Solyndra To Make Solar Power As Cheap As Coal In 2-3 years

[JohnWxy]

http://www.businessinsider.com/solyndra-to-make-solar-power-as-cheap-as-coal-in-2-3-years-2009-3

Solyndra, the first recipient of a loan from the Department of Energy, told us that it thinks it will produce solar panels at a price that's competitive with standard sources of energy in the next 2-3 years.

"We see a clear path," says Kelly Truman, the VP of marketing, sales and business development, "and in 2-3 years we'll hit grid parity."

We spoke with Truman yesterday who said the $535 million loan from the DOE will finance 73% of a new factory, though he declined to say how the company would pay for the remainder of the project. The current factory is going to be able to produce 110 MW of solar panels, with each panel able to produce 200W of energy each. The next factory will be able to produce 550MW of solar panels annually. That's enough energy to power almost 200,000 homes. Solyndra hopes to have the new factory shipping panels by 2011.
(more)
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apologies to jpak if you've already posted this.

[redqueen]

1. Excellent.

Thanks for posting this.

[HereSince1628]

2. What is it with solar solutions ALWAYS being 2-3 years in the future?

Someday this must become true but I dub this phenomenon Solar's Paradox.

[TheWraith]

4. It's not just solar, there's a lot of new technologies like that.

A breakthrough in a lab doesn't guarantee that you can make it viable in the real world. But that doesn't stop press releases looking for funding, and so a lot of things are 2-3 years, or maybe 5 years, off.

[kristopher]

6. Meanwhile, the already staggering price of nuclear just keeps climbing...

[TheWraith]

8. And some people keep showing that they're just not that friendly with reality.

I'm sorry that facts keep getting in the way of your worldview.

[kristopher]

11. Your price claims are not able to be supported. Mine are.

Care to have a citation contest???

[TheWraith]

18. What are you talking about? Price claims?

The only price claims in this thread are the same old "cheaper than dirt in a few years" stuff we've been hearing since the 1970s.

[kristopher]

20. The $3000/kw myth you routinely push for nuclear.

As to the "cheaper than dirt"?

That is your mistaken recollection of the "too cheap to meter" claim made for nuclear over the past decades. The big differences are that wind and solar are on RAPIDLY declining cost curves, and nuclear is on a rapidly escalating cost curve. What is interesting to me is that these curves are roughly the reverse of the EROI curves for the relative technologies. Nuclear is not only becoming more expensive, the fuel requirements are pushing the needed energy investments up sharply also. OF course, as mass production and standardized engineering take hold, our renewable generation look to have quite a bit of room to extend their gains in this area considerably further than the large one already extant.

[Massacure]

27. Nuclear cost are only getting more expensive in the United States.

The Japanese built Kashiwazaki-Kariwa 6 for $4.2 billion and and Kashiwazaki-Kariwa 7 for $3.8 billion. At 1356 megawatts each, that is $3,090 and $2,800 a kilowatt respectively. The French built Civaux 1 and 2 for a combined $4.1 billion and they deliver 3040 megawatts. That is an extremely impressive $1,300 a kilowatt. The design for the EPR is based heavily on the N4 that France built at Civaux. There is no guarantee that the EPR will be able to repeat the $1300 a kilowatt construction cost, but if it does, nuclear power is going to get a serious second look by a lot of nations.

[kristopher]

28. Your examples are grossly out of date.

Power plant name
(Unit number) Location Reactor
type Licensed
output
(MWe) Start of
commercial
operation
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa(Unit.1) Niigata prefecture BWR 1100 Sep.18.1985
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa(Unit.2) Niigata prefecture BWR 1100 Sep.28.1990
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa(Unit.3) Niigata prefecture BWR 1100 Aug.11.1993
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa(Unit.4) Niigata prefecture BWR 1100 Aug.11.1994
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa(Unit.5) Niigata prefecture BWR 1100 Apr.10.1990
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa(Unit.6) Niigata prefecture ABWR 1356 Nov. 7.1996
Kashiwazaki-Kariwa(Unit.7) Niigata prefecture ABWR 1356 Jul. 2.1997



