Guest post by David Middleton

SolarReserve’s Crescent Dunes Project in Tonopah, Nevada is quietly providing clean, green solar energy to 75,000 homes in the Silver State even when the sun isn’t shining.
Crescent Dunes is the first utility-scale facility in the world to use molten salt for power energy storage capabilities, a technology also known as concentrated solar.
With a concentrated solar plant such as Crescent Dunes—including other plants like it around the world—more than 10,000 movable mirrors, or heliostats, reflect solar energy to a central, 640-foot tower that heats up salt to 1,050 degrees Fahrenheit.
This salt is used for two purposes, as SolarReserve points out on its website. First, it retains very high levels of heat, making it like a thermal battery that can be used night and day, whether or not the sun is out. Second, when electricity is needed on the grid, the molten salt gets dispatched through a heat exchanger to create super-heated steam to power a traditional steam turbine.
This process is similar to a conventional fossil fuel or nuclear power plant except with zero carbon emissions or hazardous waste and without any fuel costs, the California-based solar company says.
“The whole project cost slightly under $1 billion and SolarReserve holds a 25-year contract to supply power to NV Energy for $135 per megawatt hour,” OilPrice.com observed. “The tower produces 110 megawatts of energy for 12 hours a day according to the company, which works out to roughly 1 million megawatts per year. This in turn implies a gross [return on assets] of ~13.5 percent—not bad as investments go.”
[…]
I have to assume that this is a typo:
The tower produces 110 megawatts of energy for 12 hours a day according to the company, which works out to roughly 1 million megawatts per year.
Surely they mean 1 million megawatt-hours per year… But, then again, I doubt the EcoWatch “journalist” knows or even cares about the difference between megawatts and megawatt-hours. And there’s a bit of a math problem
110 MW * 12 hr/day * 365 days/yr = 481,800 MWh/yr
481,800 is not roughly 1 million.
This power plant cost $975,000,000 to build ($8.9 million per MW, ten times the cost of a natural gas fired power plant). Taxpayers are on the hook for 76% of this cost through Federal loan guarantees. The 25-yr wholesale price guarantee of $135/MWh, about 30% higher than the average US retail price (all sectors). This is the “good news.”
While the plant has barely started operating, there is some production history.

While the production will almost certainly improve this summer, “SolarReserve’s Crescent Dunes Project in Tonopah, Nevada [isn’t even] quietly providing clean, green solar energy to 75,000 homes in the Silver State even when the sun [is] shining”…
The average U.S. residential utility customer uses about 900 kWh per month.
75,000 homes * 900 KWh/month = 67,500,000 kWh/month = 67,500 MWh/month
In its best month so far, Crescent Dunes generated 9,095 MWh… About 3 hours of electricity per day for 75,000 homes. This is the Venezuela version of 24/7 /SARC.
Addendum
Some of the comments have suggested that the generation data for this plant are not representative of its potential. While the data for February and March are from its first two fully operational months and this is not some sort of “pilot project,” the plant is still in its “infancy”… So I thought I might take a look at a more mature concentrated solar power plant: Ivanpah…


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yeah, math is sooo difficult ( and boring)
A high school teacher was arrested today at Toronto Pearson Airport as he attempted to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a compass, a slide-rule and a calculator.
At a press conference, Premier Kathleen Wynne said she believes the man is a member of the notorious extremist Al-Gebra movement. She did not identify the man, who has been charged by the RCMP with carrying weapons of maths instruction.
‘Al-Gebra is a problem for us’, the Premier said. ‘They derive solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in search of absolute values. They use secret code names like “X” and “Y” and refer to themselves as “unknowns”; but we have determined that they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country. As the Greek philosopher Isosceles used to say, “There are three sides to every triangle.”’
When asked to comment on the arrest, Prime Minister Trudeau said, “If God had wanted us to have better weapons of maths instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes.”
Fellow Liberal colleagues told reporters they could not recall a more intelligent or profound statement by any Prime Minister.
I don’t believe he was placed under arrest.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/05/07/saturday-silliness-stupidity-only-do-airplane-math-in-roman-numerals/
It’s not funny anymore now that it really happened
Some guy said, really happened.
Too difficult. That’s why, as I understand it, Wayne State U. is dropping any math requirement for graduation (and considering adding a “diversity” requirement in its place).
janus100 — Too funny. — Eugene WR Gallun
Yes, Prime Minister Trudeau does have trouble with math. I hear that in order for him to count to 21, he has to strip naked.
He claims he starts with the “Big 1”.
