The $1 Billion Solar Plant Is an Obsolete, Expensive Flop
http://www.yahoo.com/news/1-billion-solar-plant-obsolete-213200906.html
From Popular Mechanics
A $1 billion solar plant approved in 2011 never delivered what it promised and closed last year.
Solar farms are the new frontier in energy, with falling costs and myriad benefits.
A combination of terrible management and simple technological advancement turned the plant into a dinosaur.
Bloomberg reports that a planned $1 billion solar plant was out of date and obsolete before it could even be completed. The Crescent Dunes plant opened outside of Las Vegas in 2015, when its technology was already behind, and the solar boom since then has completely eclipsed it. Now, the closed and abandoned plant is the subject of huge ongoing lawsuits.
In a way, Crescent Dunes was like the Elon Musk dream solar farm of its heyday after construction was approved in 2011. It covers about 300 acres with thousands of solar collectors that power a central molten salt tower. In 2011, a handful of companies presented plans for the plant and received over $700 million in government loan guarantees.
The tower was the work of SolarReserve Inc., and the rest of the plant was designed and built by ACS Cobra. SolarReserve’s website isn’t online as I write this, and more than one of its projects has ended in the possibility of bankruptcy.
Even at peak operation, “[i]ts power cost [Nevada] about $135 per megawatt-hour, compared with less than $30 per MWh today at a new Nevada photovoltaic solar farm,” Bloomberg writes.
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(Article does continue. Zim.)
Trying to find costs for generating electricity . . . and the data
has been severely distorted . . .
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GENERATING COSTS In 2017, the average total generating cost for nuclear energy was $33.50 per megawatt-hour (MWh).
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The cost of producing solar power is rapidly declining: It now costs $50 to produce one megawatt-hour of solar power, according to a new analysis.
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Zim : Used to be coal was listed as just slightly cheaper
than nuclear . . . now I see it listed as about three
times more expensive. I suspect the 'fix' is in . . .
And, do not forget that solar does not make watts at night.
Zim.
Mad Poet Strikes Again.
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