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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There is a problem with the other math as stipulated in the $ – MW quoted as $8,863,636
This figure is based on the Plant Cost of $975M/110MW. Problem is the plant produces this amount hourly and as such the $8M figure needs to be further reduced over the expected life of the facility. They certainly aren’t expending the initial cost of the facility on an hourly basis.
Over the course of a single year, the cost drops to $2,023 per year for a single year operation.
If the plant operated for 15 years with little operating expense, the cost drops to $134.91
So to match their price guarantee they would need to operate for more than 15 years.
The price per MW for 110 MW of installed capacity will remain $8,863,636 for the life of the plant. The cost to build the plant doesn’t go down over time; nor to the 110 MW of installed capacity go up… Unless they spend more money to increase capacity.
The plant does not produce 110 MW hourly. It generates 110 MWh for each hour that it operates at full capacity.
MW and MWh are two totally different things.
Is it just me, or does such a facility look vulnerable to “messing” with by people that like to “mess” with things?
$135 MWh guaranteed?
Meanwhile, in Texas yesterday, the average hourly price at the Hub-Bus-Average was $26.70 MWh.((The maximum price in any hour was $54).
Seems like someone is being ripped off.
Must have been a windy day.
I’m paying about 11¢/kWh retail ($110/MWh). If Reliant was paying $135/MWh, they would be charging me a bit more than 11¢/kWh.
David. These are the actual prices from the ERCOT website. This is the average from all generators, which include coal and natural gas.
If you go to http://www.caiso.com and oasis.caiso.com you can get all the information for California.
On windy days, the average price can actually go negative. Wind works very well in Texas.
Walt D
“(The maximum price in any hour was $54).”
The essence of the false claim of a >13% return on investment is the payment of a subsidised price for the power.
I am impressed that they got bit working, of course, an engineering marvel. Economic marvel? Not so much. I like others would like the see the net input to the grid shown with all local deductions accounted for to keep it running. An annual figure would probably be sobering. Does the plant consume half of the power generated by the steam plant? I wouldn’t be surprised at all.
Remember there are windmills off northern Scotland that are net consumers of electricity. They have heated nacelles and electric motors to keep the blades turning to prevent the main shaft bending.
Question: how is the cold side of the steam generator cooked? Are they using water sprayed in a cooling tower? Where are they getting it? The big problem with power generation by steam and dry lands is the water. Ask the South Africans. Coal steam, gas steam, solar steam, molten salt steam, it all requires cooling on on huge scale. If there is no open evaporation the efficiency is a lot lower than it might be.
“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.”
As Glen Reynolds (Instapundit) likes to say: “This is a feature, not a bug.” The intention (albeit not stated) is that we’ll all (of course, with several notable exceptions) have to learn to get along with less. As Maurice Strong has stated, the middle class lifestyle with its single family homes, and AC, is unsustainable. As Barack Obama has stated, we can’t just live wherever we want. The electricity thus generated is probably more than sufficient for high density public housing – with window fans.
Unfortunately, Elon Musk expects to add 500,000 electric cars by 2018. Tee bulk of these new, cheap ($35k) vehicles will probably be sold in southern California. Converting electricity to a transportation fuel will certainly add to the average households energy budget. The normal pattern of operation will either be charging the car at home at night when the solar system is relying on stored salt heat or charging at work during the day and competing with maxed out air conditioners for power.
Just some thoughts from the experience of having lived in the desert southwest, during the summer months air conditioners need to run at night to maintain sleeping temperatures for modern urban humans.. Also the weather in the Mojave includes sandstorms. A full on sandstorm as the effect on glass of sandpaper. When the shiny mirrors are turned into opal glass, even their current yield will be unattainable. Large scale sandstorms are not frequent, but 25 years is a long time.
