Arvid Pasto, Sparks, NV May 2020
In the May 12th edition of the Reno Gazette-Journal (RGJ), there appeared a description of a newly-approved (by the U.S. Government) solar power facility, near Las Vegas, called Gemini. This would place it not very far from the recently-defunct solar power facility known as Crescent Dunes. The new facility is quite different in operation from Crescent Dunes, relying on huge photovoltaic cells to capture sunlight and turn it into electricity, with backup power batteries to store the electricity for use when the sun isn’t shining. In Crescent Dunes, huge mirrors were focused into a tank of molten salt atop a high tower. The heated salt was pumped down and through a turbine to extract electric power.
The RGJ article (https://www.rgj.com/story/news/2020/05/12/biggest-us-solar-project-approved-nevada-despite-critics/3120319001/ ) describes the proposed and newly-approved facility: “The $1 billion Gemini solar and battery storage project about 30 miles (48 kilometers) northeast of Las Vegas is expected to produce 690 megawatts of electricity — enough to power 260,000 households — and annually offset greenhouse emissions of about 83,000 cars.
It will create about 2,000 direct and indirect jobs and inject an estimated $712.5 million in the economy as the nation tries to recover from the downturn brought on by the coronavirus outbreak, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said.”
“The joint venture by Australia’s Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners and California-based Arevia Power is part of an integrated resource plan Nevada’s Public Utilities Commission approved last year for NV Energy, which is owned by billionaire Warren Buffet and is Nevada’s largest utility.
Coupled with a 380 megawatt AC battery storage system, it will be one of the first in Nevada to include batteries to enable power delivery after the sun goes down.”
However, with the failure of the nearby Crescent Dunes solar plant, some are not convinced that the promises can or will be kept. In a recent article ( https://climatechangedispatch.com/more-on-billion-dollar-solar-boondoggle-in-vegas/ )
Dr. Jay Lehr says “This is a fairy tale of absurdity being sold to Las Vegas just as the snake oil salesmen of the old west plied their trade.” “It must have 100% backed up with fossil fuel or nuclear power to ensure that the communities’ electric grid can not let them down. Las Vegas of all places can not afford a blackout.
Thinking that some special new battery is going to maintain as much power as the absent sun, has been and will be an impossibility for the foreseeable future.
The mandatory back up fossil fuel must stand by running near full out and emitting carbon dioxide and producing no electricity until the sun can not fill the bill and it must step in.”
He ends with “The excess cost for the excess backup power will show up in the electric bills of the residents of Las Vegas as sure as night shall follow day.”
Probably the most unsettling proposal for the new solar plant is described in the RGJ article:
“The first phase of the project covering about 11 square miles (28 sq. km) of federal land is expected to be completed next year with 440 MW of solar capacity for use in Nevada. Another 250 MW of generating capacity would be added in the second phase with the power sold in Nevada or exported to Arizona and California in 2022.”
That is, they expect to sell solar electric power to California and Arizona. Yet California already often produces more solar power than they can use, so they either have to curtail power generation, or actually PAY Arizona to take their excess power. See for instance http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity-solar/ .
In this article, the authors show that California is on a solar production upswing that shows no end. Certainly, they will not need to buy any from NV.
When excess electric power is produced, California energy regulators or grids order the power to be shut off (known as curtailment), or they pay someone else to take it (AZ).
Thus, I wonder how well thought out the Gemini solar power plan actually is, and whether this plant will be just another Nevada solar boondoggle.
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All: Sorry about the use of the California curtailment data from 2017. I was simply quoting the LA Times article. I’m pleased that someone pointed out the CASIO site for up-to-date data.
Arvid
Arvid: No need to apologize. Any commenters complaining were likely directing their irritation at the article’s author. And if they were not, they should have been.
Thank you for posting this eyebrow-raising horror story. As you can see from the energetic response to your choice of reading material, you picked a good subject for a post.
Janice
“He ends with “The excess cost for the excess backup power will show up in the electric bills of the residents of Las Vegas as sure as night shall follow day.”
Or it’ll be hidden by billing the state for a subsidy, as I’ve read has been done in Texas.
