India Unveils the World's Largest Solar Power Plant (aljazeera.com) 177
Kamuthi in Tamil Nadu, India is now home to the world's largest solar plant that adds 648 MW to the country's generating capacity. Previously, the Topaz Solar Farm in California, which was completed two years ago and has a capacity of 550 MW, held the title. Aljazeera reports: The solar plant, built in an impressive eight months, is cleaned every day by a robotic system, charged by its own solar panels. At full capacity, it is estimated to produce enough electricity to power about 150,000 homes. The project is comprised of 2.5 million individual solar modules, and cost $679 million to build. The new plant has helped nudge India's total installed solar capacity across the 10 GW mark, according to a statement by research firm Bridge to India, joining only a handful of countries that can make this claim. As solar power increases, India is expected to become the world's third-biggest solar market from next year onwards, after China and the U.S.
Wow. (Score:3, Interesting)
So that's the largest solar plant in the world and it only outputs 648 MW?
I'm having trouble finding something to compare this to since the nuclear plant near me generates 846 MW with one unit (total 1824 MW) course it was built back in 1974 at a cost of $901,500,000 so about $494,243 per MW (Back in 1974) about $2,423,384 per MW in today's dollars and this project only cost $1,047,839 per MW. Hmmmm. I wonder if you could find a way to make solar panels work at night for less than 2 mil per MW?
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Re:Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
Unlike nuclear, there's NO REASON to have one single huge central solar plant, so it's a terrible and dishonest comparison to make. Let me put it this way... How much power do you get out of the nuclear power plant at your house? Maybe on your roof or somewhere in your yard?
First you have to try and establish that having one big single central power generating plant is some sort of benefit. It's easy to argue that it's not, as distributed generation has fewer transmission losses, lower up-front build-out costs, greater flexibility (buy-up whatever land is available), etc., etc.
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Is it that easy to argue?
Remember the primary reason we centralise our energy generation in the first place:
1. Economies of scale.
2. Local management.
3. Centralised expertise.
What's stopping me running a nuclear reactor in my back yard? Other than it doesn't exist, I'm not a nuclear reactor operator. Likewise we have similar problems with local PV generation. You have a significantly larger cost in inverters due to economies of scale, you have large problems with grid management due to potential backfeeding
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No. I was using residential PV installs only as one tiny example to put things in better context. There's no reason to debate the pros/cons of it here. Those issues are irrelevant to the question of whether solar power plants should be single multi-terrawatt beasts, or several smaller multi-megawatt sites.
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There are many residential PV opportunities which do not lead to deaths, anyway, like sheds and carports. It doesn't all have to be on top of a house, and maybe it's not for everyone.
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I don't get why people on a tech site like /. are so dumb.
This is a POWER PLANT, not a house hold solar installation.
I wonder if you could find a way to make solar panels work at night for less than 2 mil per MW?
At night half of the POWER PLANTS at a grid are IDLE, because NO ONE needs the power. What ghe ruck is wrong with a solar plant not producung any power when no one needs it anyway?
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I wonder if you could find a way to make solar panels work at night for less than 2 mil per MW? /. are so dumb.
I don't get why people on a tech site like
This is a POWER PLANT, not a home roof solar installation.
Half the POWER PLANTS connected to the grid are IDLE at night, because NO ONE needs the power.
Why you expect a solar POWER PLANT to produce power when a huge deal of the conventional plants are idle, is beyond me.
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Funny)
you should consider posting it a 3rd time, just in case.
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Well, the first post gave an error message: no such storry to answer to, or something :)
Ofc I perhaps should have read more carefully if it came through.
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it was built back in 1974 at a cost of $901,500,000
So? You couldn't build it for that today. Not even close. 1974 was back when we could still put men on the moon. We could do big things, and get stuff done. Those days are gone.
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We realized that the Rube Goldberg safety systems designed back then were inadequate.
Interesting comparison to the moon landings. We were willing to lose people doing that. Not so much with power generation, especially when there are better options these days.