I think that will only get Trudeau as far as 20¼.
Funny. Stolen. Thanks.
I did not claim that I am the author of this….
:):):)
No, I mean *I* stole it from your post!
+99
Thanks Janus, this made my day.
Northern Exposure?
Just about “sums” up the Canadian government!
Excellent! 🙂
I really laughed out loud (and then saddened because it is sooo true).
Not a single mention of all the roasted eagles, etc.
Because they fixed that:
http://cleantechnica.com/2015/04/16/one-weird-trick-prevents-bird-deaths-solar-towers/
..I suppose you believe everything that Hillary says too !! LOL…
‘“The Ivanpah Unit 3 fire on May 19 was caused by the heliostats (mirrors) being locked in place in preparation for a maintenance activity (maintenance mode), causing the solar flux to briefly move over a portion of the boiler tower,” explains Knox. “The mirrors were unlocked and moved to remove the solar flux from the tower.” ‘
http://solarindustrymag.com/update-nrg-confirms-cause-of-fire-at-ivanpah-solar-plant
So now they just burn the plant itself. That is a weird trick.
The article sure makes it sound like they solved it.
But did they?
The article says the were burning birds when the mirrors where focused above the tower in ‘standby’ position. 115 kills in a little over 4 hours, that is better than 25 birds an hour.
Their ‘weird trick’ solution was to change the ‘standby’ positioning of the mirrors to spread the concentrated light over a larger area and thus keep the energy low enough to be safe for any birds that happen to fly through. Sounds great.
BUT, when the plant is in operation don’t the mirrors kind of have to all be aimed at the same area? I mean isn’t that how they concentrate enough energy to heat the solution enough to get useable work out of it? So wouldn’t that mean that when producing power the mirrors have to be aimed in such a way as to create the same high energy areas that killed 25 birds an hour during ‘standby’?
Sounds more like they found a way to prevent bird kills while not operating but that they will be killing birds during power production. And they are just spinning it to cover up that fact.
Can’t they just use the same mechanisms they use at airports to repel birds, sound waves I think?
One would have to ask why not simply lay all the heliostats flat when in stand-by; why bother replacing a halo with some pancakes at all?
…I guess that wouldn’t be ‘clever-dick’ enough.
They simply turn their backs to the collector. No more smokers! Easy.
I need 5 drinks to believe the Cleantechnica.
http://www.basinandrangewatch.org/CrescentDune.html
You mean the Colonel Gore spin off business,NFE (Nevada Fried Eagle)!
In totally unrelated news, an inexpensive ‘Fried Chicken’ stand has opened up next to the solar plant.
Good News Everyone!
(Professor Farnsworth…Futurama)
‘Nuff said.
Do NV power customers get free critter jerky with their higher energy bills now?
I do find the use of molten salt is interesting but is it worth the questionable math and money? Probably not. If this was speculative to see how the use of molten salt can be applied to come up with another form of cheap reliable energy I could see it from that point of view. But this is going or is in operation and thrusting more expensive and as yet untested in a real world environment on the public is ludicrous.
But so far as I know they still have to burn natural gas to get the salts molten in the morning. Evidently the solar energy they can collect is insufficient to melt the salts.
And the article lies; it says they use no fuel. They do.
I think you could actually build homes for 75,000 families in the area they occupy with their mirrors.
G
But it works so well for a solar storage plant! /sarc
So, at 135/MWh and a cost of $975,000,000 (and assuming no additional maintenance costs), once they’ve produced 7,222,222 MWh, they will have broken even.
At 481,800 MWh/yr, that would be 14.9 years.
Doesn’t sound so bad, except…
if it doesn’t generate more than about 10 percent or so instead, the break even point won’t be until 149 years, again not taking into consideration maintenance.
Also not taking into account interest costs on the money borrowed to build the plant.
Not to be a contrarian, but let’s not forget they don’t have any fuel costs. That is different. It’s still not near efficient as claimed, but no fuel costs has to help pay the loans a little quicker than a conventional plant. If it worked well, it might be worth a 10X cost experiment to find out, no? So I try to look at it as an investment as R&D instead of wanton waste of taxpayer dollars (as loan guarantees). There’s enough of that already to discourage new sources of depression driving facts… 🙂
They have huge fuel and water costs. Natural gas is used to start in the morning and runs for who knows how long? And the mirrors need to be washed with water to maintain a clean reflector. That water is hauled by trucks around the mirrors to wash them.