Civaux 1 1997
Civaux 2 1999



On the other hand:

Assessing Nuclear Plant Capital Costs for the Two Proposed NRG
Reactors at the South Texas Project Site

Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D.1

March 24, 2008
A. Main Findings and Recommendations

NRG, a merchant electricity generating company, proposes to build two new nuclear power
reactors, totaling 2,700 megawatts at the South Texas Project site near Bay City, Texas. NRG
owns a part of the two units that already exist at that site. CPS Energy, San Antonio’s electricity
and gas municipal utility, which owns a 40 percent share of the two existing units proposes to
purchase a 40 percent share of the proposed new reactors. This analysis is a preliminary report
on the likely capital costs of the two reactors, as best they can be determined at the present time.
It also contains some preliminary observations regarding efficiency and distributed renewable
energy sources to put the CPS decision that might be made regarding investment in the NRG
plant into context.

Central conclusion and recommendation

The overall finding of this report is that NRG’s range of $6 billion to $7 billion is obsolete.
The best available estimates indicate that capital costs would likely be about a factor of two
or more higher, even without taking into account the potential for real cost escalations
during construction, delays, and other risks. The risks to CPS, as a municipal utility and to
its ratepayers as well as to the taxpayers of San Antonio are great. Due diligence demands
that CPS participation in the project should not be pursued until an independent, detailed
study with current cost estimates of the plants and alternatives to it are complete and have
been publicly disclosed and discussed.

[Massacure]

29. Since when did Texas declare Independence from the United States?

And ten years is not grossly out of date. I happen to have a link that list the Japanese nuclear power plants handy. It doesn't have cost data though, so if you think the cost of the three Japanese reactors built since Kashiwazaki-Kariwa 7 has changed significantly, I'll leave it to you to prove.

Onagawa-3 January 2002
Higashidori-1 Tohoku December 2005
Shika-2 March 2006

[kristopher]

30. You are the one making the assertion

I've already provided a credible source supporting my statements; you've provided off the cuff assertions that my source shows are grossly out of date.

I'll give you more of what I have handy though:
http://www.amicidellaterra.it/adt/images/stories/File/downloads/pdf/Energia/Energia%20Nucleare/rassegna%20stampa%20nucleare/Construction%20Costs%20To%20Soar%20For%20New%20U.S.%20Nuclear%20Power%20Plants.pdf

Construction Costs To Soar For New U.S. Nuclear Power Plants

Publication date: 15-Oct-2008

Primary Credit Analysts: Aneesh Prabhu, New York (1) 212-438-1285;
[e-mail]
Swami Venkataraman, CFA, San Francisco (1) 415-371-5071;
[e-mail]

Secondary Credit Analyst: Richard W Cortright, Jr., New York (1) 212-438-7665;
[e-mail]

Despite a reinvigorated interest in nuclear power in the U.S., the development, construction, and operation of any type of nuclear plant must still overcome many hurdles. Foremost are safety issues, which new technologies attempt to address.

Another is the absence of any recent meaningful experience in the U.S. with building a nuclear plant. Complicating these challenges are the resource pressures that the expansion of global infrastructure has created and the resulting significant inflation in capital costs.

We have broadly categorized risks pertaining to power plant construction issues in four categories. While some of these are also applicable for other types of power plants, we believe that the issues are more acute in the case of nuclear power:
Cost inflation in input materials and labor, especially nuclear-related labor;
Unavailability of turnkey engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contracts and supply chain bottlenecks;
A limited construction track record; and
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) supervision process.