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The problem is that nuclear plants have been getting more expensive over time, not less.
Also, they don't have to pay for catastrophic liability.
And even with government-provided catastrophic liability coverage (which nobody in the private sector would provide - a $200B payout for a Fukushima-style event would bankrupt anybody), there's few takers. Nuclear plants underwent a two decade lull when the last generation of nuclear plants turned out to be more expensive than expected before undergoing a "nuclear
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I've actually seen arguments for just that. And it probably will eventually happen. But smaller nationwide / continent-wide grids obviously come first; you walk before you run. Likewise, superlong undersea connects are yet to be proven. Should the Iceland/Scotland link go through, that'd be a nice demonstrator.
I don't mean to belittle this (Score:5, Informative)
So while it's capacity is 648 MW, its average electrical generation over a year will only be about 20% that, or a more modest 130 MW. Electricity costs about 8 cents/kWh in India [ovoenergy.com]. So payback time (excluding operational expenses and interest on loans) will be
($679 million) / (0.2 * 648 MW * 3600 sec/hour * 8766 hours/year * $0.08/kWh) = 7.47 years
India is one of the better places for solar. (The 150,000 home figure seems a little screwy, since 648 MW / 150,000 homes = 4320 Watts, which is about 3.5x the electricity consumption of the average U.S. home. I suspect the 150,000 homes figure already took into account capacity factor, and is not "at full capacity" as TFA claims.)
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I don't want to belittle this because India is one of the places where solar actually makes sense. But even there its capacity factor is...
not relevant.
What is relevant is the Availability Factor. Solar power is available at its peak precisely when additional electrical capacity is required for air conditioning during the day. Which is why solar is appropriate for any city where the sun shines and air conditioning is required. India are taking the lead and good on them for doing so, they deserve our applause.
If anything it makes *more* sense to use solar during the day time when additional energy is required for air conditioning as opposed
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a state of the art coal plant is 35-40% efficient, how much heat is being produced to create 1Gw of electricity? /. crowd.
I'm getting tired about the dumbness of the
The amount of heat is always the same. Regardless if you convert/extract 1% or 100% into electricity.
In relation to the insolation by he sun, all heat mankind produces and releases into the atmosphere is so low you can't even measure it.
Aircondition ... aircondition? Except for the US, no one is using such absurd amounts of energy for AC.
Solar
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US solar capacity factors are vastly higher [eia.gov] than 14,5%. And you don't need to explain what capacity factor and nameplate capacity are, people aren't idiots.
We don't know what the capacity factor of this plant is, but at around $1/W nameplate for almost-no-operations-costs power produced at peak consumption hours, it will be quite cost effective.
Your calculation is not just wrong, but stupid. First off, hint, check your units in your divisor: where is seconds per hour coming from? You have nothing in second
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What's wrong with a 7.5 year payback period for large-scale infrastructure? What's the payback period for a typical nuclear, coal or gas plant? Most of them take more than 5 years to construct, for a start!
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When I was a child, our field trips were to actual fields, where we helped plant the potatoes and bale hay. I was three when I got my first mule and we used to plow five acres before breakfast. Once I reached five years of age, we ate the mule and I pulled the plow my damn self.
No sir, we didn't have any fancy "field trips" where you visit some industrial park and have some pencil neck tell you how you too can grow up and sit in a cubicle picking pen
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Errrr, if you didn't mean to belittle him, then why add "Didn't you people do field trips when you were children?"
Perhaps you meant to say "I do mean to belittle you" or "I am about to belittle you" or "I will try to belittle you"?
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I think the correct reading is: "It's not my intention to belittle you, but I just did anyway". Like, it was a collateral damage belittling.
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English: I don't mean to belittle you.
American: I mean to belittle you.
English: With all due respect.
American: With no respect.
English: You're almost right.
American: You are completely wrong in every possible way.
English: I'm sorry but...
American: I'm not sorry, this is your fault.
I hope this helps.
