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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: slacker711 who wrote (62920)	5/2/2008 2:25:17 PM
From: Cogito	Respond to of 541962

>>The world's largest solar plant is under consideration in Arizona. It would produce 280 Megawatts at a cost of $1 billion and be operational in 2011. The backers say that construction hinges on renewal of the energy subsidies that expire at the end of '08. ... OTOH, NRG Energy applied for the first nuclear license in 30 years last year. This plant will have a capacity of 2700 Megawatts and cost between $6 and $7 billion but wont be online until 2014/2015.<< Slacker - I stand corrected, then, on the cost question. I would point out, though, that the costs of building nuclear plants are rising, and lead times for the components are rising, too. So the nuclear plant will most likely come on line much later than that, and end up costing much more. Costs for solar thermal plants, on the other hand, are coming down, and they are still very quick to build relative to nuclear plants. You really can't beat that nuclear power output in terms of area density, though, can you? By the way, thanks for finding the numbers. I was posting late at night, off the top of my head, and was off. - Allen

To: slacker711 who wrote (62920)	5/2/2008 2:29:13 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541962

Assuming that solar plants can scale linearly, that would mean that we would need a piece of land about 60 miles by 60 miles to replace all of the countries coal production. That isnt nearly as bad as I would have figured. Its also not as bad as the other estimates I've read. But even if its right, remember its not just 60 miles by 60 miles of land, but 3600 square miles of power plants. That's an awful lot of equipment to build and maintain. Think of a power plant (or really a collection of plants) 16 times the size of Chicago.