In addition, huge amounts of fuel were used to manufacture, transport, assemble, and maintain the facility. It may even cost more fuel to demolish and transport the waste to some suitable disposable site at sometime in the future. I wonder how all these fuel energy costs compare with the energy generated by the plant over its lifetime?
They have the cost of ‘fuelling’ the electric motors and electronics that control the site. Using their own power to do this means they cannot sell it, thus lose income (unless they are paid for gross production rather than dispatched power)
$975,000,000 for research? That is scientifically unnecessary. But it is an experiment to see if they can force us to use much more costly, less effective and less efficient method of power generation on the basis of “modern technology.”
And don’t they have to have stand-by power ready in case of clouds, etc. I think they also have to use natural gas to get things started in the mornings. Is that accounted for in the costs?
“I doubt the EcoWatch “journalist” knows or even cares…”
“Copy, paste, DONE! I is a
activistjernalist now!”Cyclone Power Technology has developed an off the grid 10 Kw Solar Powered steam driven genset. Here in the US.
http://cyclonepower.com/cyclone-power-technologies-inc-kicks-off-247-solar-project-with-license-and-development-agreement-with-g2e/
Wikipedia article on cyclone power engines is quite disappointing.
Can you please site your source
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Mark_V_Engine
“Can you please site your source”
Over by the window, under the rubber tree plant.
I’ll withhold judgement until I see an actual production sample independently tested.
amen !
why is it cost effective when the Ivanpah is only producing 20% of expected power and is similar in design.
I don’t believe we are being told the truth about it.
a 25-year contract to supply power to NV Energy for $135 per megawatt hour
================
now that is a sweet deal. the wholesale price of electricity in the US is about $34 per megawatt hour. So they guaranteed 4 times the wholesale price, paid for no doubt by higher electricity prices to Harry Reid.
Wasn’t this the power plant that got permission to use natural gas to supplement sunlight, because they found that there wasn’t enough energy from the mirrors to properly operate the molten salt?
Is this in reality a magicians trick? An energy supplier getting 4 times the wholesale price for a gas fired power plant, using mirrors to make it look green?
“Wasn’t this the power plant that got permission to use natural gas to supplement sunlight, because they found that there wasn’t enough energy from the mirrors to properly operate the molten salt?”
That was Ivanpah.
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/plant-688596-gas-energy.html
All smoke and mirrors. Sorry couldn’t resist.
So what were they smoking, Brett?
So they are smoking dead birds. They call them “smokers”, don’t they?
Like the spanish PV plants that operated diesel generators during night to top up the delivered energy.
Off Topic but serious proof that Canadian liberals are crazier than American liberals !!
.The beginnings of Soylent Green ? Ewwwwwwww !
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/bodies-dissolved-sewers-smiths-falls-funeral-1.3635063
Not the craziest thing I’ve heard of being done to dispose of a body. ^_^
It is misleading to compare power generator build costs based simply on their nameplate capacity.
A nuclear power plant typically operates at 100% (or above) capacity, except during refueling shutdowns
A natural gas plant also often operates as a baseload (near 100%) capacity as well. Assuming this solar plant can achieve 50% capacity (unlikely) , its build cost per power produced is not ten times greater than a natural gas plant, but 20 times greater. As it stands , the cost looks to be 50 or more times as expensive.
Even at $17.8 actual million per produced MW, the plant is way beyond the cost of the Westinghouse AP 1000 Gen 3+ nuclear plants currently being built in South Carolina and Georgia – they are costing roughly $6 million per MW and will produce their power at around 100% capacity, any overage being stored in pumped storage. They also lack the capability of decimating our bird population as exhibited by thermal solar plants. It’s not just build and fuel costs to be considered – non-dispatchable power generators required backup power generation capacity, thus involving duplication
The article suggests that the molten salt is dispatchable. It can be stored at a very hot temperature, and then the heat energy removed (by producing steam) when the energy is needed. It would be interesting to see a detailed analysis of how well (or not) it actually works.
Unless you have really huge amounts of insulation, storing hot things always results in it cooling down on it’s own.
Unless the energy is used fairly quickly, a lot of the energy is going to be lost to the environment.
They forgot to mention that Ivanpah has prevously requested and receive permission from the state of California to consume much more natural gas to fire the “un-molten” salt that cools to an unusable temperature during the night. I may be not remembering correctly, but I think it was 5X more natural gas than was to be consumed by the initial design.
MarkW said: “Unless the energy is used fairly quickly, a lot of the energy is going to be lost to the environment.
Now that really could be considered to be a manmade contribution to glowbulll warming, couldn’t it?
