Portugal: 2006 start on world's largest PV installation.

[skids]

The 62-megawatt plant, which will use 350,000 solar panels spread over an area the size of 150 football pitches, represents a leap forward for solar energy as it moves out of small-scale use into producing electricity in large quantities.

The €250m (£168m) Girassol plant will be 12 times the size of the biggest solar power plant currently in operation near Leipzig in Germany. "The construction of the power station will begin in 2006," Moura's mayor, Jose Maria Pos-de-Mina, told journalists. The Girassol plant will be located in one of the poorest regions of Portugal, the sun-baked Alentejo.

...

Local people will, through their town hall, be taking on much of the financial risk for the project. Moura's town hall holds 90% of the capital in Amper.

BP Solar will build a solar panel factory at the site, which it says will create 240 full-time jobs. Girassol is planned to come on line in 2009.



...though the "largest solar" comment isn't quite accurate, as solar-thermoelectric plants will be bigger, it will probably own the solid-state PV crown for a bit.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/renewable/Story/0,2763,1570304,00.html

[NNadir]

1. Is that 62 mega"watts" physicist watts or magical peak solar "watts"?

I can't tell.

[skids]

2. Yawn. n/t

[NNadir]

3. Yeah, it makes me drowzy too.

:-)

So much energy extended on so little result.

[400Years]

6. everybody knows the difference b/t the wattage rated vs. output

you are not impressing anybody, I'm glad these folks are doing something. These panels will be generating electricity long after energy costs have skyrocketed.

[NNadir]

8. Everybody knows?

I don't think so.

Why not then rate it in kilowatt-hours?

Actually this whole press release is full of questionable claims. Let's do some economic analysis. The plant is said to cost 250 million euros, and it is said that the plant will, according to the corporate giant BP, produce 250 full time jobs.

Now, the plant is located in the newly desertified country of Portugal and so we will assume that this plant has the highest capacity loading of any solar PV plant on the planet, ie that it twice as good as this "over performing" plant in the California desert, which has a capacity loading factor of 15%:

http://www.solarelectricpower.org/SEPA_Member_News/index_detail.cfm?LinkAdvID=14943

(Here is the calculation: The plant produced 163,000 kilowatt-hours or 590 billion joules. It is rated at 136,000 kilowatts, which multiplied by 31,557,600 seconds in a year gives a theoretical full capacity of 4.2 trillion joules. Dividing 590 billion by 4 trillion gives 0.15 or 15% roughly.)

So let's say this Portugese plant operates at 30% of loading capacity, twice as high as the Hopland plant.

This means it's average output is 18.6 Megawatts which translates to an energy output (again annualized) is 587 trillion joules or 0.195 billion kilowatt-hours. The retail price of electricity in Portugal for industrial facilities (delivered) was 0.07 USD/kw-hr in 2002.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/elecprii.html

This means that the plant can expect in revenue, given in USD, $13.7M. The amortization of the plant at zero interest is thus 18 years, (1.2 Euro/USD) without a huge increase in electrical rates.

Meanwhile, the plant is claimed to be providing 250 jobs. The per capita income of Portugal is $14,000, or $56,000 for a family of 4.

http://www.worldbank.org/data/countrydata/aag/prt_aag.pdf

For 250 jobs at this level the labor cost alone would be $13,000,000/year or close to the total revenue if the plant were free. Probably the jobs don't pay that well but still, the general idea is pretty clear. More likely the jobs are all outside of the area of the Portugese facility entirely, and the real jobs in the area will be things like solar cell window washer, wiping the dust that drifts all over the new global climate change induced desert. I don't know the cost of Windex in Portugal.

And I remind you that I have assumed exceptional performance for this plant.

Now I'm sure that you find this unimpressive, but still I must say that from my perspective something is rotten in Denmark, Denmark being a country that buys it's power from France and Germany when the wind isn't blowing.

[skids]

9. The jobs are in the solar cell factory, not the plant.

RTFA.

[ladjf]

4. Portugal also has started work on a tidal generator facility

to generate electricity.

[skids]

5. Wave actually.

Thanks for pointing it out. Interesting sounding technology -- indirect drive of generators through some sort of fluid pumping system.

http://www.freenewmexican.com/news/13932.html

[ladjf]

7. Thanks for the correction. Anyway, it's some interesting stuff.

[phantom power]

10. I would consider a gigawatt, or a half-gigawatt, to be "large"

An installation in the gigawatt-range would put it in the same class as most normal power plants, and it would be large enough to represent a significant fraction of an industrial country's power requirements. Not a large fraction, but significant.

In the daytime, anyway.

[skids]

11. Missing the point.

The point is that solar PV, whatever faults you may find with it, is in fact expanding at a very large rate, relative to its current installed base.

We've hashed over the relative merits of various technologies about 50 times. There's no need to go into it again. I just post these articles so people will be able to keep track where each technology option is at. That's all.

[phantom power]

12. That would make an interesting pie-graph, year by year.

Make a pie graph for each year, with gigawatt-hours of energy produced for that year by solar, wind, coal, gas, nuclear, geothermal, hydro, and whatever others I forgot.