Portugal Breaks Ground On World's Largest Solar Power Plant - Reuters

[hatrack]

LISBON, June 6 (Reuters) - Construction of the world's largest solar energy plant started on Tuesday in Portugal's southern Alentejo region, General Electric (GE.N: Quote, Profile, Research) said. General Electric will invest $75 million to build the photovoltaic power plant, which will cover 60 hectares (150 acres) of gently rolling hills with solar panels.

The panels, which will be raised around 2 metres off the ground in an area dotted with olive groves, will produce 11 megawatts of electricity, or enough to supply 8,000 homes. The plant is expected to be ready in January 2007 and will have 52,000 photovoltaic modules.

It is near the town of Serpa, 125 miles (200 km) southeast of Lisbon and in the heart of Portugal's Alentejo, an overwhelmingly poor agricultural region and one of the sunniest spots in Europe.

The scheme fits into Portugal's plans of reducing its reliance on imported energy and cutting output of greenhouse gases that feed global warming. Portugal's emissions have surged about 37 percent since 1990, one of the highest increases in the world.



EDIT

http://today.reuters.com/stocks/QuoteCompanyNewsArticle.aspx?view=CN&storyID=2006-06-06T173721Z_01_L06109556_RTRIDST_0_ENERGY-PORTUGAL-SOLAR.XML&rpc=66

[spag68]

1. solar plants

We should be building them here, furthermore we should be offering to build them for the Iranians. Logic would dictate that in a land of deserts solar power would be cheaper them anything else for electricity production.

[Dead_Parrot]

3. Only very surreal logic.

$75 mil for 11 MW works out at over $6,800 per kW: That's a fucking obscene waste of money - They could have slapped up a few wind turbines and built a new hospital out of the change. Still, I guess if it's GE's money they can blow it how they like.

[jpak]

4. Nine Mile Point 2, Seabrook 1 and Watts Bar 1 cost $6-7 billion each

or ~$5900 per kW - and that doesn't include the costs of decommissioning (add another $500/kW), fuel, insurance, O&M and spent fuel disposal (in someone else's backyard).

Capital and decommissioning costs alone are ~$6400 per kW.

$6800 per kW for a PV array with little O&M or decommissioning costs and NO fuel costs (or spent fuel disposal costs) doesn't sound like an "obscene waste" to me...

[dcfirefighter]

6. $6400/kW/.90 or $6800/kW/.33

means that those obscene nuke plants came out to $7111/kW(avg)
and those even more obscene PV plants come out to $20,600/kW(avg)

You are comparing 'modern' PV with decades-old nuclear.
The latest plant at Finland's Olkiluoto site cost EUR$3B for 1600MW of 95% capacity factor power, and that price includes long term spent fuel storage and a 60 year design life. This comes out to $2500/kW(avg). And it's available regardless of whether the wind blows or the sun is shining.

[Dead_Parrot]

7. Sadly, Jpak is fixated on US nuclear power...

I've tried on several occasions to get him to look at European solutions (including Olkiluoto) but I get the impression that he thinks the rest of the world is irrelevant and the US can learn nothing from them. Which is odd, since he'll pontificate at length about Danish wind, Swedish biomass and Norwegian hydro (or indeed a massive 11MW of PV in Portugal).

What say you, Jpak? Is the rest of the world relevant? Or is the un-American 95% of humanity just an annoying distraction?

[jpak]

16. The Portuguese are paying $75 million for that plant - not $225 million

- and they will not be saddled with managing spent fuel for the next millennium (which is really an obscene thing to do to future generations).

They also know that it is a "solar" electric facility that doesn't produce electricity at night (this might come as a surprise to some - why, I don't know).

It's one part of a larger portfolio of renewable technologies (PV, wind, tidal, wave, biomass and hydro) that will compliment each other over time and space.

By 2010 Portugal will have at least 190 MW of new large-scale PV, 3750 MW of new wind, 400 MW of new small scale hydro, 20 MW of wave power installed this year (Portugal has 5000 MW of wave power potential that could contribute up to 20% of their needs), 100 MW of new biomass, and yet undetermined amount of tidal turbine capacity (still under development).

By 2012 renewables will provide ~40% of their electricity (and none from nuclear power).

Why we aren't committing the same resources to these technologies in the US is the REAL obscenity...

[jpak]

2. This won't be a "world record" for very long

Portugal has two larger PV farms (64 MW and 116 MW) under construction.

They should be operational by 2010...

[Dead_Parrot]

8. Lets hope they're cheaper than this effort

Otherwise that will be $1.3 billion pissed away to generate less that 200MW.

[Ready4Change]

5. Gigantic for a PV array.

Wonder why they aren't using solar-thermal? I thought that was more effective on a large scale?

[Dead_Parrot]

9. Beats me...

Solar thermal (the trough version) is currently around $2400/kW, with some pretty negligible maintenance costs: In the same ballpark as wave and some hydro schemes.

Presumably GE aren't in that buisness, so they're chucking an extra $50 mil at the PV...

[BeFree]

10. Guessing here....

...the questions about the Portugeese building this solar plant must come from a mindset that thinks the Portugeese are idiots. Don't you think they weighed the costs before deciding to go solar?

Probably, i dunno, but these are private interests financing the solar. Meanwhile, private interests in the U.S. have run away from nukes, maybe they know something yall don't?

[Dead_Parrot]

11. I doubt it...

5 of the top 6 corporations in the US are in oil or cars, the exception being Wal-Mart. If 'private interests' are a good measure of sound judgement, we're even more fucked than I thought.

[BeFree]

12. Then you don't

Think, son, think. It can't last.

[Dead_Parrot]

13. On that, we can agree.

"How will it end" is the key question...

[Ready4Change]

14. How we will continue, is my question.

Oil, coal, natural gas, uranium. All finite resources.

My question is: Will we manage to develop sufficient NON-finite energy sources to continue some form of our technological society? Or will we (in 50 or 300 years) be forced to fall back into a purely agrarian existance?

Solar may not be the answer. But at least some countries are giving it a try, rather than donning blinders and making believe it will all go away.

[Dead_Parrot]

15. I also agree fission won't last forever...

but it buys us time, which is the one thing we're running out of at a terrifying rate. How long we get is how smart we are about recycling and how quickly we get a thorium cycle working, but it's certainly centuries rather than decades - enough time to get something "greener" in place - be it fusion, ZPE, even affordable PV... not to mention a reduced population. If you look at how our technology has changed in the last 200 years, it's practically impossible to work out what we'll have in the next 200.

But at the moment we've got something like 10 years before disaster hits us, and badly. It's terribly frustrating to see so many "environmentalists", who really don't understand exactly how much shit we're in, driveling on about a couple of grams of tritium when there's four hundred billion tons of methane clathrates melting now, or arguing over the safety of hypothetical Yucca mole-people when we still haven't found all the dead in NOLA.

Things like solar thermal, wind and wave show huge potential, but we just don't have the storage or on-demand technology to get our entire energy requirements onto renewables - yet.

So we have a choice: Climate change or nuclear power.

Pissing away $7000/KW on PV just leaves us with less money to tackle either.