Texas Just Got a New 1.1-Million-Panel Solar Farm (electrek.co) 93
An anonymous reader shared this report from Electrek:
Renewable developer Clearway Energy Group has completed a 452-megawatt (MW) solar farm in West Texas — and it's huge... It's built on around 5,000 acres of land and features over 1.1 million solar panels... Texas Solar Nova will generate enough electricity to power over 190,000 homes annually.
It's got an offtake agreement with telecoms giant Verizon, and agreements with auto component maker Toyota Boshoku and Swedish bearing and seal maker SKF to purchase renewable energy certificates (RECs). Both Toyota Boshoku and SKF have 12-year agreements for RECs.
The $660 million facility will "contribute significantly to the local tax base," the company said in a statement, "starting with an estimated $5.4 million in property taxes and wages to be paid in the first year."
It's got an offtake agreement with telecoms giant Verizon, and agreements with auto component maker Toyota Boshoku and Swedish bearing and seal maker SKF to purchase renewable energy certificates (RECs). Both Toyota Boshoku and SKF have 12-year agreements for RECs.
The $660 million facility will "contribute significantly to the local tax base," the company said in a statement, "starting with an estimated $5.4 million in property taxes and wages to be paid in the first year."
Quick divisions (Score:4, Informative)
Average house power considered 2378 W (452/19000), average power of the farm 22.3 W/m^2 (452/5000), each powered home uses 106.5 m^2 of the solar farm land (5000/190000).
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2.6% of an acre of farmland wasted per house. That's actually seems OK to me.
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Average suburbs home density is around ~50 by acres. It's much more in the city. So say solar farm takes the space of 250,000 suburbs homes to serve 190,000 homes in electricity. Not bad I guess for a place like Texas but some countries just don't have the space available for this to scale everywhere IMHO. Anyway, it would more than double the area taken by housing needs globally.
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But housing needs take up only a small fraction of land use, so that's not really a big deal.
Re:Quick divisions (Score:4, Insightful)
Texas has a lot of desert and other essentially uninhabitable land, it's a great place to put solar panels. They reradiate most of their heat into space, so they actually will help cool Texas if enough of them are installed.
West Texas [Re:Quick divisions] (Score:2)
2.6% of an acre of farmland wasted per house. That's actually seems OK to me.
You ever been to west Texas? Unless you irrigate the heck out of it, it's not really "farmland".
Cattle range, maybe.
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You ever been to west Texas? Unless you irrigate the heck out of it, it's not really "farmland".
There are parts of Texas were you can grow crops without irrigation. Of course that's not where they are putting solar panels.
Exactly. The article was about an array in west Texas, which is famously hot and dry. Now, north Texas, that's much more agricultural.
For what it's worth, here [duckduckgo.com] is the array we're talking about. Scrubland.
And storage? (Score:2)
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I don't think storage is essential in Texas yet (utilities offer "free nights" plans), but with the company selling the RECs that covers about half the costs, so they would be less dependant on time shifting. If/when it does make sense I am sure they can add it.
Annually? (Score:1)
What's annually got to do with it?
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What's annually got to do with it?
Averaged
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What's annually got to do with it?
And it's really only half that as the farm can't power them at night. :-)
So either 95,000 annually or 190,000 semi-annually.
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What's annually got to do with it?
There is a federal statue in place that specifies that all communications published in the USA which discuss any energy or power-related topic MUST include an inappropriate division by some factor of time, such as "KW per day".
Or at least that's what I presume, since I don't recall ever seeing any news article that did not include this.
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ROTFL! And exactly where is this "statue"?
Re:And storage? (Score:4, Interesting)
452 MW of solar panels. No mention in the article of storage. But surely, they must have also built some storage to go along with that, right?
Of course they have energy storage. I suspect people would see plenty of energy storage in Texas if they only know what to look for. Look for large steel tanks full of natural gas.
The natural gas industry loves to see more wind and solar power project pop up since that means more customers for them. Big steam power like coal or nuclear fission (and in some cases thermal solar) can't follow load well so to make up for the relative rapid gain and loss of solar power every day there must be a reserve of natural gas fuel and power plants to burn that fuel.
With big steam power there's something of a reverse problem to that of solar and wind but the solution is much the same, natural gas. With big steam not liking to ramp up and down rapidly with changing demand there much be some part of electricity production that is natural gas. Reciprocating engines burning diesel fuel can also work for something that can ramp up power output quickly, and back down again as load disappears, but typically natural gas burned in turbines is much cheaper.
Solar power is not a threat to natural gas. What might be a threat to natural gas is some form of inexpensive electrical storage but even that is half the battle. With storage there is still a need for production and natural gas produces power as well as provides a convenient storage method, it's a kind of "two for one" deal that solar and batteries are not likely to ever compete with since steel tanks are going to always be cheaper than batteries for energy storage.
