New Solar Power Advance In Australia?

A new solar power plant has been announced for Australia.
This is the news release covering the announcement of the new plant.

It will be sited at Lake Cargelligo, a beautiful little town with a population of 1300, on a lake that is part of the Lachlan River. It is situated around 380 miles almost due west of Sydney in Central New South Wales, and the next closest big town is Condobolin, about 60 miles away.
This is a good place to site a solar power plant as it has a constant sunny aspect.

The plant will be of new technology in that the panels will not be made of glass, but of plastic film with silver embedded in it these then attached to fibreglass panels. These panels will be attached to stands that will track the Sun during daylight hours. There will be 2,200 of these panels. They will be focused in lots, onto 16 towers covering the 16,00 square metre site, which is around 4 acres. Each tower will contain a unit about the size of a shipping container. Inside this unit will be high purity graphite.

This link is for the Company’s own release for the project. Be aware that this link takes you to a pdf document and you may need a reader to download it.

The method of operation is that the light and heat from the Sun will be focused onto the units by the mirrors. This will heat up the graphite. Tubes embedded through the graphite will carry water. The heat generated by the graphite will boil the water. This boiling water will then drive a turbine which will then drive the generator producing electrical power. This is the classic solar thermal type power plant, as opposed to solar photovoltaic where the panels themselves generate the electricity.

The rated total nameplate power of the plant will be 3 Megawatts (MW)

It is calculated that it will be able to supply that full nameplate power for around 5 hours a day in Winter, and for 9 hours a day during the Summer. This is important, because from this we can calculate the amount of actual usable power delivered to the end users.

The plant is specifically designed to provide backup power for the small town. It is specifically designed to provide backup power only for the town.

The costs will be borne, half by a private company, and half by the Australian Government. The total cost for the plant will be $10 Million.

So then, let’s compare this with a traditional coal fired power plant, to see if it is feasible to scale up something like this to supply electrical power on a large scale with a view to taking the coal fired power plant out of commission, thus saving emissions of Carbon Dioxide.

That Summer and Winter power delivery time range comes into play here, because it gives us an idea of exactly how much usable power is actually delivered. Extrapolated out over the whole year, this makes an overall efficiency of 26%. This is pretty good really, but it needs to be realised that this only applies in the best of conditions with no overcast (ever) and constant sunlight all the time to heat the graphite to the point where it can actually boil the water to steam to drive the turbine. If an overall factor of down time due to conditions is taken into account, then that efficiency rating of 26% would come down, say to around 23%. Again, this is still pretty good because most plants of similar method of operation all across the Planet are currently only managing 16%, so the total I have here of 23% is sanguine to say the least.
So 3 MW to produce usable power, measured in Megawatthours, (MWH) you multiply by 24 and then 365 to produce the yearly total giving us 26280 MWH.
The efficiency rate at 23% gives us total delivered power of around 6050 MWH.

Now, coal fired power plants are considerably larger, so then let’s look at the delivered power from one of those. The nameplate capacity of one of those large ones powering your average city is around 2,100 MW. Multiply by 24 and 365 to find maximum possible delivered power, that figure now coming to 18,400,000 MWH. The efficiency of these large plants is around 85%, and some are up around the 90% mark, but I’ll use the lower figure of 85%.
So the maximum delivered total power is 15,650,000 MWH.

So then, now knowing those delivered totals, we can work out how many of these solar plants we will need to construct to replace just one of those coal fired power plants.

Divide the 15,650,000 by 6,050 and you come up with 2,590. So to replace just one large coal fired power plant, you will need to construct nearly 3,000 of those plants similar to this.

That’s 3,000 plants.

That’s 6.6 Million of the mirror structures on stands that track the Sun. 48,000 towers with the graphite units. 3000 Turbine/Generator units. That’s 12,000 acres of land, nearly 20 square miles in all. They have to be near water for the steam plant part of it. Then you will need the infrastructure to get that power to the users.

More importantly, the cost of those 3,000 plants at the cost of this plant now becomes $30 Billion, the single most costly way to replace a large power plant that could ever be thought up.

That $30 Billion is just the start point. You need to gear up factories and a work force to construct the mirrors. Organise the huge legal work behind getting all the approvals from the relevant authorities. Gear up the construction an a mammoth scale, gear up for the infrastructure.

This is absolutely not feasible.

It may work on the small scale for small towns such as is being planned here, but then imagine the costs to be passed onto the consumers who will have to pay for the electricity.

Keep in mind also the most important thing of all. The time that the power will be available. This is why this form of power can only ever be used for backup purposes as this is stated quite clearly in the Company plan for this plant.
So, even if these plants are constructed on this unimaginable scale, they cannot be used to replace the need for a constant dedicated reliable power that can only be supplied by those larger plants. So, even though something like this might be okay for small towns of small populations, they cannot be used in large towns or in the big cities.
You can also quite clearly see why something like this cannot be even contemplated without substantial subsidies from Government backing.

It’s fine to say. “Let’s move towards using Solar Power.” However, the reality is something else altogether.

Tagged: Coal Fired Power Generation, Kyoto, Solar Power, Solar Thermal Power Plants

Posted in: Australia, Climate Alarmists, Climate Change, Environment, Environmental activists, Global Warming, Infrastructure Problems, Junk Science