<snip>
Labor costs are also becoming a critical new driver for industry inflation. We learned from EPC contractors that there has been a 30% nominal change in average hourly earnings for construction labor since the last round of construction in 2001. (note the date - k)

This labor cost and supply situation is due to a significant number of retirements and replacements with new, less experienced workers, which has reduced labor productivity. And it could get worse: in the engineering sector, over 45% of labor will be eligible for retirement over the next five years. At the same time, strong global labor construction demand is leading to shortages of skilled labor, especially in the energy sector, which threatens the schedule and in-service dates of projects.


<snip>

Construction risk is the overriding risk for new nuclear units. We believe that labor and material cost increases are particularly acute for nuclear plants given their specialized labor needs, material intensity, and a tight supply chain for key components. The scanty construction track record for the new technologies and an untested regulatory process only complicate the risks. The ABWR has an advantage over other technologies since four have been built and the technology has more than a decade of operating experience. EPR technologies will benefit from the fact that there are two reactors being built in Europe where construction is at least three years ahead of the Calvert Cliffs 3 plant. Thus, U.S. facilities will be able to learn from any difficulties confronted there. It is unclear how much risk technology vendors and construction contractors will be willing to assume in new nuclear plant construction. Construction exposure for ABWR and EPR also benefit from being evolutionary rather than revolutionary designs. While ABWR and EPR contactors have stepped up in varying degrees, we do not have enough information on the terms being offered by the AP 1000, ESBWR, or APWR contractors. How much of these risks a developer is able to assign to vendors and how much cushion is available for risks that are retained by a project will be key drivers of credit quality.

If you'd like more, just ask. The fact is that the argument for a large scale dedication of resources towards increasing the nuclear fleet in the US simply can't be made. The cost of the capital investment and the total nature of our needs result in nuclear sucking hind tit.

[bananas]

36. Kashiwazaki-Kariwa is a good example of how NOT to build a nuclear power plant.

To get it done that cheap, they cut corners and falsified test reports.
They are extremely unreliable, peak output was in 1999.

[bananas]

37. "EDF has not, however, revealed more than the top line figure to justify these calculations."

EDF has put the cost of the Civaux units at $4.1bn. It claims other plants commissioned worldwide in recent years cost as much as 60% more than the N4 plants. The Civaux figure does work out to an impressive $1,349 per kWe, which is much lower than several foreign nuclear projects, and even around the level of some current large coal projects. EDF has not, however, revealed more than the top line figure to justify these calculations.

http://www.power-technology.com/projects/civaux/

EDF's cost estimates for Civaux should be taken with a huge grain of salt.

edit to add:
The reason the nuclear industry had to ask Congress for 100% loan guarantees is because nobody believed their cost estimates.

[Kablooie]

21. All electric cars are also "only" 2 to 3 years in the future.

As are all new battery technologies.

[floridablue]

3. Is that commercial true ?

That a solar grid in the desert 96 miles x 96 miles could supply the US requirement in electricity? Or did I see it wrong?

[kristopher]

5. It sounds right.

Right now Solyndra specializes in rooftop systems for commercial (low slope) buildings. If you haven't been to their website you should check it out.

Their design fully utilizes the space and it has a profile that reduces wind drag to almost nothing. The result is that they've addressed the biggest component of solar cost - installation costs. I don't see why it wouldn't work in the desert but I don't know if their price advantage would persist when space and building structure isn't a factor.

[TheWraith]

7. Not quite.

Yes, it could supply US demand--at peak production. But peak production is only a block of time around local solar noon, and to produce enough energy for constant use you'd need to triple or quadruple that size. I did the math once, and the real size would be around 216 x 216 miles, or about 50% of the size of Nevada. More when you consider the need for access roads, space between panels, maintainence facilities, etcetera.

Plus, a 96 x 96 mile solar panel would dwarf all previous production by several orders of magnitude, requiring massive industrial expansion, strip mining, and basically paving over that X thousand square miles of desert ecosystem.

[kristopher]

12. That is a VISUALIZATION AIDE, not a PLAN.

How many square miles of buildings and roads do you think we have in aggregate? 90% of the installed solar in this country is rooftop.

