Bob Sanders of NH Business Review has an excellent look at why a lot of very large (by NH standards, anyway) solar projects are being proposed in the states:
All the projects being proposed in New Hampshire total 210 MW of capacity, triple the state’s solar capacity in 2016. The huge projects are the result of a bidding war driven by the regional hunger for renewable power, a war that includes traditional utilities like Eversource and National Grid, with such projects as the Northern Pass and Granite State Power Link transmission lines, as well as nine utility-sized solar projects.
In 2016, the combined solar capacity of all of New Hampshire barely topped 60 MW. Currently, almost all of the solar projects are built or leased by homeowners, businesses, institutions and towns to save money off their utility bills. This is decentralized power, the vision of most of those activists protesting nuclear power plants in the 1970s and 1980s. Utility-scale solar, however, is built to make money by selling power to those very utilities with a centralized generating plant.
“You have to keep in mind, this is a different market. Net metering — that’s retail. This is really big wholesale,” said Kate Epsen, executive director of the NH Sustainable Energy Association. “They don’t cross paths very often.”
Read the whole piece here; it’s excellent.
Return to the Concord Monitor
Interesting that the one column in the article that lists proposed solar projects in NH shows, by my cipherin’, a total of 210 MW of capacity. This is almost precisely one-third of the capacity of a moderate-sized nuclear plant, Vermont Yankee. Then you have to throw in old-fashioned notions like capacity factor (about 90% for VY, maybe 25% at best for the solar projects), and you have an even bigger discrepancy. Seems like we’re kicking up a lot of dust and effort over a relatively small amount of energy. Doesn’t sound very economical or sustainable to me.
Yes, that is an issue – and is why some people concerned about global warming are big advocates of nuclear power.
On the other hand, even a Vermont Yankee would take a minimum of 5 years and $5 billion – billion! – to construct, whereas you can put up 100-megawatt solar systems in 6 months and for a few tens of millions of dollars, so they’re much more flexible and cheaper.
Your objection to capital costs for nuclear units is valid and something, probably a combination of industry initiatives and government policy, should be done to make the costs(and construction timeline) reasonable. Other countries have done it, and have not, to my knowledge, compromised safety and quality of LWR-based systems. We only lack the will and political resolve to do it.
The other issue for comparison of various systems, one that directly affects EROI, is unit lifetime. A well-constructed and maintained nuclear plant can run at near capacity for 60, perhaps 80 years, based on measured parameters such as pressure vessel embrittlement and balance-of-plant component lifetimes. Do solar panels, exposed as they are directly to the environment, which is often challenging in northern climates, have a similar projected lifetime? If not, what is the replacement component cost over an equal asset lifetime? I’d also be curious about land use. Vermont Yankee, for example, had a lifetime capacity factor of over 80%. Being conservative, let’s assume 80%. Using a 43 year operating period, we get about 187 TWhr of energy production on a 125 acre site. How much land would solar arrays require to match that, assuming a 43 year operating time?
I’m a fan of nuclear power – I think the closure of Vermont Yankee, in particular, was tragic. And yes, one of solar’s biggest weaknesses is land area per unit output, which is going to make solar farms unpopular near urban areas.
As for lifespan – that’s an excellent question with no good data to answer it. This may prove an achilles heel to solar that we’re not anticipating.
But don’t underestimate the value of quick construction and expansion, extremely low operating costs, and the ability to be distributed around the grid to avoid bottlenecks when considering relative value. It’s not just output that matters.
I agree that solar and distributed generation have a role to play in our overall energy supply. Clean power is the way to go and that includes a portfolio of energy sources, nuclear, solar, and wind included. Each has its strengths and drawbacks.
I also believe that carbon-based fuels will be with us for a long time. I don’t see an easy fix to that in the transport sector, at least not in the short term. Long term, electric substitution may allow a path for market penetration of cleanly-generated electricity, but it may be a ways off as the infrastructure to support it is gradually phased in. We’ll see.
I am an ex-patriate New Jerseyan banished to the Midwest, but am a fan of the New EnglandE ecology and thus have the same interest in preserving as much as possible, especially from the ravages of acid rain and ocean acidification. So, I’m also a fan of Granite Geek, since we have that same vision.
By the way, it sounds like you should attend the Nov. 14 Science Cafe Concord about the future of the grid – we need good questions from the audience like that!