Luc Ozade said
“Now that really could be considered to be a manmade contribution to glowbulll warming, couldn’t it?”
Not really, the energy involved came from sunlight, so it was going to end up as waste heat in the environment in any case, this is just trying to get some work out of it first.
You need to add the capital cost of the generation system that will stand by until the station shuts because of the strange natural phenomenon called sunset. Remember that the back up system does not generate revenue while it is standing by.
You forget to mention it needs a Gas Boiler to heat the Molten Salts every morning to get the process started.
The only Green thing about it are the public who believe their fairy tales.
Ivanpah does; Crescent Dunes doesn’t. Apparently.
“The storage technology also eliminates the need for any backup fossil fuels, such as natural gas.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crescent_Dunes_Solar_Energy_Project
This would limit how much energy can drawn out of the salts over night.
Can’t let the salts cool down enough to require reheating the next morning.
There is a difference between startup and backup. Sounds like CD still requires startup.
Can we then expect 100% proven 24/7/365 power and how much per day. Then just show the actual number of KWH produced 24/7 for 60 days?
What happens when the earth has a super volcano event that fills the sky with dust that could last years?
Molten salts sound fantastically corrosive. How often must the storage containers and heat exchangers be replaced?
You mean what they tell you or what really happens?
I can generate 8000 mwh/month. I am sure of it.
Let me check the arithmetic to be sure… watch me screw this up…
My generator cost me $500. It can produce 5000 watt continuously.
5000 x 24 x 30 = 3.6 million watt-hours or 3.6 MWh.
8000/3.6 = 2222 generators required at $500 each.
$1.11 million dollars to buy enough generators to build capacity that equals a 1 billion dollar solar plant.
Fuel… I could run the 2222 generators for 100 years and still not cost a billion dollars.
You’ll have to replace all the generators about 6-8 times over 100 years, Paul. You’ll need a crew of 5+/- small engine repair experts to fill the tanks, do preventive maintenance, and repairs. Still, those functions are also needed at the solar plant and your costs would be far below their costs.
HR….I figured I’d replace all of the generators every 5 years so add 20 million to the price….as you say… home depot gas generators are cheaper that the boon-doggle solar plant. So we agree!
You should be able to rig something up to keep the tanks full automatically.
I’m pretty sure the cost of such a system would be less than paying a team of people to keep them topped off for 100 years.
H.R. your system would achieve pretty close to 100% base plate for the entire time it was operational.
10,000 heliostats means 20,000 servos plus other moving parts. Whats is the mean time between failures for those? Regardless, eventually you will be replacing at least a handful on a daily basis. That’s on top of the cost of keeping the mirrors clean. I think I would rather the ongoing expenses of ‘only’ 2,222 generators.
ARCO and Spain proved that in the 70s and then Spain in the 2000 times – greens repeat generational stupid acts.
Paul W. – Oh yes. We agree! So triple or quadruple our WAGs for the extras and you could still live like a Rajah on the cost difference.
Thanks for the additional input MarkW, Jtom, Gamecock, & schitzree. Good points and good fun.
They use around 2litres of fuel per hour and at current AU prices, 2222 of them at, lets call it AU$1.35/l is around $6k per hour to run them. That’s $144k per day to run them, a million dollars per week… I think you can probably see where this is going…
TimTheToolMan, I was thinking in U.S. dollars and costs. Of course Paul would be clever and arrange for fuel to be delivered without taxes so the fuel costs would be below $2.00USD/gallon. and he’d buy generators factory direct. And how much per week does the solar installation spend on gas to pre-heat the salt?
We’re just having some fun here and it’s still hard to put a damper on Paul’s idea.
“We’re just having some fun here and it’s still hard to put a damper on Paul’s idea.”
Sure. But fuel cost wasn’t even mentioned in the fun calculations. Paul waved it of as being easily within the $1billion he was working with. The fact is that using my calculations he needs $5billion on fuel alone. And that’s at today’s prices let alone what they will be in say 50 years time. I think there is a perception that fuel is cheap when its really not…
I don’t think you figured in the cost of EPA, OSHA, EEOC, M-O-U-S-E helping you.
If 3 out of every 100 of the 75000 homeowners would install the 2222 generators, then I would not have to get involved. 🙂
we’ve already seen evidence that when the price of grid electricity exceeds the price of producing it your self, people produce it themselves.
Of course, when every home has it’s own generator running 24/7 the total amount of real pollution (Sulphur and Nitrogen compounds, particles, ect.) will probably skyrocket. Unintended consequences and all that.
