Skip to main content

The Cost of Concentrated Solar Power

From today's edition of Electric Power Daily (no link):
EPRI estimates that a 500-MW solar plant would cost about $1.5 billion, or $3,000/kW, Bedard said. A just-built 64-MW solar plant in Nevada cost about $4,000/kW, he said. Nevada Power is buying the output from the Nevada Solar One project.

EPRI has had little involvement with solar power in the last decade, Bedard said. But climate change and renewable portfolio standards have renewed utility interest in the technology.

Currently, electricity from a CSP plant costs about 16 cents/kWh, compared with 7 cents/kWh for wind and 5.5 cents/kWh for coal, he said.
That's a serious chunk of change.

Comments

Anonymous said…
This is about the same estimated overnight capital cost range as new nuclear in the Keystone Center's recent report.
Rod Adams said…
I wrote a blog post about Nevada Solar One earlier this month. You can find it at Nevada Solar One Starts Up.

The real numbers provide a different story than the advertised ones. The plant has a name plate capacity of 64MWe, but an expected annual energy production of just 124 million kilowatt hours per year. If you divide that number by 8760 (hours in a year) you find that the average production will be just a bit more than 14 MWe (CF = 22%).

In contrast, if you built a nuclear plant with the same capacity, you would expect that it would produce approximately 475 million kilowatt hours per year assuming that the plant achieves a fairly modest 85% capacity factor - well below the current fleet average for the American nuclear power industry.

According to a recent report produced for Congress, the US Navy has estimated that the cost difference between a cruiser sized vessel powered with four new LM2500 type engines (with a total power output of a about 130 MW) and one powered with a proven PWR steam plant (essentially one of the two plants that now power aircraft carriers) is on the order of 600-800 million dollars.

This is not firm cost data and takes some interpretation, but it sure looks to me like there are available, proven, operating nuclear plants that are being built in the present tense that can come in for approximately the same cost per name plate capacity as a concentrating solar system.

The advantage that the nuclear plant would have is that it could produce and sell almost 4 times as many kilowatt hours per year.

I am also quite sure that there are ways to reduce the unit costs through increased production rates by spreading fixed costs over a larger number of plants than the one or two a year that are now being built for the Navy.

Only one problem - the Navy would have to have some encouragement to begin allowing its contractors to seek additional customers.

BTW - go ahead and make the "enrichment" argument if you wish. There is no reason at all for a commercial version of a carrier sized reactor plant to use HEU - the NS Savannah showed that a reactor large enough for a surface ship could do quite well with 5% enrichment even using what we knew about reactor fuel designs in the 1950s.
Regarding "The Cost of Concentrated Solar Power" (2007-06-28), there really is no no need for concentrating solar power in the US because there is a simple mature technology that can deliver huge amounts of clean energy without any of the headaches of concentrating solar power.

I refer to 'Nuclear Power' (NP), the technique of amplifying a neutron flux through the fission of heavy metals to create heat, and then using the heat to raise steam and drive turbines and generators, just like a conventional power station. It is possible to run NP plants on demand so that electricity generation may continue through the night or on cloudy days, or when the Russians decide to cut off the gas. This technology has been generating electricity successfully in California since 1957 and six million Californians currently get their electricity from this source. NP plants are now being planned or built in many parts of the world.

NP works best near cool shores and, of course, these are not always nearby! But it is feasible and economic to decrease outlet temperatures using highly-efficient 'natural draft' cooling towers. With plant efficiency losses at about 3% per cooling tower, NP plants may be placed anywhere in the US. NP plants at existing coal plant sites could easily meet the entire current US demand for electricity.

In the recent 'EIA Electric Power Annual' report commissioned by the US government, it is estimated that NP electricity, which does not need to be imported from exotic locales, is already one of the cheapest sources of electricity in the United States, including the cost of cooling. A large-scale cooling tower manufacturing infrastructure has also been proposed by Alstom as a means of optimising the use of NP throughout the world.

Further information about NP may be found at www.niof.org and www.atomicinsights.com . Copies of the EIA Electric Power Annual report may be downloaded from www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epa_sum.html . The many problems associated with concentrating solar power are summarised at freedomforfission.blogspot.com/2007/01/commenter-referred-me-to-anti-nuclear.html .

For those of you who aren't blog administrators, this is a parody.

:-)
Anonymous said…
Stewart:

That's brilliant. The only part lacking was that you didn't run fast and loose with the facts like the CSP fanatics. Since their claim of "half million
Californians" being powered by CSP is true only for a moment at peak generation and only for home use, not commercial/industrial, you could have easily said 15 or 20 million people get their power from nuclear.
Anonymous said…
Of course to use nuclear power is much easier now then solar power, but solar power is absolutely harmless. There should be a way to use it effectively, just we need some time to investigate it. Using of solar power has a big future in my opinion.

Popular posts from this blog

An Ohio School Board Is Working to Save Nuclear Plants

Ohio faces a decision soon about its two nuclear reactors, Davis-Besse and Perry, and on Wednesday, neighbors of one of those plants issued a cry for help. The reactors’ problem is that the price of electricity they sell on the high-voltage grid is depressed, mostly because of a surplus of natural gas. And the reactors do not get any revenue for the other benefits they provide. Some of those benefits are regional – emissions-free electricity, reliability with months of fuel on-site, and diversity in case of problems or price spikes with gas or coal, state and federal payroll taxes, and national economic stimulus as the plants buy fuel, supplies and services. Some of the benefits are highly localized, including employment and property taxes. One locality is already feeling the pinch: Oak Harbor on Lake Erie, home to Davis-Besse. The town has a middle school in a building that is 106 years old, and an elementary school from the 1950s, and on May 2 was scheduled to have a referendu

Why Ex-Im Bank Board Nominations Will Turn the Page on a Dysfunctional Chapter in Washington

In our present era of political discord, could Washington agree to support an agency that creates thousands of American jobs by enabling U.S. companies of all sizes to compete in foreign markets? What if that agency generated nearly billions of dollars more in revenue than the cost of its operations and returned that money – $7 billion over the past two decades – to U.S. taxpayers? In fact, that agency, the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank), was reauthorized by a large majority of Congress in 2015. To be sure, the matter was not without controversy. A bipartisan House coalition resorted to a rarely-used parliamentary maneuver in order to force a vote. But when Congress voted, Ex-Im Bank won a supermajority in the House and a large majority in the Senate. For almost two years, however, Ex-Im Bank has been unable to function fully because a single Senate committee chairman prevented the confirmation of nominees to its Board of Directors. Without a quorum

NEI Praises Connecticut Action in Support of Nuclear Energy

Earlier this week, Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy signed SB-1501 into law, legislation that puts nuclear energy on an equal footing with other non-emitting sources of energy in the state’s electricity marketplace. “Gov. Malloy and the state legislature deserve praise for their decision to support Dominion’s Millstone Power Station and the 1,500 Connecticut residents who work there," said NEI President and CEO Maria Korsnick. "By opening the door to Millstone having equal access to auctions open to other non-emitting sources of electricity, the state will help preserve $1.5 billion in economic activity, grid resiliency and reliability, and clean air that all residents of the state can enjoy," Korsnick said. Millstone Power Station Korsnick continued, "Connecticut is the third state to re-balance its electricity marketplace, joining New York and Illinois, which took their own legislative paths to preserving nuclear power plants in 2016. Now attention should