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Yet they don't pretend they do and pontificate about "capacity factor" instead of understanding that some things you want to run all of the time and some things you only need every now and again.
heat Salt with solar rather than PV (Score:2)
heat salt with the sun and you get a base load capacity (throughout the night)
that combined with mini nuclear reactors seem to hold the answer to power generation... critiques ?
John
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I think this is where molten salt solar and nuclear have similar issues. Both types of plants benefit from being large and are more efficient, the larger they are.
anyone know this? (Score:2)
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Except, does anyone know how long a modern solar panel like the one they'd be using lasts before it expires or degrades or whatever? Or even what the overall maintenance expense is?
Consumer panels are usually warrantied to 80% capacity after 25 or 30 years. I.e. they'll work for at least 25 or 30 years, but you can expect to lose 20% of generating capacity by that time. Inverters are more like 5-7 year warranty.
I would imagine a commercial plant, with professional management and maintenance, probably has a longer lifespan/
Because to me solar panels seem like a class AAA rated bond on steroid when it comes to ROI.
Yes, they will be very soon. The tech is reaching a point on the cost curve where it would be crazy to not build them purely based on cost. I suspect over the next 2
werent the deniers just saying (Score:2)
"we can't/shouldn't do anything about global warming because India and China aren't doing anything."
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Actually Indian politicians have sold out to the west and are doing a lot about global warming. However India should not be fighting Global Warming. A hotter world means a better monsoon and more rains in India. India is water deficient a problem Global Warming could fix. Instead of Solar India should be putting in clean coal plants(clean as in the only emissions are CO2)
Cleaned by robots? (Score:2)
Kind of sad that they feel it is cheaper to have the panels cleaned by robots than by the hundreds of millions of underemployed poor Indians...
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Re:Impressive (Score:4, Informative)
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Well, the estimate assumed 8 hours a day, so 4 hours either side of noon. Assuming that power varies as the cosine of the angle, averaging between -/+ 60 degrees gives sqrt(3)/(2*pi/3)=82.7% of peak.
Averaging over -/+ 90 degrees (i.e. 12 hours) gives 63.7% of peak, i.e. the equivalent of 7.6 hours of peak output per day. So the 8 hr/day figure seems a reasonable ballpark estimate.
Doesn't account for latitude, season or weather, YMMV, contents may have settled during transit, etc.
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It's best not to base it on "hours per day", and instead just look at capacity factors. Capacity factors on commercial scale solar plants range from under 15% to over 30%, depending on the tracking tech (none, single axis, dual axis) and plant design (as well as the most critical aspect, of course - location).
A nice thing about solar is that it tends to align pretty well with the demand curve, so up to a point adding actually makes grid operators' jobs easier, not harder. It also runs contrary to wind, wh
Re:Impressive (Score:5, Informative)
Your calculation is a just bit too simple and optimistic.
Madurai (about 50km away from the power plant) has an average global horizontal irradiance of 224W/m**2.
At 9 degree latitude North, the optimum tilt angle is pretty close to horizontal : 10 degree tilt only brings 2% more irradiance over the year
Total insolation is year * average irradiance ~ 1960kWh
The performance ratio of such a power plant could be around 85%, with cable losses, inverter losses and automated cleaning.
The nominal power of the installation is 648MWp, tested under an irradiance of 1000W/m**2.
So your expected yield is :
1960kWh/(m**2*year)*85%*648MW/(1000W/m**2) ~ 1.1 TWh/year
compared to your result of 1.9 TWh/year.
The plant should pay for itself in less than 8 years, and your calculation wasn't too far off.
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> The performance ratio of such a power plant could be around 85%, with cable losses, inverter losses and automated cleaning
A VERY minor nit-pick - modern utility scale systems are closer to 90% because they have far lower line losses and inverters with ~98% efficiency. Apple's system (in WV? I can't recall) was specced at 92%
I realize that has no real effect on the bottom line, but I did think it was worth putting out modern numbers.
