World’s Largest Solar Array Set to Crank Out 290 Megawatts of Sunshine Power
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
That's generous, getting a loan for a massive 0.056% like that must have been a real boost. Also: wut?
"The summary of oil-related subsidies in the U.S. for 2010 totals $4.5 billion" [1]
"The Treasury Department estimates that eliminating just three tax preferences for coal would save $2.6 billion between 2013-2022" [2]
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/energysource/2012/04/25/the-surp...
[2] http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/04/13/463874/top-three...
Renewables get about 10x the subsidies (both direct and indirect) of oil. Nuclear seems to be getting screwed in the deal. Given the crappy economy, looking at the number of people employed by each sector is helpful.
> This report only includes subsidies meeting the following criteria: they are provided by the federal government, they provide a financial benefit with an identifiable FY 2010 federal budget impact, and, they are specifically targeted at energy. These criteria, particularly the energy-specific requirement, exclude some subsidies that benefit the energy sector. Some of the subsidies excluded from this analysis are discussed below.
The examples that they list overwhelmingly benefit oil, gas, and nuclear energy sectors.
Let's look:
"For example, Section 199 of the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004"
This was not specific to oil or gas and benefited those "provides reductions in taxable income for American manufacturers", wonder why that was more beneficial to oil and gas then renewable in 2010? 25% of $13 billion is listed as energy related with the remainder being other industries.
"The tax code allows a foreign tax credit for income taxes paid to foreign countries." Benefits oil, but also a lot of other industries buying raw materials from foreign countries to use in the USA.
"The tax code also provides special treatment for some publicly-traded partnerships (PTP)." This one should benefit both sides equally.
"Another potential subsidy source not addressed in this report is associated with energy-related trust funds financed by taxes and fees." These are industry funded and "there is no direct federal budgetary impact in FY 2010"
"This report also does not attempt to quantify the potential subsidy resulting from limits to liability in case of a nuclear accident provided by Section 170 of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, the Price-Anderson Act." Nuclear accidents can be bad so this is actually the most beneficial.
Oil and gas are using the same tax incentives that other companies that employ American workers in the US and manufacture a product with local resources or foreign bought resources are using. If solar is not using these tax breaks then I wonder where they were getting their panels?
Obviously, a program that applies to all companies will see more expenditures for the oil and gas companies because they exist in a larger and more established industry. That is still tax-payer money being spent to encourage growth in that sector, and much less, comparatively speaking, is being spent in those sectors than on renewables.
Thus, I find it a little disingenuous to roll out that 10x factor which ignores a lot of subsidization for an industry which many would argue doesn't need much more encouragement.
The technology failure to build an energy source / process that is cheaper with better storage options than oil & gas is the primary problem. Lack of taxpayer funds is not.
This does not include other tax incentives.
I love renewable energy, and I purchase carbon offsets on my power bill each month to mitigate the fossil fuel I use. But it doesn't scale that well, and the environmental costs of manufacturing energy capture and storage technology need to be taken into account as well. We need to face up to this scale issue, which is something many green people don't like to do because that brings nuclear power into the conversation, but facts are facts.
/and increases in power requirements but you were negative enough.
EDIT: the wikipedia page commented above says about 13% was renewables in 2008 ... ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption )
I don't understand. Why forego the extra power when there are no clouds?
1) Maintenance - When not cloudy you can bring them on-line to cover the maintenance on other parts of the site.
2) They've designed for a fixed output under certain conditions so in effect they don't want to push more than 290MW but the extra panels help them not drop that too far.
3) Grid operators like plants this size to be capable of consistent output - similar to why some gas plants run with either one or the other turbine on but often not both (In the old days before successive governments trashed it the UK national grid aimed for an unused capacity overhead of 25%, this would cover maintenance, accidents, natural disasters etc, we are currently running with about 4% spare)
Upstate NY has a lot of hydro and wind power, and actually produces more energy than it can export on a lot of days. The obvious answer is to build more high voltage transmission lines, but people are fighting them for two reasons: No one wants to live under the transmission lines, and when they build transmission lines next to your house your electricity gets more expensive because the cheap power being exported to the rest of the state.
But I guess nobody wants to buy the highly-variable extra power. And it leaves them room to install storage in the future.
$360 per panel is very reasonable.
With PPG is buying all of its capacity, it appears this is a solution that works.
Is my math right tho'? 290MW is roughly 58 Watts per panel. Aren't these things capable of 300+ watts or more?
edit: changed $1.6B to $1.8B
Of course, a hot spot also causes updrafts, so your thought there is still valid.
Personally, I think combining solar PV with solar thermal is an interesting option. When your panels are often seeing temperatures in excess of 90C (that part I am confident is true), it seems like using a heat exchange fluid to both cool the panels (improving efficiency and lifetime) and deliver that heat to a heat engine or use as a preheater for a steam generation system is interesting.