Solar power has a capacity factor of somewhere between 25% and 30%. The sun might shine an average of 12 hours per day through the year but the intensity is going to be less in the mornings and evenings, that's why we aren't going to see 50% capacity factor from solar PV. When averaged over the year a 450 MW solar PV system will produce about as much energy as a 150 MW coal or nuclear power plant with 90% capacity factor. Coal power plants rarely get 90% capacity factors any more, not because they can't do it but because it's often cheaper to burn natural gas instead.
Solar power has been a proxy for natural gas for a very long time. As more solar power is added to the grid then more natural gas production is added to the grid. Just ask Germany how adding more solar power to the grid has worked out for them.
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452 MW of solar panels. No mention in the article of storage. But surely, they must have also built some storage to go along with that, right?
Of course they have energy storage.
Some form of storage is a given these days. It can double the profit of the farm.
OTOH this is Texas, so... maybe they sell the midday excess to Bitcoin miners instead of doing something useful with it
Re: And storage? (Score:2)
I suppose... but then there's this...
https://www.reuters.com/busine... [reuters.com]
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And yes you could say the 'extra' is currently wasted. But since there's zero fuel spent, it's effectively zero operational cost. But it's also a future source of additional capacity on
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The extra unused capacity isn't free. There was capex, the cost of the loan or bond or whatever was used to build it, and a larger facility requires more maintenance, which is opex.
I'm in favor of over building infrastructure but let's not fudge the math on it. That's how everything turns into an unexpected cost over run and budgets get fucked and so on and makes the next project harder to fund.
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And it's literally planned. The cost of building 120% of planned power output is the cost of being able to provide 100% over longer periods and less than perfect sun. It's smoothing out the variable output of solar. The extra power you curtail at noon without storage is part of the system and is costing 'effectively' nothing. It's part of the design.
Cost overruns aren't at all the same thing.
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That's all good, I'm with you except it's not 'free' or even effectively free. The cost is built in as you say which makes the cost per kWh go up.
TANSTAAFL
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The 'cost' of oversizing isn't compared to not building it. It's compared to having to provide the extra power a 100% sized system can't provide.
And that extra power is costing actual fuel per kwh, not a fixed cost of infrastructure (and yes that fixed includes loan amortization rates, since those do not cost 'per kwh').
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Citation needed to explain why buying extra solar panels costs more than fewer solar panels to install and maintain? Really?
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I thought you were going to reply to the request for a citation with RAH... (although it may not have been his in the first place, of course)
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I dunno man, it seemed self evident that more stuff = costs more. Heinlein is rolling in his grave somewhere.
Maybe we need a giant bug attack to get everyone focused.
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What's the cost to provide the extra power that an only 100% sized system doesn't provide...for the life of the plant?
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Another option is to just use the excess power when it is available. If you can find industrial processes that you can run intermittently, with a day or less notice of cheap excess power availability, you can just consume that energy.
Re: And storage? (Score:2)
That's precisely why they oversize the installs, to smooth out that variability.
Local battery storage or hydrogen solves that coordination issue.
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It looks from the summary that they already have contracts with large scale consumers that will pull every joule they can crank out even during peak output. Maybe they can add storage later if those contracts expire or if the grid in Texas for some reason loses their backup natgas capacity.
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The Texas grid collapse? Gasp! That could never happen!
That was one of the major reasons I skipped Texas when looking for a new place. They don't know how to run a state. Coming from California it would just have been frying pan to fire.
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I'm not talking about a grid collapse. In that event, no manner of battery storage would help. I was more thinking that if political forces conspire to strangle the natural gas industry in the United States, making it effectively impossible to generate power with it.
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If Texas loses their natives backup capacity as you said do you think their grid would survive?
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But surely, they must have also built some storage to go along with that, right?
No need. Texas can just build more crypto farms to stabilize the grid. /s
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I hope they're producing enough power to store my NFT collection.
Re:And storage? (Score:5, Insightful)
452 MW of solar panels. No mention in the article of storage. But surely, they must have also built some storage to go along with that, right?
Almost certainly, yes. I say this from first-hand knowledge, working for a utility in Texas. The last several solar farms we've connected into our transmission system in the last five years (which has been quite a few, as solar farms of all sizes are booming across Texas) have all included a BESS [wikipedia.org] (Battery Energy Storage System) component as part of their design.
Now, these are not long-term storage systems. On average they provide approximately two hours, though up to five hours is not uncommon. They're meant more to keep the output of the farm stable and consistent since things like cloud cover can significantly affect power production.
As for long-term storage, there are some pure-battery storage farms in operation in Texas. One called KCE TX 11 comes to mind off-hand. It's a 50 MW facility. There are others as well, and more being planned.
