Engineers Plan The Most Expensive Object Ever Built (bbc.com) 351
HughPickens.com writes: Ed Davey has an interesting story at BBC about the proposed nuclear plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset, UK which at $35 billion will be the most expensive object ever put together on Earth. For that sum you could build a small forest of Burj Khalifas -- the world's tallest building, in Dubai, which each cost $1.5 billion. You could build almost six Large Hadron Colliders, built under the border between France and Switzerland to unlock the secrets of the universe, and at a cost a mere $5.8 billion. Or you could build five Oakland Bay Bridges in San Francisco, designed to withstand the strongest earthquake seismologists would expect within the next 1,500 years at a cost of $6.5 billion...
But what about historical buildings like the the pyramids. Although working out the cost of something built more than 4,500 years ago presents numerous challenges, in 2012 the Turner Construction Company estimated it could build the Great Pyramid of Giza for $5 billion. That includes about $730 million for stone and $58 million for 12 cranes. Labor is a minor cost as it is projected that a mere staff of 600 would be necessary. In contrast, it took 20,000 people to build the original pyramid with a total of 77.6 million days' labor. Using the current Egyptian minimum wage of $5.73 a day, that gives a labor cost of $445 million. But whatever the most expensive object on Earth is, up in the sky is something that eclipses all of these things. The International Space Station. Price tag: $110 billion.
But what about historical buildings like the the pyramids. Although working out the cost of something built more than 4,500 years ago presents numerous challenges, in 2012 the Turner Construction Company estimated it could build the Great Pyramid of Giza for $5 billion. That includes about $730 million for stone and $58 million for 12 cranes. Labor is a minor cost as it is projected that a mere staff of 600 would be necessary. In contrast, it took 20,000 people to build the original pyramid with a total of 77.6 million days' labor. Using the current Egyptian minimum wage of $5.73 a day, that gives a labor cost of $445 million. But whatever the most expensive object on Earth is, up in the sky is something that eclipses all of these things. The International Space Station. Price tag: $110 billion.
Very small forest (Score:3, Funny)
For that sum you could build a small forest of Burj Khalifas -- the world's tallest building, in Dubai, which each cost $1.5 billion.
At 23 trees that IS a very small forest.
Earth (Score:4, Funny)
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No 3 Gorges estimate here?
Re:Very small forest (Score:4, Informative)
No 3 Gorges estimate here?
3 Gorges was projected to cost about $22.5B [wikipedia.org]. The actual cost is believed to be a little below that.
3 Gorges produces 23GW. Hinkley Point is designed to produce 3.2GW. So that is ten times 3 Gorges based on cost/power.
Maybe instead of building this new power plant, they should just convince more people to switch to LED light bulbs.
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No 3 Gorges estimate here?
3 Gorges was projected to cost about $22.5B [wikipedia.org]. The actual cost is believed to be a little below that.
3 Gorges produces 23GW. Hinkley Point is designed to produce 3.2GW. So that is ten times 3 Gorges based on cost/power.
Maybe instead of building this new power plant, they should just convince more people to switch to LED light bulbs.
Everything is cheaper in China and financing costs don't get accurately included, just a labor translation and you'll see a big difference. But yes, 3 Gorges is a low cost energy source as is Hydro in general. Of course, if we look at project like Ivanpah, everything looks great. Switching to LED doesn't change the generation mix, or curb the huge demand increase projections China has, not even close.
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Not Even (yet) (Score:3, Informative)
http://money.cnn.com/gallery/n... [cnn.com]
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Is there a "Ten Most Expensive" gallery that actually works? This one shows me three projects and then collapses into advertising and coming attractions without presenting the next link.
Point proven, though.
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California 'High Speed' Rail may beat it (Score:4, Informative)
No mention of the great train project in California?
That will be a budget buster for sure. especially by the time all the bonds and loans are paid off......
And the Bay Bridge is falling apart!
Re:California 'High Speed' Rail may beat it (Score:4, Informative)
Go back to your heforshe masters, Emma needs her boots licked.
It would have been cheaper if the main line ran directly between the major population centers (Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento). Alas, the Central Valley politicians felt left out and turned it into a boondoggle by running the line through the Central Valley. First segment got built between one nowhere location to another nowhere location in the Central Valley. Your tax dollars at work.
