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Comment by mattip | Hacker News Reader

Are there any figures on ROI available for this plant?

ROI on non renewables are high because the producers do not pay (all) of the externalities such as the cost of pull the carbon out of the air after it's been burned. I would love to see the true cost of oil and then decide if the ROI is real, or if its just a shift of wealth from those who get to breath polluted air to those who pumped the oil.

You'd have to put an unusually high value on air cleanliness to argue that oil, period, and the scale economies it has enabled, has not have a net ROI in total.

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.

I agree with your general feeling that Oil has had a positive ROI, but I doubt it is very high after all the cleanup is paid for.

You would need to calc solar insolation http://www.pveducation.org/pvcdrom/properties-of-sunlight/ca... for the site and the bulk cost of electricity over the lifetime of the plant.

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.

[1] http://www.powerisknowledge.com/

Hmm, I think this wholesale pricing may be more accurate:

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.

Wow, I had no idea it was so high. Yeah, that plant could have a 15 year payback cycle or less.

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.

ROI with and without subsidies would also be interesting.

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