Thermal Solar Energy - Some Technologies Really Are Dumb

Solar Energy / Economics

Date posted: 11/11/14

Dr. Conca reports that the largest solar energy facility in the world is already irrelevant and has cost a lot more to construct than any other form of energy. The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System is a 5-square-mile, 392 MW array that cost 2.2 billion US dollars. It is located in the Mojave Desert, where the Sun always shines, and is supposed to produce a billion kWhs per year for 25 years. But there is a problem - the Sun does not seem to be cooperating. A spokesman for NRG Energy blamed the weather, saying the Sun did not perform as predicted. Instead of a billion kWhs of electricity, this year Ivanpah will produce less than 0.4 billion kWhrs, making its capacity factor only 12 per cent not the 30 per cent as advertised. And certainly not the 90 per cent of base-load generators like nuclear power. Fortunately for its investors, Ivanpah signed power purchase agreements of about 12 cents per kWhr. Assuming Ivanpah production gets up to its specs of 1 billion kWhs per year and operates for its design life of 25 years, then it will produce 25 billion kWhs, about 3 billion US dollars in gross revenue at a construction cost of 9 cents per kWh. Assuming O&M and decommissioning costs are almost zero......Not. No wonder they want a bail out - it may be the only profit they see. By comparison, the two new nuclear reactors under construction at the Vogtle site in Georgia will cost about 16 billion US dollars and will produce almost 17 billion kWhs per year for 60 years - almost a trillion kWhs total - at a construction cost of less than 2 cents per kWh. And no dead birds. It was good that we experimented with large-scale thermal solar and found that it is not quite what we hoped. Now we need to see how a large-scale PV solar plant does, which should be in operation soon.