flashy comparison.

__________________

Bearsy

No, I'm pretty sure it's accurate... just not possible to harness that much power now, nor in the near future. The sun is the only thing that gives and sustains life to every living thing on this planet, and it has done that for the past Billion or so years... You think it can't fill a couple billion batteries?



Nanotech ≠ nanobots Terry, no need to be frightened of microscopic fuel cells.

__________________

Ego Tripping

Yeah, gross inefficiency.

The only people afraid of solar are the ones that have a vested ($$) interest in oil. Solar is the absolutely, unequivocally, the power source of our future. All we need is proper storage and I know a guy in the industry that told me the holding capacity of the units that are going into production right now are simply amazing. We're very close, no matter what the oil companies say.

__________________

msicidron

i wasnt doubting the sun's potential to do such a thing...i was just saying it was a bullshit statistic

__________________

Bearsy

Idk, maybe. I googled that and I'm seeing it a lot online... but it's always the same exact sentence and there never seems to be any proof behind it. You're probably right.

__________________

cocobolo

Mathematically, it would be possible to calculate just how much energy fell on earth in a single day, and actually it would be pretty easy to do that. What we would not know, however, is how much power has been consumed since the day we had electricity on this earth. At best that would only be a wild guess.
Then we would need to know at what efficiency to do said calculation, 100% or something like 15%, the efficiency of a fairly good solar panel.
Sharp has just announced a 35.8% efficiency rating using nanotechnology, which is with us today. Now it is just a matter of time before these types of panels are commonly available.
Nano Solar in California is making them, plus their factory in Germany as well. Unfortunately the whole production is being shipped to europe. At least for now. There is at least one other nano-tech outfit in the US doing this, but their sales are limited to something like 50kw+ in order to serve more communal type needs.
It is here, we just have to be patient.
In the meantime, make your own panels. You can do it for $1/watt. And that is what coal power costs us.

DubStyle311

The lack of critical thinking here is as apparent as ever. I had forgot Id even make this post. After rereading it, I made a enormous error by misstating KW as MW. The cost of steam gen is $2,500,000 per MW, or a little less half than solar. The fact noone here even questioned the fact that i said solar power costs 2,500 times more than steam is hilarious.

And to whomever said that doesnt include the cost of evironmental cleanup and emissions, it does. The $2,500/kw costs includes SOx and NOx emission controls and the costs associated with cleanup when a unit is retired. If you were to take those out it would be closer to $750/kw.

__________________
I may be wrong, but I doubt it.

cocobolo

It's good to hear from another solar aficionado. When you refer to "proper storage" are you speaking of an advanced battery or something else?

Štulic

Critical thinking is one thing, expecting stoners to sit down and carefully examine your calculations is another.

__________________

cocobolo

7 acres to generate 1 MW? How so? Using panels at 15% efficiency, which is not particularly high should require 1.53 acres, plus the other .47 acre for breathing room.
One acre, 43560 square feet or about 4350 sq. meters. At an efficiency of 15% you should get 650,000 watts per acre, therefore, just over 1.5 acres per MW. Panels will be on the market in the near future which exceed 30% efficiency. This will mean 1 MW per acre.
We need to learn how to consume less, not spread the nuclear nonsense around. There are actually people around who would rather use clean power, even if it does cost a little more.
And incidentally, a Florida power company announced a couple of days ago that current electricity prices are rising at a rate between 15% and 31% annually. I suppose that depends on where you are.

cocobolo

OK, just for fun, I did a calculation of the amount of solar insolation arriving on planet earth at any given second. Using as a base for the visible area facing the sun a diameter of 8,000 miles it works out to very close to 140 billion MW at any given second in time.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with reality. If we were ever to be able to capture just 1% of that amount, it would be a staggering achievement indeed.

Ego Tripping

And with cocobolo's arrival, we can end this thread for it's lack of ability to have faith in the very spirit of mankind that brought us to this miraculous point.

I love this icon.

__________________

JcP

I'm curious why the KW/MW issue is what you think we all should be discussing? Seems to me, the discussion lies in funding solar research so there isn't such a discrepancy, regardless of measurement.

FYI, you switched back and forth between KW and MW, so to be completely honest with you, I just chalked it up to your own ignorance and/or simple late-nite typing mistakes.
If I posted "lol you said MW instead of KW" you would have replied with "you have nothing better to do than attack the messenger?!" so instead, I gave you the benefit of the doubt.

You can be sure, in the future, I will point out all of your mistakes to you. And I urge all the other "non critical thinkers" here to do the same.

__________________

Just look out around us, people fightin their wars...
They think they'll be happy when they've settled their scores...
Let's lay down our weapons
and hold us apart
be still for just a minute
try to open our hearts
MORE LOVE.

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Rev It's not what you see, it's that you're looking.

cocobolo

Au contraire, my friend. I am definitely on your side.