{"id":24,"date":"2006-11-21T07:05:28","date_gmt":"2006-11-21T15:05:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/montaraventures.com\/energy\/?p=24"},"modified":"2007-01-10T15:02:42","modified_gmt":"2007-01-10T23:02:42","slug":"100mw-solar-plant-planned-in-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/energy\/?p=24","title":{"rendered":"100MW Solar Plant planned in China"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\nA follow-up story from yesterday&#8217;s entry, there is <a href=\"https:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/s\/nm\/20061121\/sc_nm\/energy_china_solar_dc_1\">a report out today that China intends to build the world&#8217;s largest solar electricity generation plant<\/a>, 100MW. To put that in perspective, it&#8217;s about 1\/2 the size of a traditional coal fired generation plant and about 10x the largest solar installations on the planet. If you&#8217;ve ever wondered why we don&#8217;t see more solar plants, the clues are in the report.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nA year has 8,760 hours in it. In this report the selected site has an outstanding 3,362 hours of sunlight. That would yield a capacity factor of a little over 38% (good compared to the 25% normally achieved by solar.) To translate that into something more tangible, the system is rated at 100MW x the 38% capacity factor means that around 38MW output can be expected from the installation. Each MW provides enough electricity for about 600 households per year (US &#8211; I&#8217;m sure China is substantially different due to lower electricity demand per capita.)<br \/>\n<br \/>\nThe announced cost for this installation is $766M, or $7.6M per nameplate MW, or $20.1M per capacity factor constrained MW. Even amortized over decades, it&#8217;s difficult to see the economic payback from such an installation. To put solar cost in perspective, one would expect to pay $1M\/MW for wind, $750k\/MW for natural gas, and $3M\/MW for geothermal. My sense is we&#8217;re still a technology generation or two away from economically viable solar electric generation at utility scale.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nI think solar energy generation is great and I laud China for stepping up with an audacious plan, but I do believe there are more economically viable ways to achieve the same result. I&#8217;ll watch this project with interest as it unfolds.<br \/>\n<br \/><small><br \/>\nTechnorati Tags: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/energy\" rel=\"tag\">Energy<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/renewable\" rel=\"tag\">Renewable<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/china\" rel=\"tag\">China<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A follow-up story from yesterday&#8217;s entry, there is a report out today that China intends to build the world&#8217;s largest solar electricity generation plant, 100MW. To put that in perspective, it&#8217;s about 1\/2 the size of a traditional coal fired generation plant and about 10x the largest solar installations on the planet. If you&#8217;ve ever [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[9,3],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2gI6x-o","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/energy\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/energy\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/energy\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/energy\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/energy\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/energy\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/energy\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/energy\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montaraventures.com\/energy\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}