Good points Bill,
here is some history many will find interesting – hint we have been here before . . con job maybe huh?
http://www.gosolarcalifornia.ca.gov/about/gosolar/california.php
Yet Another Article that omits the fact that, on average, each of the thousands of heliostats (10,347 for Crescent Dunes) consumes over 100 watts per hour while generating electricity. This 1.034 WWhr is not counted in their calculation of power delivered to homes. In fact none of the power used to operate any of the equipment on the site, lighting, communications, creature comfort, I.e., workers is counted. The claim th Output of the generator as “delivered power” however, the power consumed by th plant is taken from the grid and measured by a separate meter. Typical “house load” is about 10 to 15 %. Which for Crescent Dunes is about one third of the claimed delivered power.
The article completely ignores the required (startup) and actual consumption of natural gas needed to meet their claims. Numerous articles on the Internet indicate tha Ivanpah is generating about one third of their delivered power with/by natural gas heating of the system. Thus this plant is only slightly better in terms of CO2 production than a NG CCTG Unit, at ten times the price and one tenth the capacity factor.
I take that you meant to say 1.034 MW. Not sure how many hours of the day it uses that much power. If we estimate 8-12, then it is 8-12 MWh per day, or over a quarter of a GWh each month. Compaired to the 9 GWh/month it is currently producing, that is not much (2.5%-3.5%).
Yes MW.
Estimate based upon the fact that the mirrors are the size of garage doors and a garage door opener uses that much power, need to also consider that it takes two each, for azimuth and elevation adjustments. That is the lowest possible power I could estimate as that could be done with worm gear or planetary gear drive system. That size motor though could limit motion during heavy wind conditions.
Then you have the salt pumps, water pumps, for making steam at 500+ psi. The pumps. For the condensate cooling system, water purification system, the pumps for the industrial cooler system, Then the control system, HVAC, lighting, communications, computers (which fail when to hot/cold)and other power loads. Every plant I have worked at has used at least 15% of name plate rated power when in “hot standby.” This is not like a Photovoltaic solar collection panel system, the support systems are big power hogs. You are talking ten to twenty, minimum, pump motors with double, triple digit horsepower rating running 12 hrs a day. Think a typical 100 Mw coal fired power station.(which they don’t make anymore.
“Estimate based upon the fact that the mirrors are the size of garage doors and a garage door opener uses that much power, need to also consider that it takes two each, for azimuth and elevation adjustments.”
I don’t think you’ve thought this through. A garage door opener only needs the power it does because it has to move the door quickly, and overcome high levels of friction. That’s a completely nonsensical way to determine how much power it takes to keep each panel facing right way.
I believe the biggest issue we should be focusing on with these plants is the over priced electricity that they are selling. $135/MWh is 4-6 times the going rate. This is in fact a government mandated subsidy, paid for by the US electrical consumer. This should be creating outrage!
For 25 years. Also replacing a fossil fuel powered plant that is not fully depreciated and must be paid for by the consumer.
What’s the budgeted maintenance and depreciation on 10,000 moving mirrors ?
What’s the total moving parts count versus a nuke or fossil ?
Yes Bob Armstrong- what is the cost of cleaning all those mirrors of dust accumulation and how often.?
How many birds does it fry an hour????
Who cares? They are giving their lives to “save the planet”, that’s all that matters.
Bruce I need to know how many birds so I can compute the carbon credits. The only way the piece of junk/%$^$ is reducing carbon is by killing things that exhale.
My wife and I drove from Southern Nevada to Northern Nevada right after new years. I don’t believe there are 75,000 homes in the entire state!
Maybe not, but I’ll bet a couple of big hotels in Las Vegas take more than this plant can produce at full output.
I found a 2007 Forbes article regarding Las Vegas consumption:
I assume the figures quotes are actually megawatt-hours. To put that in perspective, the Crescent Dunes CSP facility even at the 50% capacity factor claimed only produces 1320 MWh a day, so we’d need 6 of them to keep Las Vegas running (at the 2015 estimated load). If we take the EIA capacity factor of 20% the daily output is 528 MWh, so we need 15 or so similar CSP plants to keep Sin City in business.