I think possibly more interesting for residential, where a 90C heat source preheating your residential water before your water heater could significantly increase the effective efficiency of your panels. You generate high value electricity from as much light power as you can, and use the waste heat to decrease your use of electricity/gas for heating. Win-win, and the cost is just some heat exchangers and tubing.
Sounds like this mega plant is designed with a fair amount of redundant capacity; for cloudy days, maintenance etc. If so, this may facilitate "real world scale" testing of approaches like yours without unduly affecting "production."
However, using that warmed water as a preheat for another process is perfectly valid.
http://www.cleanenergyactionproject.com/CleanEnergyActionPro...
https://www.google.com/#q=(626.219+*+1000)+%2F+(365.25+*+24)
I pretty sure history says this line is false.
Individual homeowners may not care. I imagine if Target or Wal-Mart is choosing their energy supplier, however...
I'm considering replacing them with the latest technology. That cost/efficiency I believe I can boost them to 7.8kW raw conversion on the same mounts. I may also be able to boost total efficiency with some of the newer modes (mine are connected serially into high voltage strings, vs today where they are more commonly a set of parallel micro-inverters.
No, they are fixed frames.
http://gigaom.com/2012/07/16/huge-arizona-solar-panel-farm-n...
The reason why is probably that they did the same computation everybody else has made that considers movable panels and they concluded that the extra costs sunk in the hardware to move the panels could be spent on extra panels with a net increase in power at reduced complexity.
I wished I had made that same computation before investing in my actuator controlled panel setup.
> Are these thin film panels more efficient than solar thermal collectors?
You can't really do that comparison directly, you can only compare one installation end-to-end with another using different technology. Just substituting one part of the chain is impossible, and even if the one or the other would show a benefit there is no point making the comparison without adding best-of-breed versions of all the other parts in the chain so that the resulting power generated at the systems output can be compared with the energy input by the sun.
Even then, the systems are of such different breed that you could have a problem comparing them at all, for instance, photovoltaics do not allow for easy storage and thermal collectors give you the option of storing the energy in the form of heat for a while before using it for conversion.
And then there's the difference between energy efficiency, energy return on energy invested, cost efficiency, and energy return on money invested which are all totally different measures.
The energy efficiency of solar PV is really rather ridiculously high all things considered, I think it's rarely acknowledged that the ~10% conversion efficiencies common for PV are actually extremely high compared to plants with their more typical ~1% for even organisms like algae. Really kind of puts things in perspective.
I think solar thermal is less energy efficient generally for producing electricity, but is obviously more efficient for generating heat. But the cost efficiency is less clear. I've seen studies that indicate solar thermal can be on par cost-wise even though the efficiency is lower, because it's an array of mirrors instead of semiconductors. Not really sure what the result of that analysis ended up being, but probably varies by site.
In the Southwest, where counteracting the direct effect of solar radiation (cooling/Ac) is a main consumer of power, this makes even more sense.
I don't have specifics but it looks like they have more capacity that they bring online at the beginning and the end of the day to flatten the power output. So I would use a more trapezoidal curve (or just assume a 10 hr day).
290MW * 10hrs * 42$/MWhr [1] => 120K/day
With a nice fatti 0% loan and no increases in the cost of electricity payback is about 30 years. I wouldn't be surprised if costs didn't rise at least 2x to 4x in the next 20, soo I'd say they are probably going to do ok on the ROI.
Even if the raw capacity of the plant was 600MW (derate panels over lifetime, more consistent output), the panel cost was less than 1/3 of the total price of acquisition and construction. And as the grid becomes smarter they can probably start to put a more variable amount of power into it.
http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/update/wholesale_mark...
The plant will serve California which seems to be in the 130-170$/MWhr right? But, this all assumes that a plant like this would not put a downward pressure on prices.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricit...
Since the US used 3800 TWhr of energy I doubt this plant would make a dent. If we got our watts/person down to the same level as Germany we would be doing pretty well in terms of excess energy capacity. We could shut down our most poorly performing power plants.
With those rates you outlined if I ran the power system for a municipality I would start buying land in the desert now.
Whether the marginal added "value" to some, of commuting in a hummer vs a Prius, is worth the cost to third parties of the incremental added pollution is, of course, a different matter.
Intuitively, adding greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere should, in isolation, increase energy in the system. But what if we really were heading for a new ice age as some feared in the 70s. And the only thing that prevented us from freezing to death, was the concerted effort of those notoriously concerned and altruistic SUV drivers taking one for the team, by revving up their Hummers.
As for the ice age business, climate modeling from 40 years ago is an entirely separate thing compared with today's climate modeling. The advances we've made in model resolution and understanding the physics is quite compelling.