Last week in Pueblo Colorado, the county commission gave its final approval to the Comanche Solar Project The largest solar project east of the Rockies.
...Comanche Solar project will supply 120 megawatts of solar generation to Xcel Energy ...
Upon completion, the Comanche Solar project would be the largest solar generating facility in Colorado, the largest east of the Rocky Mountains, and one of the largest in the US...
The Comanche Solar project will ultimately be comprised of more than 450,000 mono-crystalline PV modules utilizing a single-axis tracking technology. The tracking technology will follow the sun as it rises in the east and sets in the west, producing power during Xcel Energy’s peak demand periods and generally providing a nice match to daily summer air conditioning loads.
Sample picture of a solar farm
This project is going to cost roughly $200M. $200M? Sounds kind of expensive doesn't it? But is it?
Let me give you a quick background for those who've never run across one of my ALT-E threshold diaries. I am of the belief that the only way we're going to stop fossil fuel caused Global Warming, and save a future for our kids, is if we can get Alternative non-fossil fuel energy sources cheaper than fossil fuels. Trying to stop every pipeline, every fracked well, every deep ocean rig, every coal mine... around the world, is a morally admirable thing to be doing, but IMHO, it really isn't going to put a dent in the problem. But once Solar/wind, and many other ALT-E sources become cheaper than fossil fuels, there will be a tidal wave switch away from fossil fuels.
So back to the Comanche Solar project. I wanted to know if $200M for 120MW of solar was expensive. I went to the Energy Information Administration's website and dug up some information about what it costs to build power plants. They use "overnight costs", which is the cost if you build the plant overnight, without interest costs and stuff like that. The costs are in $'s to build 1KW of power production. Here's what I found:
2012 difference from 2010
COAL $2,934 -1%
Natural Gas $676 -2%
Uranium $5,530 0%
Hydro $2,936 -8%
Wind $2,213 -13%
Solar PV $3,873 -22%
You don't need to be an economist to look at the last column to see the wave of the future. But wait, $3,873 for Solar? Let me get my calculator. $200M for 120MW comes out to $1666, less than half of the EIA's estimate of $3,873.
Estimating the total cost over the lifetime of a power plant is far more difficult, but there is something called LCOE (levalized Cost Of Electricity) and the EIA has a future projection model posted on it's website. Now these are the total costs, in dollars per Megawatt hour, over the lifetime of the plant.
COAL $95.6
Natural Gas $66.3
Uranium $96.1
Hydro $84.5
Wind $80.3
Solar PV $130
Again, NG comes out pretty good, while solar is not so good. But this is what the model says about the difference between ALT-E and fossil fuels.
For technologies such as solar and wind generation that have no fuel costs and relatively small variable O&M costs, LCOE changes in rough proportion to the estimated capital cost of generation capacity. For technologies with significant fuel cost, both fuel cost and overnight cost estimates significantly affect LCOE.
Ohhhhh, I seeee. From the first chart, we see that the Comanche solar plant near Pueblo is actually coming in at less than half the average cost of Solar PV the EIA estimated for 2012. So the real LCOE costs for the Comanche plant are actually going to be pretty close to NG.
A couple of other things we should take notice of, Coal and Uranium are dead! Solar, and wind are dropping so fast in price, it would almost be a betrayal of stock holders to waste their money on a new coal or nuclear power plant. The drop in Natural Gas prices really killed coal, but NG is at the bottom of it's price range and cheap NG days are numbered.
But I haven't even mentioned oil yet. Can ALT-E have an impact on on all those tar sands, and all that deep ocean and arctic oil that the Oil giants are so eager to get at? Take it away Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at the UK's The Telegraph in an article titled Oil industry on borrowed time as switch to gas and solar accelerates
The props beneath the global oil industry are slowly decaying. The big traded energy companies resemble the telecom giants of the late 1990s, heavily leveraged to a business model already threatened by fast-moving technology.
...
The "oil intensity" of global GDP has already halved since 1980s. We are becoming more frugal. Gasoline demand in the OECD rich states has been sliding in absolute terms since 2007, punctuated by ups and downs, but dropping overall from 15.5m barrels a day (b/d) of crude to 14m b/d.
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Citigroup said solar already competes in the growing regions of the world on "pure economics" without subsidies. It has reached grid parity with residential electricity prices in Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Australia and the US southwest. Japan will cross this year, Korea in 2018. It forecast that even Britain will achieve grid parity by 2020, a remarkable thought for this wet isle at 51 or 52 degrees latitude.
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Some US electric companies are starting to build solar farms for hard-headed commercial reasons as a hedge against future shifts in the gas price. This is astonishing.
Roughly 29pc of all electricity capacity added in America last year came from solar. The story is by now well-known. A McKinsey study found that installed solar power in the US across all sectors has dropped from $6 a watt to $2.59 in four years, largely due to the collapse in the cost of solar cells.
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The clinching shift will come when the battery storage is cheap enough and lasts long enough for users to draw down their suplus generated during the day to cover needs at night, opening the way for mass exodus from the grid, unless utilities harness it first to their own advantage.
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Harvard is working on an organic flow battery using quinones - from rhubarb - instead of rare earth metals. It hopes to cut battery costs by two-thirds within three years. Rivals at the University of Southern California think they can eventually slash the cost by 90pc below today's lithium-ion batteries.
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Big Oil is trapped, gradually running down legacy reserves. The longer that geopolitical eruptions disguise this erosion of competitiveness by propping up prices, the more emphatic the shift to renewables. Yet if prices do drift down to $80 - as many expect - they will lose money on their exotic ventures.
The energy group Douglas-Westwood says half the oil industry needs prices of $120 or more to generate free cash flow under current drilling plans and shareholder dividends. Leverage may catch up with them, a risk flagged recently by Standard & Poor's.
Most of the above article deals with Natural Gas, but I found the ALT-E parts more interesting.
But if you really want to put a dent in the Oil market, you've got to start making inroads into transportation. According to cleantechnica.com we are starting a steep climb in Electric type vehicle sales.
You can see the rapid rise in EV sales, but I believe if we get the breakthrough in the flow battery technology, the above chart will greatly underestimate EV car sales. There simply won't be a reason to have gasoline powered cars anymore.
So we are on the threshold of an Energy revolution like we haven't seen since someone decided that old dinosaurs in machines could get us to places faster than old horses. But we are also in a race to save civilization, and it is to be determined if we will cross the ALT-E threshold faster than we cross too many Global Warming tipping points.
We have an election coming up in a few months, and we have to get our butts out and vote for the people who will fight against the fossil fuel subsidies and fight for the ALT-E incentives. This is a race we can't afford to lose.
Bad things happen when good people don't vote!