The article should rather say that this extends solar power to 24/7, rather than provides it…
Because that’s what it does – it stores energy in the day to generate it at night, complementing solar PV.
And if “The average U.S. residential utility customer uses about 900 kWh per month” – well they don’t use it at an even rate: they need less at night: peak demand is also when aircon needed during the day in that area.
So do the sums again for night time use, in that area, with plant at full production output…
You also do not mention the Gas Boiler.
Or the fact that have had to ask for more Gas because they got the design wrong.
You guys have missed their secret trick to generate solar power 24 hours a day, and it’s in plain sight:
The mirrors are in a circle. They go all the way around the tower.
Why didn’t they think of that before?
Guys, that’s Ivanpah (or however you spell it). That’s a different installation, that, admittedly, looks quite similar at first glance.
It’s not going to be storing much power if it’s only generating 8,000 MWh per month.
[blockquote]..complementing solar PV.[/blockquote]
What PV is it complementing? I’m not aware of any significant component of PV associated with this site. Did I miss something? Are you assuming widespread distributed PV in the plant’s service area? Is that a valid assumption?
Griff,
Nice try at deflection. The real issue you are trying to ignore is the fact that after a year of operation, this plant is still producing only 10% of predicted capacity. In any other situation, whether energy production, manufacturing, computer resources, etc., this would be considered an abject failure. Address that.
Yep,
— A Porsche sports car that’s got less power than a lawnmower
– A 1TB hard drive that’s full after 100GB
– You’ve got two hands but you’re trying to catch the ball with 1 finger
– Buy a quarter pounder in McDonalds but you can only eat the gherkins
– An Olympic sprinter who can only manage a slow walk
– You own a Tesla in London but you can’t even get to Luton (who’d want to?)
– You’ve got a ten inch d!cl< but can only give your wife….you get the idea.
Not very impressive eh Griff?
I understand its still ramping up… how about the new Watts Bar nuclear plant – how’s that doing?
And what will it manage when it’s finished “ramping up”?
Solar power could be provided 24/7 by putting the entire generating plant on a huge railroad and race around the earth at about 1000 mph. Then it would always be in the sunlight and working.
The plant might have to be moved to California or Washington, DC to find someone smart as Gov Brown or Pres Obama to gain approval.
Col. Sanders has a good use in mind for such a flash fryer device.
Pointman
Maybe Colonel Sanders and this solar plant can work out a business arraingement.
I think it was meantioned previously that the solar plant fried over 25 birds an hour during daylight operation. That’s a lot of nuggets.
Let’s do a little economic math here. They built the thing at a cost of $975 million, and they have a contract to sell their electricity at $135/MWh for the next 25 years, with a supposed production of 481,800 MWh/yr. I don’t know how long the plant is supposed to last, so we’ll use the life of the contract as our basis for comparison. I also don’t know annual operating costs (if anyone knows where to find this, I’m all ears), so we will charitably assume it’s $0.
If I’m an investor with $975 million laying around, I could choose to build this plant (we’re going to assume magically overnight), or I could invest my cash elsewhere and expect an annualized return of around 7%, which we’ll be conservative with and round down to 5%. If I chose the latter option, after 25 years I’d have grown my money to ~$3.3 billion. If I chose the former, and the plant hit its performance expectations, I’d get $65 million a year in revenue, which I could then invest at 5%; after 25 years, the combined gains from revenue from the plant and revenue from investing my gains from the plant would be ~$3.1 billion. For those playing along at home, that’s a net loss of $200 million compared to my other option!
And note the assumptions I made here that don’t reflect reality:
-I have the money up front to pay cash for the entire construction (therefore, no financing expenses)
-I built the plant overnight (no delay between the initial investment and when the return starts coming in)
-My traditional investments only return 5% (if we increase it to 7%, the net loss grows to ~$1billion)
-There are no operating costs.
-I get the production that the flier said I would.
I don’t want to rule out salt plants as a potentially viable technology in the future, but to try to sell it as a sound investment in its current manifestation (“not bad as investments go”) is absurd.
When investing in a business you must always compute the minimum alternate investment return you could receive and subtract it from your expected return on the business to understand the real rate of return.
Solar produces, so I’m told, the rule of thumb max of 6 hours a day at max rate possible for a given Installation. That means you effectively have 18 hours with no generation, every day it’s not cloudy. The more expensive the installation (not merely fields of PV panels) the more glaringly wasteful those idle 3/4 of every 24 hour day appear.