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Thanks. I don't know much about the project, so I didn't pick the best performance ratio.
It might end up being over 90%. It also could end up much worse, with either shadowing, module mismatch, inverter mismatch or soiling.
I've seen big projects where almost a dozen inverters (out of many hundred) were either out of order or even not connected at all without anyone noticing for over a year.
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> It also could end up much worse, with either shadowing, module mismatch
Well the nice thing about utility scale is that you have some control over this. Shadowing? Call in the bulldozers and level the ground. Module mismatch? Demand the supplier stack them on the pallets in matched groups.
You and I don't have the same advantages, the pallet you get will be +/- ~3% and you get to install on whatever square you have. That said, I did get lucky - my 2 story garage gets shadowed only about 2% of the year, a
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Sure, planners can avoid those pitfalls easily. They might not always do so, though. ;)
The difference between practice and theory is bigger in practice than in theory
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Interesting blog, BTW.
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Yes, if you ignore all maintenance costs
According to the summary, the maintenance is done by robots. Other than occasionally flushing off the dust, there isn't much to do.
and solar panel degradation.
The panels on my roof are warrantied at 80% capacity for 25 years.
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> Yes, if you ignore all maintenance costs
Maintenance costs are part of OPEX. OPEX on PV is the lowest of any major power source, by far. No moving parts, your main component is a sheet of glass (they are SILICON cells) in an aluminum frame, and the power conversion doesn't even have a transformer any more. And no fuel, of course.
Do you really think it would be more expensive than, say, a nuclear plant? Nuclear fuel is very cheap, but you still have lots (and LOTS) of moving parts to contend with. And ch
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Absolutely. Coal has no maintenance costs. No fuel costs, No boiler scale, no generator wear, no waste clean-out. It's all magic free energy!
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Well, yeah, it is a bargain, actually. For comparison, the new nuclear power plants that the US is building cost roughly 5x as much per megawatt.
Re:Impressive (Score:5, Informative)
It is not a bargain at all. Also that price is construction only, and fails to include all owner's costs in development, not to mention the capacity factor is far below conventional power plants.
Well yeah, it's a PV Solar plant of course it has a lower capacity factor than a conventional plant, you might as well just say "It's dark at night"
But given this is India, expecting them to build a modern combined cycle plant without natural gas infrastructure, or nuclear power without experience is too much.
You mean like the Sugen combined-cycle power plant in Gujarat, India? Or one of the 22 nuclear reactors in operation at seven sites that generate about 25% of India's electricity?
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You mean like the Sugen combined-cycle power plant in Gujarat, India? Or one of the 22 nuclear reactors in operation at seven sites that generate about 25% of India's electricity?
Shhhh we're bashing India right now. You can come back with a comment on India's various achievements next time there's a Trump article posted. Don't worry, there will be one soon enough.
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It is not a bargain at all. Also that price is construction only, and fails to include all owner's costs in development, not to mention the capacity factor is far below conventional power plants.
Look, a school of red herrings! (Why does anyone think these things aren't considered in economy analyses?)
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Exactly my reaction. If they say the project cost $679m to build, then it means just that: the project cost $679m to build. Not "one aspect of it" cost $679m.
A price of just over $1 a watt is superb. That's about what it costs to build a typical fossil plant - except that the cost to build a fossil plant is dwarfed by the cost of running it. Now, a fossil plant will have a 3x higher capacity factor, but still, this is highly competitive power. To put it in perspective, some of the new nuclear plants th
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Strictly speaking: a fossile plant designed to follow the load curve of the day, that means gradually powering up around 7:00 in the morning, reaching a measureable power output around 9:00 in the morning, going up to about 85% of max around 12:00 and shifting back and forth between 87% and 93% between 13:00 and 17:00 and then slowly perform the reverse shift in output: has the exact same CF as a solar plant.
