[JR: It was posted a while ago.]

[JR: If you had 2 or more links, it was put in moderation. I've had a lot of comments, so I might have missed it. I'll look for it now.]

[JR: Multiple companies, multiple countries, multiple approaches, much lower costs, and many people pursuing storage. Plus global warming and lots of VC money.]

What I find especially useful in the article is the graph in the lower right (before the discussion section). It gives on a good feel of how wind and solar figure in. Clearly thermal solar with some storage could shove a lot of the NG off the page.

http://blog.wired.com/ wiredscience/ 2008/ 12/ could-the-elect.html

I tend to think the biggest energy boondoggle going is the Iraq War – I think Stiglitz costed it at in excess of $2 trillion and still rising (if you include all the future costs the US is committed to now re looking after vets etc). Part of the plan the neo cons were bragging about as they ramped up operations was it was going to create the conditions where oil prices would stabilize at $10 a barrel.

On the topic of $2 trillion dollar blowouts: Rogoff (highly regarded economist) is saying “it would be great right now if we could write a $2 trillion dollar check and this [ the current economic crisis ] would go away…”

$4 trillion would have been handy to have now that Hansen is wandering around telling us the NAS is ready to back him as he says there isn’t any time left for the economical phase in the new while the old wears out CO2 emission reduction plans….

Thanks for talking about that Forbes article. I am not sure why they would be biased, though even still, I made my own suppositions. Probably the fact that in 1999 natural gas was very inexpensive had a lot to do with the “not economic” decision made at that time.

If CSP can displace natural gas as a basis for electric power on a large scale, the banning of coal begins to make sense, since this banning action might not tend to drive up the price of natural gas. Of the “large scale” has to be judged on a national level.

Like Mark Shapiro’s point, in the end it comes down to the true cost of building and operating these facilities. That is the analysis I am looking for. The technical detail would also be important to look at to get a sense of the real problems involved.

To start with there is this Scientific American article which states the feed in tariff subsidy may be in jeopardy in Spain. They only need to power a percentage of their grid with renewables and once they get there they might stop the tariff.

http://www.sciam.com/ article.cfm?id=is-the-sun-setting-on-solar-power-in-spain

I went to the manufacturer’s website, i.e. Abengoa

http://www.abengoasolar.com/ sites/ solar/ resources/ pdf/ en/ PS10.pdf

I was curious what it would cost to build enough of these plants to replace a coal plant in the US. My calculations showed it would cost around ten times as much, capital cost. (see: further on). It still takes a Spanish feed in tariff that according to Scientific American guarantees “up to triple the market price” for the next 25 years for solar energy to get this CSP stuff off the ground in Spain.

It seems ironic that campaigners declare that CSP solar power not only exists, but some assert it is already cheaper than coal or nuclear when Abengoa touts this 20MW plant as “the largest in the world”. I guess it could be the largest “tower” plant in the world. A pilot coal fired carbon capture (CCS) plant, the Schwarze Pumpe in Germany is running today producing 30 MW but campaigners declare that CCS, because the biggest operating plant now is that tiny, doesn’t even exist. Hey, just commenting. If you compare using capacity factor, which takes into account how many hours in a year a solar plant can run, the German CCS coal fired plant has more than four times the output as this Abengoa plant.

Abengoa calls this plant the PS20. They have a detailed brochure for the PS10, a preceding version one half this size. I had to get some info for what follows from the PS10 brochure. Abengoa doesn’t particularly want you to know what electricity generated by one of these plants costs.

I wanted to find out what it would cost to build enough of these PS20s to replace the 800 MW coal fired plant discussed in “American Coal Rush Hits some Hurdles”, an NPR broadcast discussing the costs of building coal fired power plants in the US. As of 2007, after a tremendous 40% increase in construction costs in 18 months due to competition from so many other coal plants being built worldwide driving up prices, plus the general commodity boom raising the price of everything back in those ancient days when the US had an economy, NPR reported that an 800 MW coal plant would cost $1.4 billion.

