2 cents a kilowatt-hour! Storage cheaper than gas peakers.
The 30% tax break on capital cost is almost irrelevant…
And only three years late!
Personally, I hope they succeed. (Of course, now expect the usual suspects to start crying about ‘too cheap to meter’ because all the power WILL come from free sources…)
With Tesla’s target battery price of $100/kw-hr (which does not include power conditioning equipment), the batteries would have to go through 5,000 cycles with 100% depth of discharge to reach $0.02/kw-hr. This is close to 15 years for 1 cycle a day that would be needed to replace a peaker plant. Sounds suspiciously like male bovine excrement to me.
Maxwell Ultracaps were running about $0.05/kw-hr if you had an application that would need 50,000 charge discharge cycles per year (6 per hour for 24 hours/day).
I didn’t see anything about de-commisioning costs…
One problem I can see with solar farms is they take up an awful lot of space. The “eyesore” argument some place against them is irrelevant as far as I’m concerned.
Hey, if they work, good.
Ever seen a oil/gas fracking field? Take a couple minutes and cruise around this area in northwestern Alberta. Lots and lots of wells are needed.
The ideal location for a large solar farm is out in the southwestern U.S. desert, where there is very little rain or clouds and fewer people. Perhaps the panels could even be set up on outlying sections of certain large military reserves, which are forbidden to the public anyway.
Or we could simply install the panels on roofs (would this be called Distributed Power?), using up space that is otherwise wasted.
There was even a company developing a sort of paint (for lack of a better term) that would form itself into one large solar panel after being spread on an appropriate material, the idea being to easily turn the sides and roofs of houses into small decentralized power generators.
Can’t speak for Canada but most of military reserve land in the United States is managed similarly to National Parks land by DoD usually following recommendations by the green movement. I can’t see them using solar panels nor windmills on it. Maybe abandoned military reserve land?
You would have to cover the entire state of AZ to create the same electric power that is generated by one large coal or nuclear plant. Plus the panels have to be continually washed or they won’t produce as much (which is a problem in the desert), and they fry birds, and raise surface temperatures.
And then there is wind power, there is usually no wind blowing during the periods when you use power the most - the middle of summer and the middle of winter. Plus all of the required access roads, and the 1000s of miles of copper wire required to distribute the power, and the fact they are sitting ducks for major storms, they cause bird deaths, and change surface wind patterns.
Odd isn’t it that in Germany and Spain they’ve been generating > 50% through wind and solar for several summers.
This solar plant (thermal, not photovoltaic) is about as powerful as one unit at the coal-fired plants in my area (each plant has 3 to 6 units).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility
Is it bigger than the coal plant? Yes. But when you throw in the size of the strip mines required to feed large coal plants the size comparison gets a little more equal.
A large area of mirror/panels? Yes. The entire state of Arizona? No.
Denmark too.
I wonder how long before these discussions get locked by a moderator?
Must be “NIMBY” and “BANANA” aren’t in their vocabulary. Around here, a small, but determined, group fights every wind project. They haven’t been as vocal about solar/electric.
Fort Drum, NY tried a co-gen, with the plant selling the electricity on the grid and the Fort using the steam to heat buildings. That lasted until the buried steam pipes started corroding from the outside…
That plant used coal or petcoke.
It has since been changed over to biomass, which drove the price of firewood up since contrac
There are a number of wood pellet plants in British Columbia, and now Alberta that use the same strategy. The company has its own port in Prince Rupert, and while I can’t speak for the other plants their Entwistle, AB plant ships about 2 90-100 car unit trains a week.
Britain is in the process of converting one of its largest coal plants to biomass:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drax_Power_Station
https://www.drax.com/press_release/drax-closer-coal-free-future-fourth-biomass-unit-conversion/
Average cost per kWh in the US in 2019:
https://www.chooseenergy.com/electricity-rates-by-state/
Average cost per kWh in Germany in 2018:
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/what-german-households-pay-power
Divide the German Eurocents by .89 to get the equivalent in US cents as of the latest exchange rates.
Just data.
There’s been a fair amount of discussion as to whether solar farms are a benign use of the land they are sited on. San Bernardino county has taken the position that no new permits will be issued for large scale solar farms. One concern for both solar and wind farms is the decommisioning process, specifically who pays to have the land returned to its natural state.
OTOH, rooftop solar does make sense as the power is produced much closer to potential loads. There still is the problem of the solar power fading away 3 - 4 hours prior to peak load (a problem thatutility engineers were warning about in the mid 1970’s). Let’s assume that Tesla can make batteries for $100/kw-hr and with power conditioning we’d be looking at $150/kw-hr. Figure another 50% allowance for limitiing depth of discharge to preserve battery life and we’re up to $225/kw-hr. I’d be surprised if the batteries would last more than 10 years (3650 cycles), so we’re looking at > $0.06/kw-hr just for the batteries at a price we won’t be seeing for 2 - 5 years.
This still doesn’t take care of the problem with cloudy days.
I don’t know about anybody else, but Elon Musk has virtually no credibility as far as I’m concerned. He may be a visionary, but he’s not a very good businessman.
Germany and Spain >50% is indeed odd when they are connected to a larger European grid, including France’s nuclear “fleet”, that can accept power during periods of excess renewable supply as well as supply power when the clouds come in or the wind dies down.
Odd that you would not mention that it cost over $.34/kwh. At 3 times the US price I don’t see any sane people jumping on that bandwagon.
That is the average for electricity to consumers regardless of source. Gas and coal are more expensive there than here and there are higher taxes. Try giving a full story, Midget.
Percentage of electricity generated by renewables by country through 2017.
https://yearbook.enerdata.net/renewables/renewable-in-electricity-production-share.html
The US had the same precentage as France and Russia.
Cloudy days average out. Again, I have solar on my roof, and a negative electric bill. In my area, Southern Califonia, houses, especially newer ones, with solar is getting more and more the usual thing. The other day I saw a billboard advertizing a new development and touting that all the houses would have solar! So it a selling point.
Of course, the additional mortgage payment per month for a new house to add solar is trivial compared to the saved monthly electric bill – again, at least this is true in So Cal where air conditioning is necessary and sun is a given. In a few years, you won’t be able to sell a house without solar here because it will come incumbered with a big eletric bill.