Will Crescent Dune ever make economic sense?

[Birkoff]

Hi all, new guy here. I have a son-in-law who's an EE and has worked for one of Oregon's big utilities for ten years. He does specialty work on Windmills. I can't bug him about solar installations, though. I found your site because I was wondering about grounds and found a 51 page thread, so I know you take stuff seriously.

A few years ago, flying back from Las Vegas, I saw a very shinny spot in the desert, north of Tonopah, looked almost like a lake from 30,000 feet, and it turned out to be the Crescent Dune solar power plant, using motorized mirrors to super heat a salt solution with the plan to provide 24-hour electrical power to the masses in Nevada. It ended up costing over $1 Billion, has political connections to Nancy Pelosi, and as much as I might think its a boondoggle, I thought I would ask this forum about it.

When it was initially fired up it became an extremely efficient bird killing machine (like 130 in an hour). They tweeked it and other delays, and this year in April they finally produced ELECTRICITY!! It is rated to be a 110 megawatts and provide electricity for 75,000 Nevadians. Only problem is its averaging for the last 4 or 5 months about 10,000 megawatts per month and varies substantially month to month. Oh, Nevada Energy has agreed to buy all it can produce at 13 cents a kilowatt (you may have heard the big Casinos want to go off the public grid). And the BLM gave up on bird counting.

So what do you think about this project? There might be something I'm not getting or understanding.

 

[ActionDave]

So what do you think about this project? There might be something I'm not getting or understanding.

I think you have an agenda that is outside of the scope of this forum. We discuss a lot of stuff about electrical installations and how to do it the best way possible here. Beyond that we get really distracted and confused.

You said you found this site because of a fifty one page thread about grounding. Ask a direct question to do with that topic and you will get a good answer.

 

[gadfly56]

Suggest this thread get moved to the Campfire forum.

 

[jaggedben]

Suggest this thread get moved to the Campfire forum.

I'd agree. For one thing, the power plant in question is not a photovoltaic one.

 

[SolarPro]

It's safe to say that they built this plant to answer the question: "Will this ever make economic sense."

Solar thermal hasn't had a lot of legs of late. In 2008, we were paying about $4.00/watt for flat plate PV modules, and some investors were betting on solar thermal as a lower cost alternative. Today, the average cost for a 20 MW (flat-plate) solar farm is roughly $1.50/watt. Investors have fled from solar thermal.

Of course, utility-scale solar (and wind) farms suffer from intermittency, in the sense that plant output varies according to the weather or time of day. These plants would be more valuable to independent system operators if the ISO had more control over and confidence in plant output. That's where solar thermal technology with molten salt storage starts to look interesting. You can store energy during period of high irradiance and dispatch it later, improving plant availability, which is a big deal for utilities.

In a manner of speaking, Crescent Dune is a pilot project proving out some of these concepts. As such, it's not competing against traditional flat-plate PV solar farms so much as large-scale solar + storage farms, which are another bleeding edge concept that could prove cost effective in the future.

 

[petersonra]

The real problem with both solar and wind in trying to use it to generate power is not the cost, which arguably could come down over time, but the fact that they are not very reliable and you need expensive backup generation capacity for those times when it is not able to produce.

Some kind of energy storage device might help but there is not a lot in the works that I can see that will economically do all that much for us right now.

In the meantime, all solar and wind projects are basically experiments hoping that eventually we will find some way to make them economically viable.

There are some interesting battery technologies in the pipeline that may make them viable in the not real distant future, especially for distributed generation. In the meantime they will require the massive direct and indirect subsidies they currently have just to operate at all.

 

[ggunn]

The real problem with both solar and wind in trying to use it to generate power is not the cost, which arguably could come down over time, but the fact that they are not very reliable and you need expensive backup generation capacity for those times when it is not able to produce.

Some kind of energy storage device might help but there is not a lot in the works that I can see that will economically do all that much for us right now.

In the meantime, all solar and wind projects are basically experiments hoping that eventually we will find some way to make them economically viable.

There are some interesting battery technologies in the pipeline that may make them viable in the not real distant future, especially for distributed generation. In the meantime they will require the massive direct and indirect subsidies they currently have just to operate at all.

Actually, they are very reliable as long as you can reasonably predict and take into account the ambient conditions they operate in, i.e., it's dark every night so PV won't be producing. Wind is a little harder, but short term weather forecasting is pretty good.

Any technology needs either to be viable from the beginning or to get some support while it is being developed. Subsidies are coming down all the time as costs fall. Solar is already viable without subsidy in some places where electricity is expensive.

 

[Fulthrotl]

I think you have an agenda that is outside of the scope of this forum. We discuss a lot of stuff about electrical installations and how to do it the best way possible here. Beyond that we get really distracted and confused.

You said you found this site because of a fifty one page thread about grounding. Ask a direct question to do with that topic and you will get a good answer.

ground up, or ground down? good for fifty pages on a slow sunday, easy.

 

[jaggedben]

The real problem with both solar and wind in trying to use it to generate power is not the cost, which arguably could come down over time, but the fact that they are not very reliable and you need expensive backup generation capacity for those times when it is not able to produce.

Some kind of energy storage device might help but there is not a lot in the works that I can see that will economically do all that much for us right now.

In the meantime, all solar and wind projects are basically experiments hoping that eventually we will find some way to make them economically viable.

There are some interesting battery technologies in the pipeline that may make them viable in the not real distant future, especially for distributed generation. In the meantime they will require the massive direct and indirect subsidies they currently have just to operate at all.

You really ought to have read up about Crescent Dune's molten salt thermal storage technology before making these comments. And in general, these comments are so ten years ago. Many gigwatts of these sources have come online without breaking the bank. And with large scale PV generation costs now coming down to as little 2-3 cents per kWh, there's now a lot of headroom to pay for storage and be competitive with fossil fuels. And you're right about batteries and the 'not real distant future'. Except that in some places, that have more expensive electricity, the not real distant future was yesterday. And finally, let's not forget the truly important question: whether or not the planet will be habitable in a few generations if we don't make the change.

 

[jaggedben]

... Solar thermal hasn't had a lot of legs of late. In 2008, we were paying about $4.00/watt for flat plate PV modules, and some investors were betting on solar thermal as a lower cost alternative. Today, the average cost for a 20 MW (flat-plate) solar farm is roughly $1.50/watt. Investors have fled from solar thermal. ...

To be fair, since the capacity factor of the thermal plants is quite a bit higher, the levelized cost of electricity may be closer than those numbers suggest. Then again, the operating costs of the thermal plants probably push that back in the other direction. It will be interesting to see how well Ivanpah and Crescent Dunes actually compete.