Just wonder where all those solar panels are coming from.. could it be China?
Boondoggle? I think this is more like a swindle.
Wonder if President Trump’s administration will start charging them rent like started happening recently with other solar generating locations. Granted, has to be on federal land but if ranchers, farmers and others are charged some quantity of rent, why not treat land occupants equally’ish.
“Enough to power 260,000 household”? I do wish journalists would stop lazily copying and pasting inane statements such as this. Not only is it meaningless but it is a lie, if you can have that combination. It is also dangerous as it creates the wrong impression and diverts the discussion away from the truth.
Come on you journalists do your job properly. Ducking behind the fact that it is merely a statement made by others is NOT acceptable; unless you wish to be considered as a parrot.
‘… inject an estimated 712.5 million dollar into … ‘! Statements like that are always revealng. Why not 712.4 or 712.6? The faux precision tells me that both the source, Bernhardt, and the writer, Pasta, are clueless and have no idea what they are talking about.
Don’t confuse the message with the writer: the comment you are referring to is quoted directly from the newspaper article, which is why it is in quotation marks.
I really liked the snake oil comment !!!?
Well, I’ve got two solar panels in my back garden. They cost nothing except a bit of spade work and some manure. So far I have lettuce, beetroot, cabbage and carrots growing in them thanks to direct solar power. Why would I spend £2000 to cover them in glass panels to get enough electricity to run my kettle during the day when there is a huge power station at Hinkley point doing it for me?. The logic behind covering land to produce unwanted electricity escapes me. Even the desert is stunningly beautiful as the sun traverses the sky. How can they claim that this travesty is somehow improving our lot. Even without the math clearly demonstrating the pointlessness of it, why do people want to destroy what we have to create what we don’t need? Don’t answer that, it is purely rhetoric.
Gemini Solar Power Plant
It’s a disgrace to associate a solar powder-puff plant with a famous, successful pioneering space program.
What the solar farm will provide over its lifetime is enough energy to power 80 thousand cars or 260 thousand houses or to produce 1 new solar farm.
What is always excluded from the cost benefit analysis is the simple fact that that it takes as much energy to produce the panel as the panel will produce in its lifetime.
Good grief no it doesn’t! Even 20 years ago there was evidence posted that energy neutrality was reached in around 2-4 years for silicon solar cells with 14% efficiency. They are more efficient now and iirc modern wafers are thinner, contributing to cost down.
If what you asserted were true then the cost of the energy would be reflected in the price of the panel and this would be prohibitive.
The note I found very quickly was at http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy99osti/24619.pdf
If solar power is profitable, why are solar panel factories not solar powered?
Wouldn’t it make sense. Build 1 solar panel, then use that to make a second, then use 2 panels to make 4, 4 to make 8, 8 to make 16 until you have millions of panels. Then use those millions of panels to make millions more to take to market.
With all those solar panels producing solar panels it should cost almost nothing to make more panels, and your profits should be huge. But that is not what we see. Why?
There’s a lot more to it than just energy obviously – raw materials refining and so on. Manufactures of solar panels may not refine their own silicon and then dope the wafers etc. You need aluminium, glass, silver or copper for interconnections and cables, and so on.
I found a rather good (if longish) study made only 4 years ago which covers the energy input of the whole solar generation system. Bottom line – energy payback in about 1.5 years (YMMV).
See https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2016/12/8/musqo7036dslptm1b8efduj6i3e7ms
Incidentally the one published paper that suggests no payback in 25 years is by 2 Swiss guys Ferroni and Hopkirk. Please don’t quote it at me. It appears to have been worthy of the best climate alarmists in selecting its data and arriving at its conclusions. There’s a pretty good debunking at https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2016/05/17/another-pv-eroei-debacle/
I would add that I am no climate alarmist. But we should all try to stick to the facts, even if there is room for interpretation!
John Dawson, the article for which you provided the link is a joke. First, you have to go to another article link in that article’s second sentence to find the longish “study made only 4 years ago”, which is titled “Re-assessment of net energy production and greenhouse gas emissions avoidance after 40 years of photovoltaics development”.