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I saw some work a little while ago that suggested that the addition of just a modest amount of storage can drive up reliability dramatically -- to something like the low 90s%. And that overcapacity can take it to the high 90s, which should be ever more attractive as a strategy as solar and wind costs fall. With the free bonus of increasing amounts of cheap power that we can do funky things with at some times of the day / month / year
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They might not need storage. It seems wind power lags during the day, when solar is at its best. So the two tend to roughly even out. There are some graphs here that help visualize how wind and solar complement each other.
https://www.ercot.com/ [ercot.com]
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Many solar farms have small batteries to smooth the output.
Another technique is to build vertical panels, which help cover the times early in the morning and late in the evening, when the sun is low in the sky.
Solar is so cheap now that it's become viable to have double sided panels, to pick up reflected light too.
This could solve their power issues! (Score:2, Troll)
Finally they may have a backup power source next time their crappy jury-rigged power grid fails due to their conservative politicians constantly working to uninvent electricity!
Just don't let them know that solar power is secretly socialist :-P
Texas Democrats (Score:4, Informative)
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Californian here. Hoping to build a wall at the border of Texas, their northern border.
Re:So Green Energy is Crappy and jury-rigged power (Score:5, Informative)
You couldn’t be more wrong. The pipelines for the natural gas plants froze. But since the regulatory body who oversees these plants is toothless by design, nothing is done. https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com]
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That's only half the story. Had ERCOT required the natgas facilities to harden versus cold weather events, that wouldn't have happened (and the power failures might not have been so catastrophic). That being said, solar and wind facilities weren't saving anyone either, and with the still air from that event, heated wind turbines weren't going to save the day either.
Under those conditions, natgas was probably the best solution provided the plant operators were prepared (they weren't).
Re:So Green Energy is Crappy and jury-rigged power (Score:5, Insightful)
So if Texas was connected to the rest of the country, we could have supplied that extra power Texas natural gas plants weren't able to. Literally we're standing here with an extension cord and Texas is saying no.
Also look at El Paso...which didn't have issues because they are on the interconnected grid system, not Texas' grid.
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For anyone reading along linky [statesman.com] A pretty biased take trying to defend the 'pipelines' and yet has this buried in it.
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if only Texas wasn't ignorant of this a reoccurring event called a polar vortex. If only they were paying attention to how wind farms are handled in colder places like Scotland, where they put heating elements on their turbines.. If only that were the case, because that would have helped to mitigate the massive failure they encountered after going green.
Texas is not Scotland, that is why they didn't have heaters in the windmills.
Below freezing temperatures are rare in Texas, and even rarer would be seeing temperatures that low for long enough that they'd have to worry about heating their coolant. Yes, that is coolant would get heated because the heat transfer can work both ways and some coolant would need to be heated in extreme cold to prevent ice forming and damaging pumps and valves.
My guess is that many people don't realize that windmills need to be "
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Freezing temperatures happen constantly in Texas. Here’s a record breaking ice storm from a year ago. https://spectrumlocalnews.com/... [spectrumlocalnews.com]
Re:So Green Energy is Crappy and jury-rigged power (Score:5, Insightful)
Because Texas rarely gets as cold as Scotland it was highly likely nobody considered a need to have heaters
Rarely =/= never.
This is just sheer stupidity on the part of Texans. Just like when I lived in south Texas and repeatedly had to deal with the fact that they put the water meters and supply lines to houses in free air outside the house. WTF? They get at least one hard freeze there every few years. I knew some folks who were on vacation during one of these cold snaps and sustained countless thousands of dollars damage when the pipes strung through their uninsulated attic (another idiocy) burst.
It's not surprising, though. Texas was one of the primary cradles of the rapidly metastasizing nationwide idea that willful ignorance is a virtue.
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Rarely =/= never.
Rarely =/= constantly.
If people were getting burst pipes from freezing often enough then they would not consider running pipes outdoors. It happens so rarely, and when it does happen it's not a deep enough freeze to do permanent damage, that people are willing to roll the dice on that to save some labor and materials on running water pipes differently.
I'm sure getting a lot of hate for pointing out some realities of wind power. I like wind power, it's low tech, low cost, low in CO2 emissions, among other
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According to ASHRAE, the 99.6% winter design for Houston ranges from 33.5F at Hobby to 31.4F at Bush to 29.8F at Hook. On average it's that cold or colder 35 hours a year. Yet it's common to have some exposed aboveground water piping, e.g. at outdoor hose bibbs. If you don't protect that piping with some insulating cover at the beginning of winter, you're asking for trouble, and occasionally
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And those hours are only going to go up over time, as we get ever more extreme weather
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I'm interested in your comment that wind power is low tech. Seems pretty high tech to me: cutting edge materials science, aero etc to build ever-larger turbines, cutting edge software control systems to manage power outputs, cutting edge modelling to determine placements, etc etc.