Section 6 is a comparative analysis of the area that all non-carbon technologies would require to power the US transportation sector.
http://www.rsc.org/delivery/_ArticleLinking/DisplayHTMLArticleforfree.cfm?JournalCode=EE&Year=2009&ManuscriptID=b809990c&Iss=2

[TheWraith]

17. Decentralizing increases cost, size, and complexity, it doesn't decease it.

You need individual power storage mechanisms, individual inverters, grid tie equipment...

[kristopher]

19. Think this through a little...

There are trade-offs to all technologies. There is good reason to centralize wind power production and some percentage of solar. The best resources are going to be used to provide the supplemental power that exploiting lower grade, small scale development of local resources will require. Either strategy alone would be hard pressed to meet out needs; but their combination, along with geothermal and wave/tidal/current will do the job. As to the required storage, V2G and other types of well proved grid storage (CAES, pumped hydro) can certainly fill the need. V2G batteries and solar are both going to experience dramatic cost reductions due to the economies of scale we already see being implemented; a trend that will bring them into easy range of an economical 50KWh of storage per home.
And that brings me to where your analysis goes astray. There are dramatic cost reductions that can result for the economies of scale that large projects garner. However, batteries and solar technologies are also able to capture the benefit of large wcale production because they are suitable for mass production.
Take a look at Solyndra's example closely. An initial capital investment of 3/4 a billion dollars is slated to produce 500MW of panels for at least 25 years. Those solar tubes will actually produce an aggregate of around 438,000GWh per year for 40 years with no further cost other than installation.
And installation is their other big gain. Take a look at their product:




Article at: http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/solyndra-boosts-power-output-5946.html

Our grid is antiquated and increasingly unreliable, so upgrading it to a smart grid to accommodate the transition to EVs is already high priority.

Most people have their own talent, mine is an intuitive grasp of complex systems. Even though I'm acting as my own witness I assure you that although the system may sound complicated, once you actually understand understand where we are and where we are going, it falls together better than almost anything I've ever seen. One approach (which I have no problem with) involves maintaining our current level of nuclear for another 30-40 years. That will require building some replacement plants and it is worth it to do so. However it is actually more of a political decision to take that path than it is a technical one, for with current technology we can, if we wish, just as economically dedicate ourselves to phasing out the nuclear plants as they age.

That is how I see it.

[zipplewrath]

22. It's not a constant world

I think what you're getting at is that none of these technologies will be "immediately transformational". Our energy system is multidimensional and all aspects of it will be changing at the same time. I tend to agree. It is misleading to discuss any renewable energy system as some sort of "drop-in replacement" for coal, or oil, or whatever. Coal replaced wood, oil replaced coal, but none of this happened over night. Concrete and steel replaced wood as a building material, but we still use wood to build homes. Concrete and steel allowed us to build things we never had built before. New energy sources will be used in new ways to do this as we have never done them before. And they will be used with a grid that doesn't look anything like today's grid, powering things that currently don't exist in manners we do not do them today.

The flip side of all that is these announcements that various renewable energy developers seem to feel obligated to make about how soon their technology will be commercially viable. "Cheaper than coal" is more of a metaphor or euphamism than a reality. Building cheap, efficient solar panels in large quantities should be an announcement big enough in its own right. The market is ready for them if they can be made. "Build it and they will come". Trying to put that in terms of "replacing" something in the current environment is misleading at best and ultimately leads people to distrust. These solar panels will find markets, but that LAST thing they will probably be used for in 2 - 3 years is to reduce the load on any coal fired plants. At best it will slow down the demand for new plants. But mostly it will just change the market altogether, albeit gradually, much like concrete and steel did for bridges and buildings.

[JohnWxy]

9. virtually every fabricated device we use today was once something that only existed in the future.

If fact, the device you sent your comment on was not feasible only a couple of decades ago. IF nobody supported developing new ideas to realize new products and technologies we would still be wearing animal furs and scraping up grubs with sticks.