Alan – many big hotels etc in Las Vegas have solar panels… and Las Vegas has LED street lighting which has reduced electricity used..
I wish everybody doing the calculations here were using the power unit when considering power. All those kWh per day, MWh per months, per decade, per week, per year – those are simply expressions of power and so the watt applies. Who wants to be converting? Let’s apply the KISS principle. Furthermore, when speaking about the actual power of any renewable source, a whole year must be accumulated before its output becomes comparable. Spring, summer, winter, … the output differs seasonally. Therefore, until the whole year, better yet 5 years, yield is accumulated, judgments are guesses.
To help: 1 kWh/y = 0.114 W; 1 MWh/y = 0.114 kW; 1 GWh/y = 0.114 MW.
Similarly, avoid the “elastic units” such as the “home.” It means what anyone wants it to mean. Here in the US, the EPA coins 1.5 kW for the average US home that uses electricity for all except heating (the local number, of course, varies – from Florida to Alaska). An all-electric home, on the other hand, 7.5 kW (again, anywhere from 5 kW to 10 kW depending on the region). Gas heating alone is about 5 KW in the cooler regions.
Lets uncover the way-out claims such as “enough to power 10,000 houses” (or homes?).
Process is used by the renewable energy propagandists to keep you confused.
It’s akin to the use of Olympic sized swimming pools and Manhattan sized chunks of ice. Ignorant people are impressed by nonsensical units of measurement.
Looking at the price they are getting for the power, this ‘13.5% return’ is in fact subsidised. If they sold the power retail, which is very unlikely, they would be running a loss. If they sold the power wholesale it would be running a big loss.
So…the technology works, but we already knew it would. It is also economically unviable, but we already knew that too. It roasts birds to cinders. We also knew that it would, bit not how many. I guess we learned something for the expenditure of a billion smackeroos.
Solar CSP in the Obama policy years runs on the same shell game for costs to rate payers as the nuclear industry did under Jimmy Carter’s DoE. The difference today is that it should be a lot more obvious that natural gas supply is boundless for those with pipeline access and much lower forward prices. So with all factors considered, policy leadership is a lot dumber today than in the 1970s. Industry hype is about the same and the shell game on cost incidence is just as efficient as before. Only the names and the executive bravado have changed.
The difference between nuclear and solar power is the fact that nuclear can actually replaced coal and natural gas. If carbon emissions were really a serious problem, all of the government subsidies would be going to nuclear power.
Is there a way to bring up a class action suit against these thieves?
Imagine how many LED bulbs the feds could have given away with $737,000,000!
Let’s assume a relatively high cost of $10/bulb (they are much cheaper for normal 60W equivalent now), because it’s the feds we’re talking about. That’s 73,000,000 bulbs. If these bulbs (8.5W) replaced CFLs (13W), that equates to 4.5W * 73,000,000 * 1h= 328 MWh!
If molten-salt thermal energy storage was economically viable then traditional generators would have an economic incentive to use it without subsidies.
But they don’t.
The color of the lipstick you put on the green pig really doesn’t make any difference to the fact that it is still just a pig.
If you think a solar power plant can be made into is a perpetual energy machine, you might be a Green-neck.
+oodles
Thanks, Menicholas .
The closest we’ll ever come is to utilizing what solar has already stored, more commonly known as “fossil fuels”, is to burn it.
What us old fossils have to contribute isn’t always bad. (despite the methane8-)
I wonder hot much waste heat the thing produces? And what happens to it? Does it, gasp, heat up the atmosphere, by any chance?
Maybe we’ve found the source of polar-bear-drowning ‘global warming’!
It “smokes” birds, so unless that would be considered a “design feature”, I’m thinking there is a serious “UHI” dome over these things.
How many birds [a.k.a. smokers] does it kill each day?
When did 24/7 = 3 hours?
25+ birds fried per hour during daylight operation, was the figure used in a post upthread.
Is that “estimated” or “observed”?
If observed, wonder how many smaller birds aren’t observed?