That’s what the 5% is for, to act as an unknown baseline.
Solar and wind power make perfect sense.
For the math-and-economics-challenged.
Bruce, they make perfect cents. Thirteen and a half, to be exact, and that is income, not net income.
As so many comparisons have been made with nuclear it would be good to see a comparison with hydro as is built in Northern Québec. That is ‘real’ renewable.
One must use the new math to arrive at an acceptable green result.
Here is a treatise on another CSP (Ivanpah) comparing it with the truly clean energy source –
Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plants plants were promoted by the Department of Energy (DOE) from the time the Dep’t was created under Pres. Carter. Several were built over the decades and none performed adequately. One burned up in 1986 and was rebuilt, enlarged, DOE arguing that the plants have to be big to take advantage of economy of scale.
Following that logic, this latest 392 MW (name-plate) giant was built on 13 km2 of land in Mojave Desert at a cost of 2.2 billion dollars. It generated disappointing .4 billion kWh [sic] thus producing at an average rate of 46 MW the first year and just a little more the next.
Note: It is typical for renewable energy projects to show different units for input, rated output and actual output. This practice makes performance and efficiency comparisons cumbersome, and therefore not pursued allowing misinformation to flourish. In the above paragraph, the former value is in “W” but the latter in “Wh.” The author wishes that such reporting use the same unit (preferably W, as with the 392 MW and 46 MW above) or it states, as an example, “…. the plant has been producing 12 % of its name-plate power.”
Rather than focusing on the poor performance of the plant thru its, so far, two years of operation, the following text and numbers show how the planned-for performance, capital and operational expenses, and earnings compare with those of another electricity producing plant.
The designed-for Capacity Factor of 31 % at Ivanpah indicates 120 MW to be the expected actual average output. That wattage was to justify the billions dollars investment, and it is the basis for this analysis.
The 2200 M$ price per 120 MW represents 18 $/W investment. By way of comparison, another nonpolluting source of electricity, nuclear power plant, the Millstone reactor No. 2 in Connecticut, operating at 880 MW since 1975, cost 0.5 $/W; Ivanpah is thus 36 times more expensive (inflation excluded).
With about 1000 employees receiving salary and benefits, the annual outlay for that alone is roughly 100 M$. Selling the annual 3.8 EJ at the projected 0.028 $/MJ yields 106 M$. Ouch – only 6 M$ left for other expenses, notably for natural gas whose burning produces some 8 % of the total output.
For comparison again, the Millstone nuclear plant complex employs also about 1000, and its two reactors have been producing 1870 MW actual electrical output. Assuming the same salaries, benefits, and the electricity selling price, the operating expense is 15 times higher at Ivanpah.
Note that the above two outlays are 35 and 15 times, not percent, higher and that this huge expense gap exists in an industry where a difference of just a few percent means the difference between success and bankruptcy. The magnitude of the gap hints also at the reason why the so-called “free” solar electricity is so expensive.*
As for the occupied land comparison, those 120 MW spread over 13 km2 represents 9.2 W/m2. In contrast, ground based nuclear plants produce some 2000 W/m2 thus utilizing the land area some 200 times more effectively. And they can be erected in any climate and in proximity to users.
If the purpose of the CSPs is to cut CO2 emissions, that expectation is unrealistic. The construction, operating, maintaining and eventually dismantling this plant will at best match the amount of CO2 claimed to be saved in non-burning fossil-fuels for that relatively small amount of electricity. And producing intermittent electricity causes CO2 generation elsewhere.
We must be either excessively rich or ignorant to be building power sources of the type that produce electricity we cannot afford.
Is anyone accountable for approving this already-on-paper deficient project? And for the other CSP projects in existence, being built, or planned?
It should be also pointed out, that the above ratios apply to a plant delivering its planned-for output. In contrast, the plant has averaged only 1/3rd of the plan to date meaning that those ratios are in fact three times worse. This is unusually bad even for a CSP although none of them performs to industry standard, an often heard excuse being that they are still “experimental” (for ½ century?).
So, let me get this straight.
It covers 3500 acres and supplies 75,000 homes. There are about 133,957,180 US households. So, it takes care of 0.056% residential demand. Also, just to supply residential demand we’d need 1786 such plants spanning some 732,578,100 square miles which is greater than the contiguous US @ur momisugly about 3,119,885 square miles. Considering the world is about 1,974,610,563 square miles we’d have to cover 37% of the planet with these things just to supply residential demand. Forget factories and commercial buildings.
Math check please.
