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Comment by kraftman | Hacker News Reader

Maybe a bit off topic, but large infrastructure projects have a tendancy to balloon in costs and either get cancelled or get completed well beyond their original budget. Given how long these projects take to develop, and how fast solar is dropping in price, is the opposite true for large solar projects? Or do they lock in panel prices early on?

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This is a good example, a large desert solar park made in Pakistan:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaid-e-Azam_Solar_Park#Hurdle...

It massively ballooned in price + issues like dust covering the panels + the large amount of water needed to clean them + cross border tariff issues basically made the energy unaffordable

> Bahawalpur is desert terrain, having high dust count, therefore, the efficiency of panels were reduced by 40%. It required 30 people to clean panels with 15 days to restore the panels back to their full capacity, which reduced production of installed 100MW plant to below 18 MW.[26][27]

> Each of the 400,000 installed panels required one litre of water to clean. A 15 days cleaning cycle required 124 million litres of water (enough to sustain 9000 people) while rain in the Cholistan desert is rare and far between.

also politicians start interfering:

> Despite the fact that Balochistan is more suitable for solar power with more barren land and suitable dust count,[32] Government of Punjab convinced the Prime Minister that Punjab is more suitable venue for solar power. Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif later accepted that producing 18.5 MW for Rs. 13.5 billion is an expensive deal.[33]

Why the fuck was this built on Bahawalpur? I'm so frustrated at Pakistan's inability to not fuck things up :( years it's been. Years of frustration. Disappointments. Disillusionment. Sigh :(

Bangladesh's GDP per capita now exceeds Pakistan's.

That's a bit embarrassing.

Bite me

> "Bahawalpur is desert terrain, having high dust count, therefore, the efficiency of panels were reduced by 40%. It required 30 people to clean panels with 15 days to restore the panels back to their full capacity, which reduced production of installed 100MW plant to below 18 MW.[26][27]"

Solar farms are often installed in arid, dusty environments, so it's not unusual that they require regular cleaning. Various automated solutions have been developed for this (ie: panel cleaning robots). Weird that they wouldn't have considered all this when planning the solar farm.

> "Each of the 400,000 installed panels required one litre of water to clean. A 15 days cleaning cycle required 124 million litres of water"

Huh? If there's 400,000 panels and cleaning each panel requires 1 litre, that's 400,000 litres of water per cleaning cycle. Not ideal, but it's certainly not 124 million litres!

At this point, utility scale solar projects have reached scale in the supply chain, and cost estimates tend to be quite accurate once you break ground and start construction. Yes items such as solar panels tend to be procured upfront and costs locked in (so even if a 2020 style supply chain crisis hits, the extra cost tends to pass down the chain... even though, of course, that sort of crisis will always balloon costs.) The main risk on cost slippage in this sort of project would come from 2 areas: 1) pre-breaking ground (i.e. pre Final Investment Decision)... going through regulatory/licensing/permitting. This is exactly when you can't lock down long-lead time items and are subject to market prices. 2) the transmission line: unlike utility-scale power plants, these tend to be one-off projects and also face a lot of social challenges once construction starts. That price/time could definitely balloon, even after breaking ground/FID.

Really interesting, thank you!

The ballooning isn’t typically driven by mass manufactured components like solar panels so I would guess that aspect is largely irrelevant.

It seems likely to me that they lock the price in but I don’t have any special insight

Not really an answer to your questions, but just to add:

Solar (and wind) projects don't have the tendency to balloon in costs as other large infrastructure projects do [1]. They tend to be more modular then for example nuclear, making them easier to build (you place one rack of solar panels, and then another one, etc). Additionally, once (a part of) the panels is installed, you can already start generating energy rather than having to wait until the whole project in finalized.

Some parts of the project like the cable between Australia and Singapore to transmit energy might be a different story though.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90844859/why-massive-wind-and-so...

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