Top Solar Power Plants

Post by ncmncm » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 4:42 AM UTC

it_citizen wrote: post #6

Lately I have been surprised at how much solar and wind play the main role in most reports building pathways to carbon neutrality. I always believed that the intermittency of solar and wind would be too problematic and that's why people advocated for nuclear energy. However in most recent pathways stamped as "realistic", it seems that nuclear stays pretty much at its current level and solar and wind grows exponential…

Nukes are not the solution because they are mature tech. They are very expensive, always have been, always will be. Nuke plants have to be big to be worth building, but like any big public works project, they attract corruption. Most of the price of a typical nuke plant in the US is (100% legal!) graft. That won't change either. It takes many years to build a nuke plant because nobody involved wants the gravy train to stop. Finishing means it stops.

(A fusion plant would need to be enormously bigger than any fission plant, so would attract enormously more corruption, and probably never be finished.)

Solar and storage prices are still in free fall. Battery tech optimized for utilities rather than phones and laptops is coming to market at 1/3 of lithum's price, and will fall from there.

There is no lower limit on useful size for solar. It can start producing useful power immediately while you add capacity. It is more valuable with storage, but works without. The more storage you add, the better it is, but even a little storage pays for itself immediately.

Post by ncmncm » Tue, Sep 07, 2021, 5:09 AM UTC

lokimedes wrote: post #5

It don't really care about nameplate power let alone the area covered. Capacity factor is really not relevant either as it doesn't factor in the instantaneous market demand for power. What I'd really like to see is some kind of metric describing how much of power-demanded was actually covered by the facility at the right time. This would make it much easier to compare intermittent energy sources with more stable ones…

Solar/wind with plenty of storage is the future.

At the moment, generating-capacity without storage is equally as useful as with, so putting money into storage now would be wasteful, vs. getting correspondingly more absolute generating capacity online: each panel added displaces an exactly-known rate of carbon release.

Storage costs are plummeting even faster than solar generating capacity, so the longer you put off building out storage, the cheaper it will be when you do. By the time solar generating capacity is large enough that its variability could be a problem, storage will be mature and cheap, and storage buildout will ramp up. In the meantime, just a small amount of storage can take away all the profit from gas plants.

Re: Top Solar Power Plants

Re: Top Solar Power Plants