1786 x 3500/640 = 9,767 sq miles
As someone else pointed out.
All the best sites will be taken first. Which means that later builds will have a lower power to size ratio than the early builds. Which will mean more land consumed.
Then there is the issue of power transmission. Because of line losses, power plants are usually built within 500 miles of customers. Since only a small fraction of the US population lives in the desert southwest, either most plants will need to be build in places that are cloudier, further north, or both; or they will have to be built in the desert southwest, but suffer huge amounts of transmission losses.
Either way, total area needed increases astronomically.
Aging slide-rule era engineer here with a math check. Something didn’t ‘feel right’ when I read your calculation.
3500 acres is a little under 6 square miles.
2000 times 75,000 homes is 150,000,000 homes.
Based on the original 3500 & 75,000 numbers… 6 x 2000 should be generous and amounts to 12,000 square miles.
I went directly to the ecowatch.com article, hoping to see something interesting in the “comments” section, but that link goes nowhere. However, not only is their basic math wrong, their accounting is lousy as well.
As David pointed out, 110 MW for 12 hours a day is not anywhere near “roughly” 1 million MWh per year. If we re-do the ROI calculation above we get:
Annual production (MWh) = 110 * 12 * 365.25 = 482130
Wholesale price [contract] (MWh) = $135
Construction Cost = $975,000,000
ROI = 482130 * 135 / 975000000 = 0.066756 = 6.68%, which is nowhere near “~13.5 percent”.
However, that is also wrong because it is counting gross income as “return”. You count return on investment based on net income, after subtracting operating expenses. Nobody makes investment decisions on “gross return on assets” — if isn’t cash coming back to you, it isn’t a “return”.
The EIA report Levelized Cost and Levelized Avoided Cost of New Generation Resources in the Annual Energy Outlook 2015, Table 1 lists “Fixed O&M” and “Transmission Investment” costs for solar thermal as $42.10 and $5.90 per MWh respectively.
So take the contract wholesale price of $135 and subtract $48.00 for the net operating income of $87.00 per MWh. The ROI calculation then goes:
ROI = 482130 * 87 / 975000000 = 0.043020 or 4.30 %
The same EIA report lists solar thermal capacity factor as 20% (lower than onshore wind), so if we go with that, the actual production would be 20% of the nameplate, or 22 MW per hour averaged over the whole year, or 22 * 24 * 365.25 = 192852 MWh / year, or 40% of the value assumed above (or 16071 MHw / month, which is still double the historical production shown in David’s graph).
Redoing the ROI calculation based on the EIA capacity factor we get:
ROI = 192852 * 87 / 975000000 = 0.017208 or 1.72%
which is even further from “nowhere near” the claimed 13.5 percent.
Let me put it this way: it is quite possible in today’s market to raise $975 million in investment with an honest 13.5% ROI over 25 years. But the only investor you can find willing to put down that much money for a 1.72% ROI is the US government. But according to EcoWatch, this is “not bad as investment go”.
I haven’t done the calculation on how much this project ends up costing per 0.1%deg&C it prevents in global warming; feel free if you so desire.
When you have the taxpayers on the hook for 76% of your capital costs, your accounting only has to be “good enough for government work”… /SARC
Not to mention that the $135/MWh is based on blackmailing the US energy consumer. According to http://www.eia.gov/electricity/wholesale , the typical wholesale price for electricity varies between $20/MWH and $30/MWh. So the US electricity suppliers are paying 4-6 times as much for this ‘green’ power than they would for normal power. And that increase is of course passed on to the end customer.
Just to close the loop, if they sold the power at the normal wholesale price of $30/mwh and used Allen’s cost accounting then that would yield an ROI of 0.38%. What a deal!
I sometimes wish that UK ministers or civil servants would allow themselves time to visit this site, it could save the long suffering UK taxpayer much pain.
According to “Arthur4563” the Westinghouse AP1000 units (are they effectively off the shelf) cost 6M USD /MW . Compare the cost of the Hinkley Point C EPR reactor (that may or may not be built) at £24.5Billion (latest from Wiki, up from original £18 billion) for a 3.2GW reactor . Cost/GW of the Westinghouse model is 1/2 that of the proposed Hinkley point C .
So was Westinghouse ever considered ?
Is it that the Westinghouse unit is too small in capacity and 3 stations would be required for 3 GW , and there is not enough space – Britain being very crowded already and likely to become even more so.?
