For once I agree with you. Quite an impressive MW class solar generator plant but I don't see the ROI figures in the glossy handout.
I am still inclined to think that nuclear for the base load has to be the mainstay of any future power generation strategy - fission for now, and fusion when they finally get it working at an acceptable rate.
Regards, Martin Brown
** Posted from
here:
Exactly on all points. Consider the environmental cost of maintaining, servicing, and replacing all those installations: leaky roofs, rusty brackets, panels cracked by fallen branches or earthquakes...
AIUI, the best cells rely on chipmakers' rejected silicon for cheap feedstock, without which PVs would make even less sense.
Government, though, gives you a big rebate on the cost, which we haven't factored in. Just as for ethanol, big subsidies can make a bad thing attractive.
Hey, I know...let's plant solar panels instead of food:
That'll help the world's food supply. Thanks, Al Gore.
Cheers, James Arthur
APS is a publicly-held company, so I doubt that it's a boondoggle.
I once (~1970) contemplated building my own, back when I _did_ live in the boonies, on an acre of land, and the rate was raised from 4¢ to
5¢/kWh ;-) Except for the control systems to track the sun and keep pressures under control, it's pretty trivial to build.Yep. APS also owns the largest nuke plant in the US.
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: "skypeanalog" | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
America: Land of the Free, Because of the Brave
No idea, but in the grand scheme of things I expect it'd be negligible relative to, e.g., how many folks die driving to work every day.
Certainly all good questions, and I agree with you that plenty of people are on the "must do something" bandwagon even if it's difficult to demonstrate that objective it's necessarily helping. However, there are plenty of smart folks working on making solar more competitive (i.e., using the panels themselves *as* the roof), obviously there are many markets that would benefit from battery batteries, etc...
While I don't think anyone would argue that the return on investment with solar is -- in San Francisco -- better than what investing in Google ought to return, there are a couple of things to keep in mind:
1) It's quite evident that people have (or at least think they have) tons of excess cash to throw around at "improvements" when buying a home. People will gladly spend $25,000 more on a kitchen even when they seldom cook themselves and even then do little more than nuking a frozen dinner in the microwave, they're spend $10,000 more on a bathroom just to have "cool looking" fixtures, custom showers, etc., and they'll spend $100,000 on an extra 1,000 sq. ft. of house that realistically they'll never use more than a few times per year. The monetary return on investment from such expenditures is often near-zero or negative (depending on what the home sells for years later), but people get a lot of enjoyment from these indulgences, and building them helps the economy as a whole. Solar is similar... if you're building a $500,000 house anyway, why not stick $25,000 worth of panels on the roof and become a grid feeder or independent of the grid? For many people today they'd just as soon have a solar home as they would that fancier kitchen. 2) Econmoies of scale. Look at computers today: Does anybody really need a 2.4GHz dual-core CPU with 2GB of memory and a 500GB hard drive? Well, apparently, they do... and least if they want to run Vista. Yet objectively it's utterly absurd to need that kind of computing horsepower to run a web browser and an office productivity suite, isn't it? How incredibly convenient that a lot of mediocre software design by Microsoft and (not-so-mediocre) PC gamers (of all people) caused technology to advance far more rapidly and become much cheaper than just, say, a bunch of hard-core number crunchers at Sandia or even the NSA ever would have. I fully expect the same is true of solar and other alternative energy systems: We're already past the point where it was "just" Al Gore and a bunch of Hollywood "stars" buying this sort of thing and instead you see a lot of "regular Joes" seriously discussing how much more they'll pay for a lightbulb or a kWh just so that they can "feel green." Over time, all their purchases will lead to marked price reductions in alternative energy sources due to economies of scale. Granted, it won't be anything like the PC revolution, but I can envision a day where it's obvious that coal and natural gas can't compete with solar and nuclear because the costs of the later have become so cheap whereas the former just naturally slowly creep up and they become scarcer.---Joel
Ahh, here we go, *this* is why installing PVs makes sense in fog-bound San Francisco:
"The program will provide incentives that range from $4.75 to $7 per watt, as compared to the general market California Solar Initiative program, which began with subsidies of $2.50 per watt."
More info on the California subsidies:
Best regards, James
Maybe, maybe not. Back in the early '80s, after the first big oil crisis, I converted my pickup truck to run on propane. Before then, propane sold for about 1/3 the price of gasoline. Soon thereafter (actually, within a few months), the oil companies adopted a policy of 'energy pricing'. As a result, propane prices jumped to about 80% of the price of gasoline, even while the refineries were still burning off the propane they couldn't sell. The end result is that consumers pay a uniform price per mile driven, no matter what fuel they choose.
Propane is a by-product of natural gas production as well as a by-product of refining oil. Given the multiplicity of sources and excess supply, I was surprised at the ability of the oil companies to dictate pricing policies to competing businesses. But that coincided with Reagan's term in office and the collapse of anti-trust enforcement.
Diesel is both more efficient to burn in an IC engine and to refine than gasoline. Based on that, both the oil companies and various countries energy policies have an interest in promoting its use over gasoline. I would expect diesel's price at the pump to be somewhat lower. But that can only happen when normal supply and demand economics is in operation.
-- Paul Hovnanian paul@hovnanian.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Have gnu, will travel.
I'm sure some smart regulators could put some rules together to separate the speculators from actual oil consumers. If the oil doesn't move from tank A to tank B, it isn't really a delivery.
Right.