Actually, solar technology has made much more rapid progress (in terms of performance and cost) than almost anybody foresaw a few years ago. Just shows you never know how much progress can be achieved until you try - really try (instead of talking about it but not really supporting technological development as the Republicans like to do).

[kristopher]

13. Well said. nt

[JohnWxy]

10. you realize that's an area of almost 10,000 sq. miles! Quite a huge installation.

I figure that would be about 256,927,334,400 sq. ft. If the panels were 6 ft x 2.5 ft. it would take over 17 billion panels to cover the area (allowing for access space would increase the area of the installation - increasing it considerably).

Still, a thought provoking idea.

[kristopher]

14. Graphic

This is from a presentation by Jacobson on his paper "Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security"

Abstract:
This paper reviews and ranks major proposed energy-related solutions to global warming, air pollution mortality, and energy security while considering other impacts of the proposed solutions, such as on water supply, land use, wildlife, resource availability, thermal pollution, water chemical pollution, nuclear proliferation, and undernutrition. Nine electric power sources and two liquid fuel options are considered.

The electricity sources include solar-photovoltaics (PV), concentrated solar power (CSP), wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, wave, tidal, nuclear, and coal with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. The liquid fuel options include corn-ethanol (E85) and cellulosic-E85. To place the electric and liquid fuel sources on an equal footing, we examine their comparative abilities to address the problems mentioned by powering new-technology vehicles, including battery-electric vehicles (BEVs), hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs), and flex-fuel vehicles run on E85. Twelve combinations of energy source-vehicle type are considered. Upon ranking and weighting each combination with respect to each of 11 impact categories, four clear divisions of ranking, or tiers, emerge.

Tier 1 (highest-ranked) includes wind-BEVs and wind-HFCVs.
Tier 2 includes CSP-BEVs, geothermal-BEVs, PV-BEVs, tidal-BEVs, and wave-BEVs.
Tier 3 includes hydro-BEVs, nuclear-BEVs, and CCS-BEVs.
Tier 4 includes corn- and cellulosic-E85.

Wind-BEVs ranked first in seven out of 11 categories, including the two most important, mortality and climate damage reduction. Although HFCVs are much less efficient than BEVs, wind-HFCVs are still very clean and were ranked second among all combinations.

Tier 2 options provide significant benefits and are recommended.

Tier 3 options are less desirable. However, hydroelectricity, which was ranked ahead of coal-CCS and nuclear with respect to climate and health, is an excellent load balancer, thus recommended.

The Tier 4 combinations (cellulosic- and corn-E85) were ranked lowest overall and with respect to climate, air pollution, land use, wildlife damage, and chemical waste. Cellulosic-E85 ranked lower than corn-E85 overall, primarily due to its potentially larger land footprint based on new data and its higher upstream air pollution emissions than corn-E85. Whereas cellulosic-E85 may cause the greatest average human mortality, nuclear-BEVs cause the greatest upper-limit mortality risk due to the expansion of plutonium separation and uranium enrichment in nuclear energy facilities worldwide. Wind-BEVs and CSP-BEVs cause the least mortality.

The footprint area of wind-BEVs is 2–6 orders of magnitude less than that of any other option. Because of their low footprint and pollution, wind-BEVs cause the least wildlife loss. The largest consumer of water is corn-E85. The smallest are wind-, tidal-, and wave-BEVs. The US could theoretically replace all 2007 onroad vehicles with BEVs powered by 73000–144000 5 MW wind turbines, less than the 300000 airplanes the US produced during World War II, reducing US CO2 by 32.5–32.7% and nearly eliminating 15000/yr vehicle-related air pollution deaths in 2020.