In that linked article there are these statements in the Results section:
“Recent meta-analyses of LCA studies on crystalline PV systems established average values for environmental footprint of PV systems, and found energy payback times to be 3.1 and 4.1 years for poly and mono- Si, respectively, based on studies conducted between 2005 and 2013.”
and
“Still, especially for energy pay-back time (which is calculated from reported system CED according to the procedure described in the Methods section) a clear decrease of environmental footprint over time can be observed. Energy pay-back times drop from around 5 years in 1992 to around just under 1 year for poly-Si and just over 1 year for mono-Si PV systems currently.”
And in the Methods section, there are these statements:
“For the studies on the energy payback time and greenhouse gas footprint of PV module production, it is sometimes difficult to ascertain in retrospect whether the studies were performed using a consistent method . . . we have adopted a simpler screening process: the LCA studies should report CED and/or GHG emissions for a complete PV system with enough meta-information to convert the reported units to our harmonised units (see section), and should analyse existing production processes (not prospective, worst or best case processes).”
This is followed by a bunch of convoluted math, appealing to such things as “harmonization of data”, “assumed degradation of performance”, “experience curve”, and “the theory of technological learning”.
And the subsection on “Experience curve” has this admission in its final paragraph:
“. . . the relationship between price and cumulative production is indirect (while that between production cost and cumulative production is direct), as market dynamics can influence the margin between cost and price. Only in a stable market phase does the price-experience curve have the same slope as a cost-experience curve. However, as only price data is available for the period under study, we focus on the price-experience curve.”
So, what we have here is some historical payback time data that has been conflated with “environment footprint impacts” and subjected to arm-waving adjustments, an obscure tie-in to CED (cumulative energy demand), some questionable assumptions, and vaguely-justified “learning”/”experience” curves using one or more CUSTOMIZED MATHEMATICAL MODELS to predict what payback times should be, not what they really were based on then-current data (the payback time model projections ended at year 2015; the article was published in Dec 2016).
This study has no bottoms-up financial accounting of the payback times using then-current prices or costs for products and services to construct and operate a “whole solar generation system” and there is no credible basis presented to support the claim of “energy payback in about 1.5 years”, which I am certain no PV manufacturer/installer would guarantee—with hard dollars—even today.
So this study, IMHO, does deserve the adjective “good.”
Bottom line – energy payback in about 1.5 years (YMMV).
ROFLMFAO. Believe that? You never took first-year engineering economics, did you….
The $1 billion Gemini solar and battery storage project
==========
Over its lifetime, the project can be expected to generate $1 billion dollars worth of electricity at current wholesale prices. To generate a profit, wholesale power prices will necessarily rise.
And that is why, Ferd, I installed solar panels on my Las Vegas home.
Having run electric power generation, transmission and distribution systems, I knew the extra costs of solar are a significant driver of electric rates. And having worked with Nevada politicians and electric regulators, I knew they were going to mandate more and more expensive solar generation.
Since our electric power provider was mandated to pay me for my excess generation provided to the system at the retail rate they charged me for energy, it was a no-brainer to add solar. Thank you, NV Energy consumers, for subsidizing my electric power.
We still don’t have reliable information about what those monsters cost the tax- and ratepayer. There should be a place where concerned citizens can get real data. Like a list of all the subsidies it gets, all the free services it gets as subsidies and what politicians have been responsible for building it. Full transparency down to the brand of the underwear of the CEO or they do what they say they can do. Skip all aids and subsidies and survive on the open market. What’s it going to be?
Wonder if those AC batteries can be charged from the grid?
The more i tegrated solar power, the bigger the duck curve — the mismatch between supply and demand. They partially solve that by paying other entities to bleed off the excess, and charge a premium for peak hours usage. Beyond that, what do they plan?
Flatten the duck. Beware the euphamistic label “demand response.” It is another way of saying we will decide when you can and can’t use electricity.
Good catch
The definition of battery seems to be up for grabs/modification-
https://www.nrdc.org/experts/pierre-delforge/heat-pump-water-heaters-clean-energy-batteries
I was taught when I was a Schoolboy, many years ago don’t believe anything you hear,and about half of what you see, because what you see is not always what you think it is!!