Sicily's new molten salt Solar Power Plant continues to produce electricity even after the sun sets

Re: Sicily's new molten salt Solar Power Plant continues to produce electricity even after the sun s

The big problem with the Texas grid is geographical, wind is cheapest in west texas, solar in the panhandle, but the users are in central and east texas. Hopefully the grid will get modernized enough to move all the wind and solar electricity to the customers.

How close is molten salt to being cost effective compared to wind is my big question? Will a bunch of ev and phev cars on the grid help to load level? Will they use batteries or fuel cells? Or will utilities have to use natural gas for peak power, and slowly move to bio gas as the price of natural gas goes up.

 

Re: Sicily's new molten salt Solar Power Plant continues to produce electricity even after the sun s

Solar thermal costs are falling, for sure. CSP does generally produce power during highest demand periods, so while it may cost more to produce, the electricity is also worth more at the time of production. I really don't think fuel cells will be viable in the transportation sector because batteries will make the need for them redundant. I don't think widespread use of biogas at the utility scale will ever happen simply because there's not enough of it to go around. I think that biogas has a role to play, but more in a distributed generation environment. A 750 MW gas fired plant would chew up available biogas in short order.

 

Re: Sicily's new molten salt Solar Power Plant continues to produce electricity even after the sun s

When we're serious we'll cover part of the Sahara with them, to power both Europe and Africa.

Roughly 10,000 square miles of Solar collectors, plus world-wide distribution or adequate energy storage, would be needed to meet all of our energy needs.

 

Re: Sicily's new molten salt Solar Power Plant continues to produce electricity even after the sun s

Thanks for the reply. Let me get to the root of my immediate curiosity about CSP. My local utilitity has plans to build a 30MW PV solar plant locally. It is much more expensive than adding wind but its peak energy comes at the same time as our peak energy. I don't think they ever considered CSP. For a CSP plant it would be best to wait for the grid to be built out, then locate the plant in the texas pan handle where land is cheaper and the sun much more reliable. The peak of the power would still be close to our usage, but extra load leveling would need to be done. At this point, I am not even sure if solar beyond encouraging homes and businesses to put them on their own land with incentives and information makes much sense except in a few areas of the country.

On biogas, I am not sure if supply is really a problem of production. The price of natural gas is just so low that its tough economically to compete, and today doesn't make much sense. I certainly was not proposing huge plants, but some small capacity for load leveling. At a minimum I'd like most big cities and factory farms to turn their sewage into biogas.

 

Re: Sicily's new molten salt Solar Power Plant continues to produce electricity even after the sun s

Yeah, the wild instability in the price of NG is a problem. I would really like to see waste water treatment plants doubling up as power stations as well. They're an excellent source of methane and we ought to be putting that methane to use. Given the fact that these facilities are already on the grid, new transmission isn't much of an issue. The plants could either partially power themselves or even pump excess electricity back into the grid. A lot of breweries are starting to do this sort of thing as well. Just makes sense because it saves them loads on their water treatment bill and as a bonus they can put a massive dent in their electricity bill.

CSP makes huge sense in the SW. We could power the entire country with a pretty small chunk of Nevada using CSP. It just doesn't scale down. It's pretty much a utility scale thing. The elephant in the room in this discussion is, of course, efficiency/conservation. We could greatly extend our current capacity simply by wasting less energy. We waste more energy in the US than Japan uses to run its entire economy.

 

Re: Sicily's new molten salt Solar Power Plant continues to produce electricity even after the sun s

It can be and is done. I believe it doesn't economically scale down to smaller sewage plants though.

I remember reading in engineering studies about 50 years ago that back in the early 20th century some engines were run off of sewer gas.

A little Wiki digging

[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas"]Natural gas - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]


It sounds like those 74 plants are the bigger ones, so California already has good start.

I'm sure there is a lot of room to expand sewer gas power generation but it isn't rare.

Another bit of info from another Wiki page.

That's still better than wasting it or venting it to become a greenhouse gas.

There is probably as much or more potential to use animal waste on industrial level farms to generate methane for power. Some of that is already done successfully, but not to the extent that muni sewage plants are doing it in some states and countries.

 

Re: Sicily's new molten salt Solar Power Plant continues to produce electricity even after the sun s

I think your idea of a small chunk and mine are different I would like to see more/better cost figures from the Europeans before committing lots of land and money to it. That said with the situation they are in I would think California would be moving heavily into CSP. They currently don't produce nearly as much electricity as they consume, rates are high, NG use is high so it can be used for load leveling. There are high levels of sunlight needed to make the power cost effective.

 

Re: Sicily's new molten salt Solar Power Plant continues to produce electricity even after the sun s

AFAIK, the Spanish are the only euros in the CSP game. CSP requires "high quality" sunlight so I think most of Europe isn't really suitable for it. PV is better suited to areas that don't have lots of sunny days (though obviously the more the better). PV, of course, scales down really well, so it's perfect for all of the thousands of square miles of flat rooftops here in the US.

CSP is in between PV and wind in terms of cost. I think that $0.15/kWh is a reasonable estimate of the cost. You just have to look to the mojave for examples of this stuff in action. the plants there have been running for decades now. The added advantage of CSP is that it can integrate with NG (or biogas) so that you can run 24/7 (or as close as is realistically possible).

 

Re: Sicily's new molten salt Solar Power Plant continues to produce electricity even after the sun s

I like that they call it Solar Tres, a tip of the boina to Solar1 and Solar2 in the US.

