Apologies on dragging up an old threat, the Ivanpah CSP just came up in discussion elsewhere, and I quickly came up with some numbers. Anyone care to gave look over my workings and a brief glance at my sources.
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Let's critically analyse this in an example to replace Adelaide's Torrens Island Power Station.
To replace the Torrens Island CCGT Power Station that powers most of Adelaide would require US$26.94 billion dollars and occupy 12244 acres (4955 hectares) - that's a track of lang about 50 kilometres long and 1 kilometre wide.
My working:
Firstly, the stats for Ivanpah Solar Thermal Power station:
From the Wikipedia article:
Cost: US$2.2 billion [1]
Name Plate Capacity: 392 megawatts
Capacity Factor: 25% [2]
Land Usage: 4,000 acres (1618 hectares)
Cost / GW (Gigawatt): US$5.6 billion
Levelised Cost / GW: US$22.45 billion [3]
Land / GW: 10204 acres (4120 hectares)
Torrens Island CCGT (Combined Cycle Gas Turbine) Power Station
Cost: actual cost unknown, assume $1 billion [4]
Name Plate Capacity: 1.2 GW
Capacity Factor: 68% [5]
Cost / GW: $0.83 billion
Levelised Cost / GW: US1.22 billion
Land Usage: 5 acres (2 hectares) [6]
1.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility 2.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_power... - I've assumed 25%, where as this article suggests the average is 20% for solar thermal
3. Levelised Cost / GW is calculated as: Cost / (Name Place Capacity * Capacity Factor) - eg. for the Ivanpah Solar Thermal Plant the calculation is US$2.2 billion / (0.392 * 0.25) = US$22.45 billion
4.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_cycle... - while the Wikipedia article states: offered by three major manufactures (Alstom, General Electric and Siemens) are roughly in the range of 50 MW to 500 MW and costs are about $600/kW
5.
www.cfses.com/documents/AER_No_2.pdf - see page 11
6. I'm guessing this from looking at Google Maps, the sites looks to be no bigger than 2 kilometres by 1 kilometre
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Regards,
Adam Bodnar (BNC reader since 2007)