50% of all power plants in germany are load follwing. Their CF - in summer at least - is the exact s
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One of the nice things about solar from a long term cost perspective is that other than cleaning the panels periodically and fixing electrical problems you have almost no labor so operating costs are almost non-existent compared to fossil fuels. This often makes up for the lower capacity factor. Your average coal fired power plant has a round the clock (3 shifts) of dozens of people working in the plant feeding coal, removing ash, making repairs and monitoring the steam generators. Coal plants are massive m
Re:Impressive (Score:5, Insightful)
Not sure of your point - India has an energy problem, and a pollution problem. Here's a plant that will produce energy, and little to zero pollution from day 1 of its operation. I'm amazed but glad that it's actually begun to operate.
A nuclear plant would of course, supply energy when the sun goes down, but given the circumstances, what odds would you give of a nuclear plant being in any way cheap, safe, or reliable?
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Or one of the 22 nuclear reactors in operation at seven sites that generate about 25% of India's electricity?
I stand corrected. Teach me to post before thinking. Still right about pollution, though.
Electricity supply 101 (Score:3)
Yes but that's a base load solution.
This solar plant is a peak load solution.
You need both.
Having a nuke idle all night is a very expensive waste.
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Yes but that's a base load solution. This solar plant is a peak load solution. You need both. Having a nuke idle all night is a very expensive waste.
Something will need to sit idle or at least underutlized to provide peak load on cloudy days or you will end up with Brownouts. The only true solution to this problem is Timzeone spanning Backbone Transmission lines. Of course those are hugely expensive and in Democracies very problematic to build even if the funds are available
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Something will need to sit idle or at least underutlized to provide peak load on cloudy days or you will end up with Brownouts. The only true solution to this problem is Timzeone spanning Backbone Transmission lines.
The other possible solution would be bulk energy storage. It's not cost effective yet, but there's no reason to think some form of it won't become cost effective at some point in the foreseeable future.
Re:Electricity supply 101 (Score:4, Interesting)
The other possible solution would be bulk energy storage.
... and a third solution is demand shifting via variable pricing. The biggest use of electricity in India is running irrigation pumps. There is no particular reason the pumps need to run everyday, so if you raise the price of electricity on cloudy days, the pumps can be idled. Problem solved.
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Isn't it lucky that you've had them for probably more decades than you have been alive.
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Not the same thing. Standard AC distribution lines are not a cost effective means to distribute huge amounts of power from one side of a large country to the other. For that you need high power HVDC lines.
A nice thing about HVDC is that unlike AC, it also works well under seawater. Also, it shares power between disjoint AC grids (since it's always converted to the local waveform) and improves power quality on the distribution end. And prevents the cascading power failures that AC is prone to (aka, one p
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India already has a national grid of HVDC lines which link the 4 regional grids together. There just need to be more lines added as more plants are brought online
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Unlike third world countries like the United States, India already has a (sub) continent wide grid. ...
Thanx for your concerns
Long range grids are not particular expensive. That is a /. myth. Every civilized nation has them, except the USA ... so get your head out of the sand.
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Solar panels don't stop working when it's cloudy, in fact they operate surprisingly close to the same capacity as on a non-cloudy day.
Clouds only block visible spectrum photons (and a bit of IR) - but the vast majority of solar radiation is *not* in the visible spectrum. That's why you can get sunburn on a cloudy day - and in fact it's more common because the IR blocking means you don't feel sun-heat so you don't know you're getting fried by the UV.
Solar panels use whatever photons there are, clouds barely
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Thanks, I didn't know that - though it makes sense.
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The efficiency difference is very small, about 0.5% per degree celsius. The difference in light between cloudy and sunny days, however, is most definitely not small. Also, for a given cell temperature, solar panels become more efficient the more concentrated the light they're receiving is.
This person and the GP are talking bollocks. There's no meaningful difference in efficiency between sunny and cloudy days, but a big net generation difference due to the vastly reduced light availability on cloudy days.
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Okay, that was some grade A class nonsense.
1) Solar panels *do* drastically reduce power output on cloudy days.