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That should be "Los Angeles and San Francisco". The Sacramento area population is about one third of that of the SF Bay area.
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The Sacramento area population is about one third of that of the SF Bay area.
Many tech workers commute from Sacramento to San Francisco and Silicon Valley. I could rent a three-bedroom house in Sacramento for what I pay for a studio apartment in Silicon Valley. Driving by car or taking Amtrak takes about the same amount of time. A high-speed rail line could cut the commute time by hours.
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That's certainly true, but the same could be said for places already served by the ACE train.
Re:California 'High Speed' Rail may beat it (Score:4, Informative)
The land costs of running down the coast would kill the whole deal, if it's even possible to run high speed rail down along highway 1.
The whole deal is a boondoggle. They should have used the first round of funds to acquire right of way (or options for right of way) while real estate was cheap.
Not use all their money to connect Modesto to almost Bakersfield.
Sacramento is in the Central valley, but your just flat wrong about the central valley politicians. They have no power.
What happened was the SF politicians needed their cut and SF politicians get what they want from the state. So they have money to upgrade the cal train right of way to high speed, even though they have nowhere to go on from there. That money will be squandered and spent fighting lawsuits, cal train will carry the SF high speed rail passengers at low speed. Any Northern extension will go through Sacramento.
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I think another problem besides dumb politicians putting their fingers into it is the "americans think we know everything best syndrome" (well we germans get accused for the same thing, but actually we do know it best, hehehehe!)
Joke aside: there are plenty of countries with an actually very well working subway or rail system.
Can't be so hard to copy one or get inspiration. I have no idea about the locations of the towns you mention.
But to give an example: we have 4 towns building an Y shape on the map, let
Numerology instead of indicative values (Score:3)
What really matters is the population density in areas where you want to put a station or terminal. It may still be far too low, I do not know, but the numbers above are totally irrelevant and just make people using them look silly.
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> It would have been cheaper if the main line ran directly between the major population centers (Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento)
Umm... the central valley connects LA and SF. Sounds like a good location for a train. I don't see a faster way to connect. Agreed about the location of the first segment, although the LA and SF segments won't be done for years, even if they were chosen to be first. LA needs a major tunnel through the mountains, and SF needs an overhaul on the caltrain corridor.
The be
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Re: California 'High Speed' Rail may beat it (Score:2)
Also amorphous objects like a train system isn't a fair comparison.
A nuclear power plant has well define structure and size.
With train systems do you include the tracks or the trains themselves? What about all the support structures? The stations?
Wrong headline (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Wrong headline (Score:4, Insightful)
A gas plant in Australia apparently. It's in the article.
Slashdot got trolled by someone in the UK who thinks their new nuke plant is too expensive.
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Re:Wrong headline (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wrong headline (Score:4, Insightful)
Last time I checked, interest still cost money.
I'd bet that it the stated cost doesn't cover insurance though....
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Re:Wrong headline (Score:5, Insightful)
TFA is about the most expensive object on earth, it's the summary that is wrong.
The real issue here is that the new Hinkley Point C nuclear plant is insanely expensive and is costing UK citizens a ridiculous amount of money. As well as the usual generous subsidies and incentives from our government, the French government is helping EDF out too, and it will be part Chinese owned, and the energy it eventually generates will be sold at a guaranteed price that is way over the odds.
It's a scandal that we are wasting so much money on this thing that could be better spent on cheaper, more sustainable electricity generation.
Re: Wrong headline (Score:2)
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Which safety regulations in particular do you think are over the top? They all appear quite prudent and necessary to me.
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From my layman's perspective though, the safety problem which most often seems
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Because nothing [wikipedia.org] bad [wikipedia.org] happens [wikipedia.org] when nuclear reactors go wrong.
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Yeah personally I'm more afraid of green hydro electric energy [wikipedia.org].
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Hogwash (Score:5, Funny)
What a load of rubbish. Slashdot posters repeatedly inform me that nuclear is cheap and widely scalable while renewables are way too expensive.
They've also kindly let me know that the reason that nuclear power plants go so ridiculously over budget is because of NIMBYs [wikipedia.org], nothing to do with the cost of engineering, construction difficulties, etc.