This PS20 puts out 20 MW at full capacity. From the approx one half sized PS10 brochure: “with an installed capacity of 11 MW, and the local solar resource, PS10 is capable of generating 24.3 GWh of clean energy annually”. Apparently, solar power varies hourly with the angle of the Sun, the system has to be shut down when wind speed rises above 22.5 mph, the sun goes down every night, a cloud drifts by periodically, the mirrors get dusty and out of alignment, etc. 365 days 24 hours a day is 8760 hours in a year. 24.3 GWh divided by 11 MW is 2209 hours this plant could be said to be delivering power at its rated capacity. So it has a capacity factor of 25%. Other people I’m reading say actual output from CSP is less, but we’ll use this 25% derived from Abengoa’s own figures.

Therefore it would be comparable to various other power plants depending on their capacity factor. I assumed that the PS10 and the PS20 would have similar capacity factors.

According to various sources coal fired plant capacity factors vary between 70 and 90%. I take 75%. A new one might be expected to be better. So if I want to replace an 800 MW plant, using a capacity factor of 75%, I get 600 MW produced every hour the solar powered PS20s have to come up with to replace. 20 MW PS20s at 25% capacity factor means they can be described as putting out 5 MW every hour. So it would take 600 divided by 5 or about 120 PS20s to replace the coal plant being built in the US described by that NPR report.

120 PS20s using Abengoa figures of 80 million Euros each, would cost 9.6 billion Euros or $13.2 billion US dollars. Hey, only almost ten times as much. (9.4 times the NPR $1.4 billion figure is $13.2 billion USD).

Some, like Stephen Chu, say there are 150 or so coal plants at the planning stage in the US today. Industry sources say the completion percentage has been low lately due to a lot of concerns, such as what is going to be done about carbon emissions, but if 150 plants had to be replaced with Abengoa PS20s, it might cost $1.9 trillion compared to $210 billion. Now people can say carbon capture is expensive, but when the industry finally caves in and stops putting its money into “clean coal” advertising and starts spending it on CCS, they might just be able to beat $1.9 trillion, especially if no new grid is required. I’m hearing very large figures for a new grid.

I’m not saying I don’t want solar power. I just like to know what I’m talking about. And I don’t kid myself that the bean counters looking after the widows and orphans tax dollars are going to buy whatever I’m selling: they’re going to look at the economics, and they’re going to look at the goal, i.e. keeping carbon out of the atmosphere.

These CSP plants only have economics this favorable if they are located in favorable areas, such as Spain, or the US Southwest. Adding molten salt storage is going to increase the capacity factor and more importantly make it useful as baseload, but it seems it will also increase the cost per available MWh. If you say you need a new grid to transport this power from the Southwest throughout the US, some of that cost might have to be factored in as well. And if construction costs soar for other industries, one might think construction would tend to soar for CSP and new grids as well. I don’t know, but I don’t see some great cost reduction potential in making mirrors, and building arrays that can be aimed. It isn’t like Moore’s Law for transistors where technology made it possible to make a chip costing a few cents to replace what once took a huge building to house.

It’s then a question of bringing down the cost curve.

I looked up each of the Ontario power plants on the list and looked as far as possible into the details of their operation and financing. They seem to be about the same mix of private operations mixed with government funded operations like we have here in California. Maybe they have a little more hydro. Like us in CA, Ontario has government involvement in rate determination.

This is an ongoing study but my overall tentative conclusion is that they operate according to obvious economic logic overlaid with modest public funded programs. There are some special factors relating to hydro like they have to keep tourists happy by wasting a certain amount of water over Niagara Falls.

You can put 2 nukes (2400 MW) on less than 1000 acres, but so what?

Bad comparison. Mining uranium is extremely land-intensive. (Thorium is slightly less land-intensive.) The solar power example contains the land area for both the fuel source and the power generation. The nuclear example contains only the land area for power generation.