2) Clouds do *not* only block visible spectrum light "and a bit of IR". They're highly effective blockers of IR and UV as well. They do block IR and visible light better than UV (and there are relatively rare situations where they can actually enhance UV light via reflections), but they absolutely block all three, and do so well. See chart c [rand.org] in figure S1 / figure 6.
3) Only 3-5% of the sun's ener
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I'm sorry, but solar panels do dramatically reduce in power on cloudy days. The absolutely do not "operate surprisingly close to the same capacity as on a non-cloudy day." Here's [energystorage.org] what a daily generation profile looks like on a day with scattered clouds. Here [treehugger.com] you can see a mixture of cloudy, sunny, and partly cloudy days.
Your statement was simply wrong.
Literally nothing you wrote in your post was correct. UV is a nearly irrelevant source of energy at the surface. Clouds do provide some UV blocking, and
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> Solar Panels can actually be MORE efficient on cloudy days
They produce less. Every time. I have panels running since 2010, with daily statistics. Drop in power is basically linear with cloud cover.
So don't talk about all this theoretical BS before you have your own panels up. Which you should.
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It's not theory. It's real world data. The most comprehensive data on solar panel performance available was gathered by the government renewable energy labs which tracked daily performance of thousands of solar panels in Hawai over a full year. It's rare, but sometimes panels would actually produce more on overcast days than the sunny days on either side of them. It requires very specific conditions - firstly it's much more likely in a very hot climate, where your normal heat losses are higher - so you gain
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If you're talking about clouds shading areas around you but not your panels themselves, sure, that's possible. But not when your panels themselves are shaded.
The temperature dependence of solar cells is small. The light difference from shading is huge.
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Actually, even that's wrong. Solar cells do get greater efficiencies at lower temperatures, but they also get greater efficiencies at higher light intensities. The highest efficiency solar cells in operation use a combination of concentrators, splitters, and cooling so that as much light as possible, at cell-optimized frequencies, falls on as little area as possible with that area being kept as cool as practical. The world record using that approach is 46% efficiency.
Also, you want your light coming from
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Yes, the efficiency does increase. When calculating the short circuit voltage of a solar cell, you start with the AM0 voltage and then scale it by a correction factor based on the logarithm of the short circuit current. The short circuit current also modifies the temperature dependence factor.
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> Something will need to sit idle or at least underutlized to provide peak load
Yeah, but you make those plants be ones that are OK doing that. Nuclear power is not OK throttling (well, some are).
It's no coincidence that Ontario built the western world's largest coal plants while building out their nuclear fleet.
And it's also no coincidence they are replacing all the coal plants with gas peakers while retiring the nuclear fleet and slowly replacing it with wind.
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India is just like your country.
It is dark at night and bright at daytime.
The power comes out of the outlet in the wall.
What 'dark areas' are you thinking about?
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I'm amazed but glad that it's actually begun to operate.
How did they get the people who farmed the 2500 acres of land there to move out? That is the biggest problem setting up a large factory in India, the land rights are questionable.
Oh I Googled that for myself: Adani seeks to gag its lawyer after he claims 'violations' [indianexpress.com], "In an unusual move, the Gujarat-based Adani Group of Companies has filed a petition in the Madras High Court seeking to gag its own lawyer after he allegedly threatened to expose "majo
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And in just 8 months.
How can people still claim that coal is competitive ? It takes an average of 5 years to build a coal plant - and that's assuming it finishes on schedule, which they never do.
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679/648 = $1.05/Wp. That's actually slightly higher than new installs in the US and Europe, but I suspect that's simply because construction started some time ago.
PV is now the cheapest form of power in CAPEX terms, ever. Which is why ~60 GWp is going in this year.
Re:Hard specs, please. (Score:5, Informative)
648 MW ... .0007% of India's electricity consumption, based upon 2011 figures... at that rate, they'd need to cover a fifth of the country with PV panels, never mind night time load.
That's a hell of a lot of land for
Your numbers are way off.