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Having actually been to the site of Hinkley point, part of the expense so far has been relocating a badger set (despite culling badgers elsewhere in the country), moving a bat colony, and preserving an ancient bridleway (that won't be accessible to anyone but staff). With costs like that before they even break ground, it's doomed to failure.
None of that of course is a problem with nuclear power, just with the powers that be and the planning of this project. EDF need to get kicked out and bring in Hitachi.
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Those things are a tiny fraction of the total cost. Even if it cost £10 million to move some badgers, a totally insane number, it's less than 0.3% of the total cost.
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I can see two ways to defend nuclear power in light of this.
First, while this nuclear power plant may be exceedingly expensive it is also a very large power plant that will be run for a very long time. The upfront cost is big but the cost of fuel, labor, maintenance and so forth should be minimal which makes energy from this plant competitive. I do not know if this is necessarily true for this particular power plant but in general this is true for nuclear power.
Second, like most anything there is a right
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It does make me wonder how many new AGRs could have been built for the same money. While their construction cost is one of the criticisms of the design (it requires high precision down to the millimetre when doing the continuous pouring of the concrete for the reactor housing, or so I've read) I don't think they were anything like that price to build, and they have proven to be very reliable over many decades of operation and there is plenty of expertise in their building and operation. And they are a pas
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No need to be facetious. Your "funny" comment is actually right on the money. You're talking about a nuclear project in a country with lots of regulations, NIMBYs, and a summary which fails to mention that the $35bn figure was actually estimated by the wonderfully unbiased Greenpeace who included compound interest on a loan in the figures.
Now what you're actually getting is 2x 1.6 MW reactors at around $13bn each or around $8.125bn per megawatt. That's not too bad for a regulated everything to shit country
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Did you follow my link? The most modern reactor under construction (a "Generation 3+") has gone almost humorously over budget and behind schedule. It'd be comical if it wasn't ultimately ordinary people who are going to end up footing the bill.
Contract it to GE or Mitsubishi instead (Score:2)
Contract it to GE or Mitsubishi instead.
They've built these things before, and a hell of a lot more cheaply than that.
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Those were GE designs built by an inferior Japanese contractor, from an old design, which TEPCO then chose to locate the generators downhill instead of uphill from the reactor buildings, and never updated their storm walls, as they were ordered to 7-9 times (exact number is uncertain: at least 7 times, however).
That certain seems like a GE problem to me. NOT.
Solar? (Score:2)
Re:Solar? (Score:5, Insightful)
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This is England. $20 billion won't store power for years at a time.
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If you want to compare to Hinckley Pt, it takes 20GW (or probably a lot more considering solar insolation in GB) of solar to produce equivalent electrical production as 3.2GW Hinckley Pt.
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Good point, so at $2/W the solar option would cost around $ 40 billion. No fuel required. Guaranteedly no near-extinction events. I'd say let's go for solar.
No, that is just the cost of the generating capacity. 2 * 3,200 = $64B, not 40. Then, if you want to use that power year round triple the cost for storage and added transmission infrastructure. Then, since solar has an approx 30 year life spend that $64B again in 30 years. And don't forget that about half that goes to China and produces relatively few good jobs, as compared to a high domestic product content for nuclear and thousands of high paying jobs for educated employees.
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Hinkley Point C [wikipedia.org] is planned to be 3,200MWe nuclear reactor complex/waste storage faqcility. One needs to build a lot more of them before you get even close to powering the UK, let alone keeping up with reactors being retired. All it takes is one major incident, Loss of (Electricity,Coolant,Skilled People), to render a size-able portion of the UK unfit for human habitation.
Meanwhile any solar and/or wind power related incident is localised to a few hundred sq meters and can be cleaned(recycled) up in a w
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All it takes is one major incident, Loss of (Electricity,Coolant,Skilled People), to render a size-able portion of the UK unfit for human habitation.
So, basically, unfit for human habitation, like Lutton, Stoke-on-Trent, and Grimsby, then.
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as expected (Score:2, Insightful)
A lot of that money has little to do with building a nuclear power plant, and much more with the cost of massive regulations and legal challenges, as well as paying off corporations, unions, and "non profits".
Of course, nuclear power economics is also different from other sources, in that most of the cost of nuclear power is in construction, not fuel or maintenance. When all is said and done, nuclear power is cost competitive even at current fossil fuel prices, and if people are serious about reducing green
Re:as expected (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of that money has little to do with building a nuclear power plant, and much more with the cost of massive regulations and legal challenges, as well as paying off corporations, unions, and "non profits".