I noticed also that the agreed strike price of the Hinkley energy is £92.5/MWh , whereas the Wiki aricle I looked at had this additional snippet of information:
“Finland has cancelled its fourth EPR nuclear power plant project at Olkiluoto[54] opting, instead, for a VVER-1200/V-491 reactor estimated to cost ‘less than €50/MWh (5 cents/kWh), including all production costs, depreciation, finance costs and waste management’.[55] ”
This gives the impression that we are led by a Govt of economic and scientific illiterates . Please someone reassure me that this is not so and that my analysis is just too naive.
Mike,
Fixed it for ya’.
Mike, don’t panic! Hinckley C will never be built because the French government as EdF’s major shareholder won’t underwrite the financial risk. Our only hope is Rolls Royce-derived Small Modular Reactors until someone bites the bullet and starts work on thorium.
Risk at the price of £92.5/MWh?
Also, if the EPR deal is broken, then EDF will never be able to make any other deal. It’s game over for the credibility not only of EDF but of any French owned society!
France’s credibility is already too low to allow that.
Of course, UK must be on the hook so that they can’t manage to derail the deal with safety nitpicking.
I think that all that the Salt storage of heat is going to do is smooth out power production during periods of low solar energy such as when a cloud covers the solar mirrors. Those that think it can provide the other 18 hours of the day should do some math. Determine the heat storage capacity per pound of the salt ( Heat of fusion. Then determine how many BTU’s of heat is needed to produce needed to produce 500 Degree steam at 500 PSI, Next multiply that by the needed 110 megawatts and the efficiency of the steam generation cycle (typically 33% or so). My back of the envelope calculations do not see any tank, with the massive amount of insulation needed, to provide 18 hours of power with no Sun.
Will gladly accept any explanation as to how they can make that claim.
So in the Middle of the hot sandy Desert how much fresh water does it take to clean the mirrors
Good question? Any old western novels I have read set in the Mohave Desert, it is a very dusty environment. Those mirrors probably should be cleaned at least weekly.
Echos my own concern. I looked into solar home installations for my home. We get all four seasons. In the Spring, you would have to clean off a layer of yellow pine pollen. In the Summer, dust. Fall, leaves, and Winter, snow and ice. One look at the pictures when I used google images and searched ‘solar panels, snow’, convinced me I didn’t want to rely on solar power.
Besides, in this neck of the woods, you would have to clear-cut so much forest to let the sunshine through, that the local greens would have a conniption fit.
I’ll keep saying it: Cost is not a factor to Greens. In fact, their ideals are so solid that they don’t even mind saying “…at any cost” at the end of their gospels.
As long as it’s NOT Fossil Fuel, Greens are happy…at any cost.
Saving the world can not be prized (enough).
Lorraine Chow,
You are correct in pointing out the idiocy of the reporter. But your second figure is hardly fair. First, 500 Mwh per year (the correct value) is a bit over 40 MWh per month, not 80 MWh as in your figure. Second, the plant is still being tested and has not yet been turned over to its owner (see http://reneweconomy.com.au/2016/crescent-dunes-24-hour-solar-tower-is-online-15202). So it is to be expected that it is not yet producing at full power.
IT is, of course, somewhat too expensive to be competitive. But that is always the case for a first-of-its-kind project.
Oops. The above should have been addressed to David Middleton. Lorraine Chow is the idiot reporter.
Maybe you missed this bit…
The idiot reporter wrote this:
The plant clearly isn’t “providing clean, green solar energy to 75,000 homes in the Silver State even when the sun isn’t shining.” It’s not even “providing clean, green solar energy to 75,000 homes in the Silver State even when the sun is shining.
Will it work as advertised in the future? I have no idea. It has to achieve a ~50% capacity factor to do so and this leads me to think it won’t.
@ur momisugly David Middleton 9:51 am,
“SolarReserve’s Crescent Dunes Project in Tonopah, Nevada is quietly providing clean, green solar energy to 75,000 homes in the Silver State even when the sun isn’t shining.
Did she check a place where the sun don’t shine? It seems like the article came from that place.
It isn’t a first-of-its-kind project. Ivanpah has been online for two and half years now. It already has asked for loan forgiveness and was on the verge of being shutdown, for not meeting required minimum targets, until the got an extension.
It’s not exactly the same as Ivanpah. Time will tell if the distinctions are without difference.
David, for me as a taxpayer it is the same as Ivanpah – a total ripoff.
FYI…
http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=25212
Solar Reserve’s website states only 500,000 MWh pa.
http://www.solarreserve.com/en/global-projects/csp/crescent-dunes
It’s good to know that SolarReserve can do math better than journalists.