This is the same technology that Spain went broke trying . . not a 24/7/365 source and costs three times as much as fossil fuel. Check Spain and solar –
profitup 10: 24/7 is 3.43.
Maybe we could just use Pi huh? Green Pi provides all the power the world needs. he he he
Saw a TV news item the other day praising an experimental solar plant here in OZ in which heliostats focused on a PV panel to vastly increase the electricity production. To prevent the panel from melting a refrigeration unit provide cooling. I could not help wondering how much power was consumed in the cooling, hopefully less than the device produced.
Guys, it’s a first of its kind pilot plant. No need to be so critical of the economics. As a proof of concept (store solar and deliver energy whenever you need it) it works fine. Or not. But that is what it should be judged on, not some comparison to mature technologies.
Hi Ben. This is probably a good example of why our viewpoints differ.
“first of its kind pilot plant”
No, it is not. Everything has been done before.
1) For example WUWT recently ran a story on a similar facility built in the mid 1980s. The gist of it is that the plant failed on every metric and was shuttered. In the early 1990s, it was rebuilt “bigger and better” with “new technologies” and “improved economies of scale”. Again, it was a financial disaster and an operational fiasco, and was finally closed. As far as I know, it’s bones are still out there somewhere in the Calif. desert.
2) Ivanpah sets itself on fire. Enough said.
3) A loooong time ago (1960s): There was a research facility in the Spanish Pyrenees mountains which used mirrors to focus sunlight on a furnace. For a while, they claimed the highest temperatures on earth short of a nuclear blast. (this was just before plasma torches became widespread). When asked about power production, the operator always stressed that this was a research facility, and the plant size and cost is just too large for a practical power plant.
So you see all this has been around for a very long time, perhaps much longer than the PR types would have you believe.
Now we can do engineering and calculations and people can run the financial numbers. If (IF) this were a true pilot plant demonstrator project, we could allow a 2x (perhaps) miss on the targets. On the other hand, if a company, with it’s own money, was doing a demonstrator, we would expect the plant to exceed it’s targets to prove that *it works*.
This project misses not by 2x, but by 10x. Around here, we can do the math better than that. Can you understand why we feel that the plant proponents were less than honest? We also note that huge amounts of taxpayer money are always in play with these projects. Can you understand why people who pay taxes have very hard feelings towards another taxpayer financed boondoggle.
By contrast a thorium molten salt reactor ran in the 1950’s and did what it was supposed to. Yet, all suggestions that we should revive that technology are talked down in favour of this nonsense. There are bound to be financial risks in any new development, but it would seem more rational to spend the capital on a development which has a chance of working, than on one that’s been tried before and did not work.
It’s been said that the definition of insanity is to keep repeating a failed action again and again, in the hope of a different outcome.
actually there is quite some work on thorium being done, mostly in India because they have large thorium deposits and want to be energy independent as a political objective. But same as with nuclear, the economic fundamentals just aren’t there. There was quite a lot of research on it because on paper its an incredibly attractive proposition: all the pros of nuclear but without the drawbacks. Too bad!
Hey TonyL,
I agree with you that a real discussion of the fundamentals of this type of technology would be interesting. I’ve seen a couple of presentations and IMHO it’s kind of shaky if they will ever get to being economically viable. But the engineering challenges solved to get a plant of that scale running on a daily basis are incredible.
But the discussion above… *sigh* just a bunch of incredibly naive calculations based on a headline from a random website. People here just use it as an excuse to think they are smarter than everyone else while in reality It has nothing to do with the realities of designing and running a plant like that.