Nope. The opposition group organized a couple of fairly small protests over a few days, which were managed by the police and cost the site owners, EDF, basically nothing as at the time they were still organizing permits to build the thing. There was no legal challenge and the permits were evaluated and handled by the government, at no cost to EDF beyond preparing the paperwork and negotiating emissions limits (i.e. normal stuff).
The site already has a nuclear plant on, which is simply being extended. Some land might have been bought for £50m, it's not clear if that was for the nuclear plant or a wind farm. Anyway, it was priced normally.
There has been no major union involvement. While there is a union for nuclear plant workers, they welcomed the extra jobs and increased safety from a newer plant, especially as older plants are closing.
The extreme cost is mostly due to problems financing the plant (investors don't see much of a future for nuclear in the EU, even after the government guaranteed way above market rate for the energy produced for the 60 year lifetime of the plant) and the fact that modern reactors simply cost a lot of money. All that safety technology, which has been found to be necessary due to numerous accidents in the past, isn't cheap. Plus we know that these things will go on for 60 years now, so more is spent up-front on construction instead of maintenance down the road, which also reduces the probability of unforeseen problems causing a premature shut-down.
empty boasts of philistines (Score:2)
to demonstrate relative "expensiveness" this plant, by using current cost of production ( using current everyday technology and cheap labor, ) of a new pyramid is nonsense, given ancient cost of great pyramid (with then much scarce labor in then most advanced country with then most advanced technology )
absurdity of this approach can be demonstrated by comparing hypothetical selling prices(if they can be sold) of a newly constructed pyramid, with that of actual great pyramid.
it is the current valuation of
Fuck this summary. (Score:5, Insightful)
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No single country can bust a budget like the English and the French do together.
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No single country can bust a budget like the English and the French do together.
They're not even in the top league.
Canada is likely the winner, with their Firearms Registry, which was budgeted at $2 million, and cost almost a billion.
The Sydney Opera House is also infamous, with a cost estimate of $7 million, and completed at a cost of over $100 million, a mere ten years late.
To get back on topic, nuclear power plants, the Finnish Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant [wikipedia.org] is a prime example of how bad cost estimates can go. The Finnish government is paying a fixed price of $3 billion, but the con
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Not bad, but Germany is not that far behind
The new Berlin airport was supposed to be built for 1 billion and opened in 2012. Now the projected total cost would be around 7 billions and nobody knows when the construction is supposed to be finished. Maybe in 2017, maybe never. In fact, it will probably be easier to tear the whole site down and to start again.
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It's for two fission reactors to feed electricity into the grid. The $35B cost in the article is $26B for the reactors plus finance charges for caring the debt.
That's what reactors cost now. A few years ago the province of Ontario put out a request for two new reactors and the cheapest they got was $26B Canadian and they didn't go through with it because of the cost.
the the pyramids (Score:2)
The the pyramids? Are those where you put a layer of Soul Mining, and then a slightly smaller layer of Infected and so on?
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Hm, perhaps he knows something we don't know? ... hm, can mice survive on grain alone, I mean without water?
I mean: storing grain in a desert in a relatively cold building with not many mice (unless you bring in mice with the grain)
A storage in dry hot desert stores, inside of cold pyramids ... sounds plausible, or not?
The "up in the sky" URL ... (Score:2)
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Engineers Plan the Most Expensive Object Ever Built on Earth
Ed Davey has an interesting story at BBC about the proposed nuclear plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset , UK which at $35 billion will be the most expensive object ever put together on Earth [bbc.com]. For that sum you could build a small forest of Burj Khalifas [wikipedia.org] - the world's tallest building, in Dubai, which each cost $1.5bn, you could build almost six Large Hadron Colliders [wikipedia.org], bu
Stop posting inaccurate sensationalist headlines (Score:2)
>> up in the sky is something that eclipses all of these things. The International Space Station. Price tag: $110 billion.
Dumbest thing I have heard in a while (Score:4, Insightful)
If this thing would really cost 35 billion, there is no way in hell it would be built! It makes no sense at all.