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Below freezing temperatures are not uncommon. Most of the time, it might be an overnight freeze, but some years, it will go below freezing for a few days... which is a good thing as it kills the bugs, especially if the freeze is late in the year (late Feb, perhaps March.)
This year is going to be a La Niña year, so I'm expecting a nice long, perhaps multi-year drought, with temperatures around 110 (F) for most of the summer.
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Japan is about half the size of Texas and manages to run their own independent power grid. Of course Japan's GDP and population is much larger. And Texas's GDP is roughly similar to Brazil's but the population is about an eight. Japan, Brazil, and Texas are quite capable of running an electrical grid.
In short, Texas has no excuse for their poor performance.
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Japan has 2 mostly separate grids, one running at 50Hz and one running at 60Hz, with not much interconnectivity.
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Japan operates four different wide area synchronous grids. There is very little trade of power within their own country, none with other countries as far as I know. You can exchange electricity between different synchronous grids, regardless of frequency when you use modern HVDC interconnectors. Japan doesn't do this much, but the technology is there and it is used quite a bit in the US.
The Canada and the US (including Texas) have wide area synchronous grids managed by regional reliability entities under th
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Governor Abbot will not stand for this!
Nice, but how does it handle HAIL? (Score:1)
A big solar farm in Colorado, I believe, was destroyed by a hailstorm. Would this one survive? Since Texas frequently gets hailstorms.
Re: Nice, but how does it handle HAIL? (Score:3)
No, of course they invested $600M in a new plant without thinking about hail.
Jokes and sarcasm aside, panels today are very strong. And you can make them tilt over to deflect big hail when you know it is coming.
Re:Nice, but how does it handle HAIL? (Score:5, Informative)
A big solar farm in Colorado, I believe, was destroyed by a hailstorm. Would this one survive? Since Texas frequently gets hailstorms.
Are you talking about this one? https://www.cbsnews.com/colora... [cbsnews.com]
There's something quite funny about searching your example on Google only to find the actual search results all seem to show the exact opposite.
And there's something quite sad about the fact that you're still repeating talking points from the early 00s.
While the climate deniers and (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course, none of it is gonna happen fast enough to offset AGW in any meaningful way. That ship sailed a decade ago. But at least power costs will go down.
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The general population's average IQ is always exactly100. Always.
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2.
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Which MAGA idiots was it that hate solar?
On the conservative sites I troll they are perfectly aware solar works when the sun is up and not when it's down, but so not specifically hate it. They just want power 24 hours a day, not only when it's sunny.
As an aside, when I bought my system I looked up how much power I could get from moonlight for kicks. It's more than zero but not much. I think I'll ask Peter Thiel for money for my lunar power system idea.....
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You would be surprised. I live in Texas, and in the past 10-15 years, everyone, regardless of politics have embraced solar. In fact, I see some people saying that solar is a "gift" that supposedly will be taken away by an EMP soon.
Solar provides independence. You can have an on-grid setup and reverse meter, or have an off-grid or hybrid system and keep a battery bank charged. I've known people who threw panels on a roof of their house and carport, enough to keep a battery bank going that provided power
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You can already get a home battery that can see you through a day without the grid. The main limiting factor is the size of your solar array, not the battery.
As for the space taken up by nuclear, it's not particularly space efficient when you include all of it. Mining for fuel, fuel and waste disposal, security around the plant etc. The real issue though is that it just won't be economically viable as renewables keep expanding. California is already at the point where in the summer, grid demand drops to nea
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Actually most people, like me, have much more panel capacity then battery capacity. I have 11,000 watts of panels but only 20 kWh of batteries. I recently finished installing my system and today is first day I have been using solar power in my home. I have my inverters and batteries in two detached rooms next to my home. I have been using power there for a month. I do my own work and have been slow wiring in a transfer switch.
My system is off grid so with the transfer switch I can easily switch to gri
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>"Maga idiots are foaming at the mouth about this stuff,"
Nope. That is just the characterizations of people like you... I was wondering how long I would have to scroll through comments before hitting the first politically-divisive post. It took longer than expected... but the thread is new. Give it time.
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one of the most conservative states in the US
I feel like this outdated stereotype kept you from connecting a few more dots.
Is Texas still a conservative state? Firmly yes, but it’s actually one of the less conservative states in the US [fivethirtyeight.com]. Given its massive population and relatively weak lean to the Right, Texas likely has the second largest population of people who vote Democrat in the nation (behind California, but roughly 2M ahead of New York if you multiply the percent who voted D in each state for the 2020 Presidential election against their c