$1B solar plant was obsolete before it went online | Hacker News Reader

$1B solar plant was obsolete before it went online

bloomberg.com

33 pointsawb18 comments

Kind of sad that the founder feels obligated to say it's a "tragedy of mismanagement" or a tragedy of anything... as if the story is any more dramatic or Shakespearean than the simple truth: Probably this method just isn't as efficient as others. And I mean, we had to actually try building this thing to find that out, so there's no shame in that.

From what I gathered, it seems like it would have been great if it could have been created in a couple years. But it took too long to the point where it became less efficient than alternatives.

Money well spent IMO.

Money terrible spent, just another billion poured down the drain on inefficient renewable energy technologies that would have been much better spent developing better technologies.

For a billion dollars you could hire five hundred brilliant (or at least clever) scientists and pay then each $200K pa for ten years to work on promising technologies in photovoltaics, ranging from sexy stuff like multiple exciton generation to prosaic stuff like how to make silicon sheets cheaper.

money spent isn't money burned--it paid people's salaries, it helped people gain skill and experience that will apply to future projects, and the total economic benefit (not just in dollars, but in capabilities and human capital), is a much broader picture than this one power plant and its dollar per mwh number.

That sort of napkin math doesn’t take into account any economic or political realities, not to mention a stack of research papers generates 0Mwh.

When this plant was being engineered, many projected pricing trends for photovoltaics would have still kept it economical today. In that time China heavily increased their subsidizing of that sector which has been the overwhelming cause for pushing pricing down and is still the case today.

If things played out differently, which could have easily been the case, this would have been a good solution. I think it’s wise to diversify your bets across a number of solutions when you’re implementing a state level program and you should count on some of them being bad ideas. Media will jump on the half dozen failures from dozens of successes which overall is a good ROI.

building this thing is part of the whole "developing better technologies" thing

Sure, in the same way that trying to build a ladder to the moon might eventually lead to inventing rocketry.

Unless all the scientists do is theorectical work, you're going to need a lot more than that to pay for equipment, materials and other resources required to actually do some experiments, develop poc's etc.

Most of the article is behind a paywall, so I couldn't find out: More efficient solar panels have been made since, but has the price of electricity dropped so much that this plant is now not economically viable?

Custom parts for maintenance (because it's an early design), more maintenance (because more moving parts), and apparently more people?

Coupled with the increase in PV efficiency, and decrease in PV price, mean for utilities its cheaper to bring up a new modern plant than maintain the old plant that they apparently don't have liability for.

The plant requires more upkeep than most solar plants.

It sounds strange that a staff of "dozens" would make it unprofitable, though — most coal/oil/gas plants employ dozens of people and pay for their fuel.

But it's not competing directly with solar plants, but only with the price it's able to sell electricity at. That there are some new solar plants being built that are more efficient is irrelevant, at least until there are so many of them they push down the price of electricity.

> at least until there are so many of them they push down the price of electricity.

Which will happen long, long before the capital cost of this plant could be paid off.

Which ought to mean that the company that owns the plant goes bankrupt, the plant itself is sold by the receivers, and the new owner runs the plant profitably... IFF its operating cost is low enough, which ought to be those dozens of staff and the materials they need.

paywalled?

This seems interesting, though. Does the plant just become a stranded asset or is there still a way to get returns out of it?

TLDR

> Its power cost NV about $135 per megawatt-hour, compared with less than $30 per MWh today at a new Nevada photovoltaic solar farm, according to BloombergNEF, which researches fossil fuel alternatives.

There's also a graph that adds to the sadness but you know don't get too excited.

Taxpayers remain on the hook for $737 million in loan guarantees. Another one that left taxpayers on the hook for $530 mm - Solyndra (1)

(1)https://www.factcheck.org/2011/10/obamas-solyndra-problem/

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