 

Re: Sicily's new molten salt Solar Power Plant continues to produce electricity even after the sun s

Eh, did you forget what the title of this thread was? :fish:

 

Re: Sicily's new molten salt Solar Power Plant continues to produce electricity even after the sun s

Actually CA is moving about as fast as private industry can come up with the money and work through all the national and state approval processes.

First you have to come up with a CSP plant design. Then you need to utility to partner with. Then you need to find a site with the utility involved. Then you need to get permission to build on the land (not trivial). Then you need to get all the investment money to execute the project.

Even with all these hurdles there are Sterling Engine based projects (Calico Solar), Power Tower (Brightsource Energy's Ivanpah, e-solar's Sierra Sun Tower), and of course the existing Kramer's Junction operation. My point is that we are way past the discussion stage and deep into the fielding stage. We are going to see how each possible CSP technology works out.

 

Re: Sicily's new molten salt Solar Power Plant continues to produce electricity even after the sun s

Is that 15 cents after state and federal subsidies. The local pv site is supposed to be 18 cents/kwh after state and federal subsidies. Its hard to figure out what wind costs here but it is around 6 cents/kwh. At around 12 cents/kwh solar makes sense here given that its timing is better correlated with peak demand. Given california's cost basis 20 cent/ kwh for a solar/NG plant makes sense.

Ivanpah is the only new one that I've seen approved and that is with $1.3B of federal loan guaranties and large federal and state subsidies. It may be a problem with the California regulators, but approval seems to take a long time and their hasn't been any major construction since the pilot plants went in. I may be missing something. Do you know how much the utilities have agreed to pay for the energy?

 

Re: Sicily's new molten salt Solar Power Plant continues to produce electricity even after the sun s

Commercial scale PV is under 20c/kWh now: Solarbuzz Solar Electricity Prices

That is before subsidies - Peak retail prices are 30c+ here in California.

Current state subsidy is between $0.05-$0.09/kWh depending on what utility you are plugging in to.

Add in the federal tax credit and it should not be too difficult to build these plants at a profit if you can:

1. Get inexpensive access to a large roof or previously disturbed land.
2. Pick a location that is close to existing grid distribution points.

Most of the commercial/utility scale PV going on-line these days meets those criteria - typically 10-100MW located close to existing power distribution centers on either large commercial roof-tops or previously disturbed land (old farmland, other previously graded, unused sites, etc). Google "distributed solar".

The latest news has info about Solyndra's 50 MW of distributed solar going in on numerous roofs where their light-weight PV is able to be installed where traditional solar would be too heavy and need the roof to be reinforced to handle the additional weight.

Another company that pops up is called "Recurrent Energy" - their expertise is on "distributed solar" scale installs - they claim to have 330 MW of distributed solar contracts either operating, in construction or signed and have another 1.3 GW of projects in the pipeline.

 

Re: Sicily's new molten salt Solar Power Plant continues to produce electricity even after the sun s

I do not know the rates contracted. But that is just because there are so many contractual details that make a simple number (e.g. $.04/kWh) very misleading if you do not read the fine print. The PPA contract for the Sierra Solar Tower is listed as being confidential. I'm not putting much more effort in to find out the other Solar project numbers. I find the following site/spreadsheet rather informative:

Electric Regulation

It gives the number of years the contract is for. The changes in the economy and fossil fuel prices are more of a factor than the technology itself, so its hard to figure out what the real story is on any given date.

 

Re: Sicily's new molten salt Solar Power Plant continues to produce electricity even after the sun s

I apologize for my laziness. What is this cost ? (production, wholesale etc ?) Any idea how much the financing cost ?

 

Re: Sicily's new molten salt Solar Power Plant continues to produce electricity even after the sun s

Thanks for the california information, $0.20 is much cheaper than our solar before the subsidies, but we get a lot less sun. PV looks extremely good for California. If CSP is even cheaper then California should be much closer to closing its energy gap. In texas home and business pv are heavily subsidized as this is the cheapest solar for the state (no extra land is needed). The local feed through is $0.16 but there are tax credits and low interest loans to make the payback make sense for the customer.

California seems to have the strangest regulations and reporting schemes which is likely why their electricity grid is so expensive. In many states those charges become part of the public record. Thanks for looking. Natural gas cost has a great deal of variability and since it is such a big part of the california grid, they need more renewables to mitigate the risk.

 

Re: Sicily's new molten salt Solar Power Plant continues to produce electricity even after the sun s

Perhaps this link would help: Solar Photovoltaic Electricity Price Index

The $0.19/kWh is for a 500 kW commercial rooftop install grid-tied install. Financing is assumed to be 5% for 20 years.

CA's electricity is expensive primarily because of how clean the electricity is. It's probably one of the lowest in carbon and other harmful emissions (except probably some north-western states who have a large abundance of large-hydro power available.

 

Re: Sicily's new molten salt Solar Power Plant continues to produce electricity even after the sun s

I don't know what subsidies are available to CSP projects. the PTC perhaps? do not know.

 

Re: Sicily's new molten salt Solar Power Plant continues to produce electricity even after the sun s

I would imagine that they are?

Anyway, the DOE gave Brightsource a $1.37 billion loan to build 3 CSP plants which can produce 400 MW of electricity. Surely that counts as a subsidy.

Department of Energy - DOE Announces Nearly $1.4 billion in Conditional Loan Guarantees for BrightSource Energy

 

Re: Sicily's new molten salt Solar Power Plant continues to produce electricity even after the sun s

It also should qualify for a 30% federal solar investment tax credit. At $2B cost that would be $600M in grant money, there may be a cap or only partial credit since it is also a NG power plant. I'm not sure if California adds more money on top of that.