For that amount of money, you could cover the entire Sahara desert in Solar cells. You could build loads of gas plants and wind farms which would generate massively more energy than one nuclear plant.
You could launch a bunch of cells into space and transmit the power back to earth for less money than that.
You could build a wall at the Mexico / USA border and cover it with solar cells for less money.
You could install gas bags on the ass of every cow on the planet to catch the methane gas to power a gas turbine plant than it would cost to build that thing.
It make NO damn sense.
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"You could launch a bunch of cells into space and transmit the power back to earth for less money than that."
Solar power will become baseload when we can generate it in space, but before that can happen we will have to wait for a lot of Chinese infrastructure development, such as asteroidal mining of the base metals needed.
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mining of the base metals needed
Solar cells don't use metals. (Except for tellurium based thin film or rare titan dioxide based ones).
Solar cells are made of "sand" like CPUs , RAM and windows (simplifying).
Re:Dumbest thing I have heard in a while (Score:5, Insightful)
Oversimplifying it by calling it "sand" is highly misleading. A Xeon E5-2697 V4 is ultimately produced from a few cents worth of "sand" (silicon,actually), but it will set you back $2700. Silica is a major constituent of sand; it is not sand. First, you must reduce the silica to 99% pure silicon in an electric arc furnace. Then you must further purify it chemically to less than one part per BILLION of impurities (for ICs; somewhat less for solar cells). Then you must dip a seed crystal into a melted pool. Then you carefully withdraw the seed crystal, resulting in a cylindrical ingot of a single crystal of silicon.
Then you must diamond-saw the cylinder into wafers. About 1/2 of the cylinder is turned into dust by this process, and must be recycled. Then you might polish the wafers to remove the machining marks from the sawing, or for solar cells (not ICs) you can just leave them there. Then you must dope the material with highly pure boron and phosphorous. Then you heat treat very carefully it to get the doping to migrate properly. Then you must deposit very very thin patterns of palladium/silver, nickel, or copper electrodes to the front. Then you want to carefully apply a titanium dioxide or silicon oxide anti-reflective coating, to reduce reflective losses. Finally you encapsulate the cell in silicone rubber or ethylene vinyl acetate. Finally you mount the cells on a backsheet, interconnect them, install the sheet in a frame, and cover it with glass.
All of these steps are highly exacting, and require a constant high level of knowledge and QC.
I'm sure I have vastly oversimplified a lot of the steps, and glossed over some, but perhaps I have a, just a bit, shown a glimpse of why it costs such a huge amount to "just throw some sand on your roof".
P.S. - silicon (and the boron dopant also) is a metalloid - a "not quite" metal. Metalloids have a metallic appearance, but they are brittle and not very conductive. Sometimes aluminum is classified as a metalloid, so the distinction is obviously pretty vague.
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"You could launch a bunch of cells into space and transmit the power back to earth for less money than that."
"It make NO damn sense."
That's right, space-based solar power is a fantasy. It makes no sense, never did, never will.
This is precisely why the ISS and almost every satellite is powered by natural gas. The rest have "D" batteries.
Wait, I thought it was Montreal's (Score:2)
Olympic Stadium?
The Baikalâ"Amur Mainline (Score:2)
Nuclear Cost (Score:2)
How much electricity could be generated by a network of solar panels built for the same cost?
(Genuinely don't know the answer, but curious if it would be more or less than the electricity generated by this project.)
Walled garden (Score:4, Funny)
Judging from the headline, Apple's about to announce a new product.
What shall the roof of the bike shed be made of? (Score:2)
What material shall we use for the roof of the plant's bike shed. At a tight budget of £350, this item ought to get our foremost attention today.
I doubt it's even close (Score:2)
Nuclear should be killed (Score:2, Insightful)
We need to kick nuclear to the curb. The true cost of nuclear energy to society is infinite because we have no safe way to dispose of the waste these plants create for the length of time required, on the scale of thousands to millions of years.
Nuclear waste disposal is never included in cost estimates for nuclear energy, and as a result we have it just sitting around all over the United States. We can't even contain waste safely for a few decades. How do we have any hope to contain it for 100 years, or 1,00
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Ok, this may sound like a troll answer but it is intended seriously. We shouldn't care about what happens to the waste in 1000 years and probably much sooner for a couple of reasons. Reason #1: At the rates of technological, societal, and environmental change we have seen since the Industrial Revolution and especially since the turn of the 20th century, humanity is going to face much worse existential threats in the next few hundred years than a few repositories of decaying nuclear wastes. Reason #2: If
Plan versus realization (Score:2)
So we now have a ten years planing phase.