648MW / .0007% = 92 TW
All of human civilization consumes about 500 exajoules of energy per year, which is only about 16 TW. (Of which electricity is only a fraction, BTW)
Covering 1/5 of India with solar panels would actually potentially generate enough energy to power the entire planet several times over.
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Re:Hard specs, please. (Score:5, Informative)
I recall hearing a calculation on the radio: if we keep expanding our energy use at the present rate, in 2000 years, we will need more energy than all the stars in our galaxy produce.
True, but we won't be around to see it, because of the black hole that will be created by the mass of all of the disco records we'll have produced by then [youtube.com].
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Re:Hard specs, please. (Score:5, Funny)
if we keep expanding our energy use at the present rate, in 2000 years, we will need more energy than all the stars in our galaxy produce.
In America, per capita electrical energy consumption peaked in 2007, is now 6.4% lower, and is continuing to decline. If this trend continues, in 2000 years, the fission of a single atom of U-235 will supply all of our energy needs.
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And in 400 years we will have literally boiled the oceans, and the earth will become unlivable on much sooner than that.
Ultimately we will *have* to get much of our energy from solar if we wish to continue to live on the planet. Thermodynamics is a bitch.
Naive extrapolation (Score:2)
I recall hearing a calculation on the radio: if we keep expanding our energy use at the present rate, in 2000 years, we will need more energy than all the stars in our galaxy produce.
You can find all sorts of absurd naive extrapolations if you bother to look for them. Doesn't make them true.
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His math works out, averaged over a year:
500e18 J/(356*24*3600 s) = 15.85e12 W
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... 500 exajoules of energy per year ...
Your slip is showing. First of all, joules are energy and TW are power ...
He said "joules per year" ... which is power. There is nothing wrong with his units or his math.
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Joules per year = energy over time = power
Your slip is showing.
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Your slip is showing.
If you're going to make insults, you better make sure you're right.
First of all, joules are energy and TW are power,
No shit, Einstein.
so your conversion is nonsense.
Are you high?
Secondly, assuming you actually meant TWh, not TW,
You assume much, Grasshopper.
you are off by several orders of magnitude.
Nope, you're just highly confused.
The total worldwide electricity production in 2012 was 18,000 to 22,000 TWh
Why use a stupid unit like TWh/year? Hours/year is a dimensionless number. Just use the plain SI unit: 22,000 TWh/year == 2.5 TW. Which, as I said, is a fraction of the 16TW total energy use.
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Why are you acting shocked that the plant's power rating is nameplate (aka peak) rather than average? Power plants are always reported by nameplate capacity. If you want to know the capacity factor, that's a different statistic: capacity factor.
Re, India's power consumption: India consumes 1106 TWh/year. Assuming a capacity factor of 0.22 here then this plant would generate 1,25TWh/year, or 0,11% of India's consumption, not 0,0007%. 0.00015% of India's land for 0,11% of its consumption, aka 0,13% of Ind
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Night time load is lower than day time load in a hot country where the major load is airconditioning. Solar provides the peak load electircity when its needed.
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With the fact that solar panels require more energy to make frames, fab the PV junctions, and make the inverters, then move to a site and install, than they ever will gain back in their usable (20 year) lifespan, how is this a net gain?
Maybe they'll build a solar panel factory right next to it. 648MW ought to be good for a few solar panels per day.
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The payback time is around half a year, worst case up to three years.
And it NEVER was longer than 10 years, and that was over 40 years ago!!!
You must be both:
- stone old
- and never reading new since your birth
(how did you end up here on /. ? )
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Considering they invested in robotic maintenance - they clearly did consider it, and made it as cheap as possible.
Indeed- considering the low cost of labour in India, it is rare for mechanisation to be more cost-effective there (for now anyway), this would be an example where that is true. The only maintenance remaining are highly-skilled jobs like replacing panels that go faulty.
Of course, what you lot always forget is that it's perfectly valid to ignore maintenance costs - since they exist for *all* powe
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