Cheers
Ben
Please cite the differences in numbers from those posted on the Solar Reserve web site. I found no significant differences, other than the extremely rosy picture they projected. Like using name plate (gross) output rather than actual delivered. Yet the claimed nameplate as net. Seemed Solar Reserve is more to blame for the confusion. Search the explanation of difference in gross and net. Solar Reserve has hidden more information than the Clinton foundation has donations.
the point is that it is a pilot plant. A technology demonstrator. The US government supports it because they believe that over time the tech will grow, and they want US companies to have a piece of that pie. So what happens here is that they scale up, run into all kind of problems, and then fix that for the next plant that will be even larger. It is interesting to see how WUWT tries to spin that learning curve as a kind of failure of the technology while in the real world this technology has been successfully scaled up using the lessons learnt here and is being actively developed outside the US. The US government investment was very successful in that regard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_Solar_Power_Station
No, it’s interesting how YOU try to spin the abject failure of that “renewable” whitewash of ridiculously a gas plant that wasn’t even viable on paper.
Benben and Roger Sowell–if the technology is so promising, why don’t rich greens finance those puppies? Relying on public financing is an admission it is really all politics.
Did Spain not prove this technology did not work 24/7/365 and did they not prove that the cost to produce KWH power at a price competitive price. Spain is buying nuclear power from France as is Germany. Germany and others buy Hydro power from the Nordic regions.
Tom Halla, I understand you would say that, but this is a very simplistic way of looking at the role of government in innovation. Early stage innovation is almost always funded by governments because they can take much higher risks. Stuff like the internet, plastics, etc. etc. all of it finds its basis in government funded r&d. Anyway, you should of course discuss whether the technology is viable even when scaled up, but to pretend that a pilot plant should compete economically in an established market space is pretty ridiculous, and that is exactly what is happening here.
[Military R&D actually. Because, the civilians in “government” survive anything. And everything. The military gets killed if the opposing force thinks faster than they do. .mod]
http://www.rte-france.com/fr/projet/france-espagne-creation-d-une-nouvelle-interconnexion-souterraine-de-65-km
From 1.4 GW to 2.8 GW, so an additional capacity of 1.4 GW, for 700 M€, so we get 2 W of France/Spain per €.
And Europe is telling us to do more of that crap.
Two plants of this type (121 MW) are being built in Israel, the first one is scheduled to go online next year.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/07/20/3682323/israel-getting-two-giant-solar-parks-in-desert/
regarding education, I just noticed this: http://priceonomics.com/why-did-san-francisco-schools-stop-teaching/
Well sure it’s a big, ridiculously expensive and unwieldy, and not very effective in creating energy.
However, it remains a great business opportunity with the government guaranteeing 76% of your investment. It’s like going to Las Vegas with a million dollars with the government paying back as least $760,000 of what you lose. This does not include price guarantees which guarantees profits as well.
I wonder what those Liberal AG’s are on this one? Unlike the oil companies, the lies spread about solar are causing real financial damage.
State AG should sue Ivanpah and Crescent Dunes.
The project got a waiver from the e=green endangered species act for killing animals and insects on the endangered list? Hello .. .
The State AG should sue them for false advertising and lies about “delivered” electric power. Look at their web sites and the number of homes they claim these facilities will power.
Alternate headlines
World’s First 24/7 Solar Power Plant Powers 2.7 Million Homes for 5 minutes per day
(Utility-scale solar advocates don’t read past the ‘# homes’ part)
World’s First 24/7 Solar Power Plant Powers My Little House for almost 10,000 years per day
(Their interest in a solar powered grid is contrived and actually stems from a selfish preoccupation with their own house, bankrupting the country to jump start the technology so they can buy more cool stuff, or have the evil power companies buy it for them. Like the famous New Yorker Magazine ‘map’ that shows areas beyond NY as indistinct blobs, their vision for the future does not clearly discern renters or persons making less than $30k/yr.)
DISCLAIMER: My characterization of ‘hypothetical solar advocate’ is in no way intended to represent some imaginary person, living or dead. These people are real and I have encountered them.
Since some comments indicate that I am unfairly treating a barely operational solar power plant, I added an addendum comparing Ivanpah to a nearby natural gas power plant.
Just how low would power production be in December? Surely notably lower than February or March. How large does the “base load” plant need to be to cover the shortage on a cloudy December day? How many cloudy Winter days are there? What does that add to costs?