Then a ten years approval phase.
Then a price increase by a factor of 4 to 10.
Then someone who calculates that terms of current value of dollars it is only a price increase by a factor of 2 or 3.
And then the cheapest bidder wins the contract and we have a price increase by a factor of 20.
Why not buying the whole population of a small country, put up big mouse wheels and let them walk inside for power?
Oh, they would breath and produce CO2 ...
Oh, we only would need 10%
Sigh, editors (Score:2, Flamebait)
Title: Engineers Plan The Most Expensive Object Ever Built
!= to
The linked article "...the most expensive object on Earth"
and is in fact contradicted by its own summary:
" up in the sky is something that eclipses all of these things. The International Space Station. Price tag: $110 billion"
So it's self-evidently NOT the most expensive thing ever built.
Up in the air: F-35, $1T (Score:3)
Everything pales in comparison to large military contracts.
Re:Up in the air: F-35, $1T (Score:5, Funny)
I'd say the F-35 pretty much qualifies for being 'on earth'. Most of the time anyway.
Daily correction (Score:3)
"it took 20,000 people to build the original pyramid with a total of 77.6 million days' labor. "
That would be MAN days.
And thus is written the death of nuclear power (Score:3)
Here is all the facts you need to know in two quotes and a formula. Start with a quote from this article:
"proposed nuclear plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset, UK which at $35 billion will be the most expensive object ever put together on Earth"
and now from the Wiki:
"Hinkley Point C nuclear power station is a project to construct a 3,200 MWe nuclear power station"
And now it's time for our formula. In the power industry, we are very very interested in the CAPEX, expressed in terms of dollar-per-watt. In this case:
CAPEX = 35 billion / 3.2 billion = $11/W
Why is that everything you need to know? Well I lied, it's *almost* everything. The other bit is this:
Commercial PV: $1.50
Commercial wind: $1.40
Gas co-gen: $1.15
All numbers up-to-date within about 6 months, taken from real-world projects and summarized on page 11 here:
https://www.lazard.com/media/2390/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-analysis-90.pdf
And that's basically that. If you consider a modern wind turbine with a CF of 32%, and the Hinkley reactors with a CF of 90%, then you get relative LCoE's of:
Hinkley : 11 / 0.9 = 12.2
Wind: 1.40 / 0.32 = 4.38
Which means wind is about three times cheaper than nuclear. It's actually more than that because there's no fuel cost and OPEX is lower.
And that, dear reader, is why nuclear is dead.
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$35 billion for 3,2GW of power generation, even with a high capacity factor and (hopefully) low operating costs, and assuming no accidents, is still an utter absurdity. More than $10 per Wh installed? That's patently absurd. Approving that sort of thing is a mustachioed-gentleman-tying-damels-to-railroad-tracks level of criminality against the public.
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He has an extra 'h' in his units.
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You are wrong ... the h is only relevant for fuel costs
Without h you have production capacity, wich is construction cost.
H means "multiply by time per hour".
If your fridge needs one kW and runs an whole hour without stop you consumed 1kWh.
If you have a plant that produces 500W, you can not run the fridge.
If you have a plant that produces 2kW you can run the fridge but only use half the fuel as you shut/power it down to 1kW. If you run the plant 2 hours at 2kW you produce 4kWh of power. If you run it at 1kW
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KW is a rate of energy production, like Mile per Hour (MPH) is a rate of distance travel. If you want to know how many miles you traveled, you need MPH times hours, and if you want to know how much energy you produce
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It's $10/W, not $10/Wh (which would be absurdly expensive, given that retail price for electricity is about 2% of that). At £24b, that works out at £81.3/W. 3.2GW means 3.2GWh every hour, or about 28TWh/year. It is still pretty expensive though.
For comparison, solar panels are typically about £1/W peak, but only deliver that output for the equivalent of an average of 6-8 hours a day, but that's not including the other costs associated with installation (alternator, mounting, labour, an
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How is the US going to force Mexico to pay for it?
By covering the wall in solar cells.