In sum, use of wind, CSP, geothermal, tidal, PV, wave, and hydro to provide electricity for BEVs and HFCVs and, by extension, electricity for the residential, industrial, and commercial sectors, will result in the most benefit among the options considered. The combination of these technologies should be advanced as a solution to global warming, air pollution, and energy security. Coal-CCS and nuclear offer less benefit thus represent an opportunity cost loss, and the biofuel options provide no certain benefit and the greatest negative impacts.

http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/Journals/EE/article.asp?doi=b809990c

[NNadir]

15. How does this differ from the same statements made here 8 years ago, and the statements

made by the scientific illiterate Amory Lovins 33 years ago.

How come so many "solar will save us" posts engage in soothsaying but never show the daily reality?

http://www.solarbuzz.com/

[kristopher]

16. Poor little feller...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x191163


It's hard when your dream dies, isn't it?

[NNadir]

23. Well, your silliness, I can compare two numbers, a skill that the solar will save us club

is singularly incapable of doing.

I'm not even going to talk about values because there is NOT ONE pickup driving "I'm going to have a solar car someday in 2050" fool on this website who knows what values are.

Instead I'm just going to cite the solar industry's own account of its costs.

http://www.solarbuzz.com/SolarPrices.htm">Oh boy, now we have 20.30 < 20.97, the figures respectively for June, 2004 and March of 2009.

In general, you can't be an anti-nuke if you can pass the third grade inequality test.

And let me tell you something. I was here in 2004, and air heads then, just as now, indifferent, as usual to any toxicology issues, were loudly proclaiming with complete bourgeois indifference to human suffering, that "solar prices are about to fall."

It was dumb ass soothsaying then, and it is dumb ass soothsaying now.

And now, a little bit more about inequality.

One hundred percent of the "solar will save us" crowd consists of bourgeois morally vapid apologists for the status quo. Many of them, from Gerhard Schroeder to Amory Lovins are openly paid vast amounts by dangerous fossil fuel companies and consumer junk companies. There is NOT ONE of these morally vapid freaks who has ever read a single scientific paper in their useless lives about the toxicology connected with electronic waste in China, in Africa, or for that matter, in San Jose, California, where the "green" semiconductor industry destroyed ground water forever.

For most of my life, I've listened to the morally vapid prattle and preen themselves with claims about values. The most famous example - typical of the set to a fault - is the freak rock musician Sting, who had the balls to film a movie that was all about himself - Sting - in France while consuming enough electricity to light his insipid and useless face as 10,000 citizens of Nigeria might use for all purposes, including pumping drinking water.

Sting, of course, breeds like a fly, producing oodles and oodles and oodles of similarly vapid consumers.

We have a lot of little useless Sting clones here, but I'll say this for Sting - even as a morally vapid consumer fool, he can at least carry a tune. There is NOT ONE fundamentalist anti-nuke on this website, as best as I can tell, who possesses a single talent.

[kristopher]

24. Poor little feller has had his own personal nuclear meltdown.

[Systematic Chaos]

25. And the kea can haz his own personal epic fail reply. Yet again.

[kristopher]

26. A detailed response

to such self evident garbage would be like trying to engage in rational discourse with Michelle Bachman.

http://crooksandliars.com/2008/03/19/michelle-bachman-is-one-crazy-person/

But I'll tell you what, you summarize the meat of that post and I'll be happy to give you a serious point by point reply.

[kristopher]

31. Listen to those crickets...

[Systematic Chaos]

32. Fuck it, you're not worth getting kicked off DU over.

n/t

[kristopher]

33. Yep, that is the meat of it. Poor little feller's havin' another meltdown...

Not a single damned factual assertion in the screed except for the patently obvious falsehood. I don't care whether you're "fucking series!" or not; there is no content in your rant. Lots of ignorance and a tremendous amount of your basic garden variety stupidity, but not one single cogent argument.

[jpak]

35. Sting - the ((((*compulsive*)))) ((((*obsession*))) de jour!!

The Precious...

The Precious...

Smegal swears it...

We swears it...

:rofl:

[jpak]

34. LOL!!!11111

:rofl: