![]() A small utility company in Wisconsin buys in extra electricity for $30 MWh. Add maintenance and operating costs easily gets to $200 MWh. ![]() A 10 year payback is much more reasonable. Even accepting that figure, a $2bn investment with a 20 year payback (zero discount rate) is still nearly $100 MWh. 1065,000 MWh annually from a 392 MW nameplate is a planned output of 31% of capacity. A three minute summary is at Fox News.īut even at the planning stage there was either no proper business plan presented, or at least no proper scrutiny like a bank would do when making a loan. As a minor consequence, it was projected to scorch 1,000 birds a year. Problem is that in it’s first year of operation it produced one quarter of the projected electricity. Technologically the Ivanpah plant sounds impressive. At the end of 2013 its accounts state that it had Cash, Cash Equivalents & Marketable Securities of $58,717million, $10,000million than the year before. Google can certainly afford to bear these loses. The Ivanpah solar electric generating plant is owned by Google and renewable energy giant NRG. A couple of days ago it posted about the World’s largest solar energy plant applying for a $539million federal grant to help pay off a $1.5 billion federal loan. The Hockey Schtick blog specializes in summarizing scientific papers that have a sceptical leaning. A lack of due diligence in appraising the scheme – a factor common to many large scale Government backed initiatives – will have let the engineers have the finance for a fully scaled-up version of what should have been a small-scale project to prove the technology. As well as the teething problems with complex technology, it appears that the engineers were over optimistic. With the strong sun of the desert I would expect daily output to never exceed 40% of theoretical, as it is only daylight for 50% of the time, and just after sunrise and before sunset the sun is less strong than at midday. However, even all of this cannot account for the output only being at 40% of expected.
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