One interesting 'speculator' is our own government. Until congress put a stop to it recently, Bush has been busily filling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, at top dollar prices.
-- Paul Hovnanian paul@hovnanian.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Have gnu, will travel.
So, it will make about $100K a year worth of electricity. What's the ROI on that?
"The SCA modules can withstand 70-mph winds in stowed position."
John
It was part of a politically-required mandate for "renewable" energy. Of course it's a boongoggle.
Sure. Curved mirrors. Tracking actuators. Pressurized collectors with exotic working fluids. Pumps. Turbines. Heat exchangers. Condensers. Generators. Synchronizers. Weekend project.
John
But it increases demand for that fixed supply.
Bush has been running around, trying to convince producers (particularly the Saudis) to increase oil production. At this time, they are refusing to do so.
One way to interpret 'increase oil production' is to buy lots of expensive technology to increase the yield of marginal fields. When one makes this kind of investment, they need to pay careful attention to the long term price of oil. Once the equipment is in place (and needs to be paid for), that places a floor under the economic cost of that field. An oil industry analyst I heard on NPR recently placed that break even price used by many producers today at about $60 per barrel. Bush wants producers to buy $100/barrel technology.
Guess who sells most of that production equipment? We (the USA) do. Well, the French and Russians do too. But look at what happened to their last customer (Iraq) who had the nerve to buy from our competitors.
Another interesting note: Iran has an excess of crude oil right now. There is less demand for their product, since it is sour (high sulfur) crude. Refining it is more expensive. Also, Iran suffers from a shortage of refining capacity. They have to import finished product from other countries. One wonders why, if this is so, Iran doesn't partner with someone possessing production know-how, build the facilities to make use of their domestic crude and sell product. Answer: Anyone stupid enough to invest money in an area where the US is looking for an excuse to bomb would have to be nuts. Our administration is keeping that oil off the market until 'our boys' can sign a deal with a friendly Iranian administration.
-- Paul Hovnanian paul@hovnanian.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Have gnu, will travel.
I deny "climate change" because it's purest bullshit.
Well, the bullshit is that people have anything to do with it. The climate has been changing on earth for millions, maybe billions, of years. The warmingists' idea that the most recent changes are "all your fault" are based on rationalizations for their own guilt and angst.
The proof of this is, when you ask them about the contribution of water vapor/clouds, they just start name-calling. So, the real deniers (of reality) are the warmingists, Q.E.D. ;-)
Cheers! Rich
You are far too cynical, John. It's a working power plant.
For me. Maybe not for you ;-)
...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: "skypeanalog" | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
America: Land of the Free, Because of the Brave
So, if I understand you correctly....
It will be much easier for you to tread water (literally) if the sea levels rise because of human-impact GW, and much more difficult if GW happens naturally.?
=EF=BF=BD =EF=BF=BD =EF=BF=BD =EF=BF=BD =EF=BF=BD =EF=BF=BD =EF=BF=BD =EF=BF= =BD =EF=BF=BD =EF=BF=BD =EF=BF=BD =EF=BF=BD =EF=BF=BD...Jim Thompson
FYI - There's a really good audio article (NPR-Science Friday) on several of the various solar-thermal (utility scale) designs.
Click:
Notable: Ausra is under contract to deliver a 177MW solar-thermal plant to the State of California to be completed 2010. As for the ROI, according to Ausra's Chief Research Officer, the State of California is projecting natural gas costs at 9-cents a kwh, and this new solar plant will be just above that the day it goes online. In other words: competitive, and getting better each year into the future.
One of the guest was even speculating that with enough land, GigaWatt plants were possible.
-mpm
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guess
re
Bush wasn't paying attention the day they were covering "Buy low, Sell high" in class. He was too busy avoiding his Air National Guard duties, and bumbling around as the head of unprofitable oil companies.
Oil. Unprofitable? How inept do you have to be to loose money in oil?
But what does the energy cost?
John
Well if they ever had a great idea, that is it. Nothing could be better than the biggest money sink in the world going under.
"How much (if any) rebates and tax incentives you will get."
IOW, a boondoggle where you get your neighbors to pay for your stuff.
Total ripoff bullshit.
The need to resell it increases supply as much as the obligation to purchase increases demand. To the extenty that long futures contracts are demand, the expiring ones produce supply.
Have you seen the flip side? Excess of people taking a short position on something (in my experience usually a stock) often bid prices up in the process of buying the shares to pay back the ones they "borrowed" as part of betting that the price will go down. If a lot of people bet that the price of something will move some way, the price will follow the bets on a short term basis. On a longer term basis, supply and demand do their thing. As for petroleum, what I see is owners of supply holding back to sell later when the supply has decreased and prices accordingly rising.
They have a profit motive to refuse to do so.
Is $60/barrel the total cost to the producer of producing and delivering the oil, or only the cost of the extraction technology?
Meanwhile, if Bush indeed wants producers to buy $100/barrel technology to push oil prices down to not much over $100/barrel, he's even dumber than I already thought he is. The oil companies will buy plenty of $100/barrel technology when they can make money doing so. They lack profit motive to spend $100/barrel on extraction costs to increase supply now.
- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)
That is soooo crazy. Why don't they generate the power efficiently somewhere, with economy of scale, and just write checks to the poor people? What good does it do for a low-income person to have a low-output, massively expensive, mostly subsidized solar system on their roof, that makes power a few hours a day?
A 1KW pv system will generate maybe 50 cents a day worth of electricity.
John
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