I had this conversation with a-sphere before, even provided this link to try and help him understand;

http://www.solarpanelsplus.com...

He is just willfully ignoring it.

I know you get it, just being a little more 'real world' with the numbers because a lot of folks don't realize how short the solar insolation day can be.

An interesting thing about tracking panels. You might see more of them if battery systems came in to play. Right now, there is no incentive to pay for tracking systems, but rather plunk that extra money into more capacity because feed in tariffs and production credits don't care what time of day the power is produced, so why bother. Just put in more panels and have them producing during the peak of the day.

Don't mix price and cost.

$2B for 250 MW isn't that bad if it has a high capacity factor. Of course, equipment lifetime and maintenance costs become a big deal. Reliability as well, if the plant shuts down it takes a long heat up period before it can produce electricity again. It also appears to require gas backup, how often is uncertain. The biggest question is lifetime of major costly components. If they last 5 years, not a good deal. If they last 15, then its probably a wash. All those things fall in the unproven category in my book. I like to have some good, real world data before I claim we have a solution.

No, you have proven you didn't understand solar insolation vs daylight hours, even though I clearly gave you a link that explained it at high school level.

And, you fail to also read well documented fact that German solar capacity factor is less than 10% overall, equivalent of about 2.4 full sun hours.

http://euanmearns.com/german-p...

Your ignorance is intentional.

OK, show us the operating record then. Reliability, cost per kwh, etc. That info is available for mature technologies.

Hold on there buddy. Those molten salt plants are still developmental projects. Extremely expensive and by nature very inefficient. Reliability is a big unknown as well. Lets let them get a few years under their belts before we count on them. And then consider that not everywhere has the ideal conditions that are found in Arizona.

Average solar insolation is more like 5 sun-hours/day, not 8, in good locations. Much less in places like Germany. If you want autonomy on the shortest day of the year, you may have less than 2 full sun hours, which means 12 MW of capacity, but that doesn't account for a cloudy day, in which case you may get less than 1 full sun hour insolation.

So, bottom line is there are a lot of ways to look at the numbers, but to be truly autonomous with no grid support, you need a lot of capacity.

Lets just get this out of the way;

As soon as they come out with them super whamodyne batteries, our problems will be solved.

Proceed....

But total volume is not really a reasonable comparison, as what matters with subsidies is what you get in return. Which is why I responded to the OP.

Yeah, its would be a nightmare and an added overhead cost to bill that way. They could simply publish the numbers of what the average cost per customer is, but if that number winds up being very low on a per person basis, then it might lead to apathy on the matter.

Yes, there are some challenges the industry is facing getting geared back up for construction after many years. The first few plants are going to be more costly. But, we've proven in the past that once the infrastructure is running, those problems are minimized. Not all the projects are suffering from such significant problems, which, from what I understand, in Finland, a more wrapped up on contracting and regulatory disputes than actual construction problems.

And, you must also consider that this report uses those higher end estimates for nuclear already, and even with that nuclear comes out low cost.

You need to be more clear when you say "better for transmission", because that is not really true. There are good reasons our transmission infrastructure is mostly AC. DC can work well in point to point transmission, but you have to still must convert to AC to connect multiple lines together to build a true network. HVDC makes sense when you need to move a lot of power from point A to point B, over a long distance, with no intermediate interconnections.

HVDC breakers are very expensive and don't last very long compare to AC switching equipment. This is due to the much higher current interrupting requirements and resultant arching from breaking a DC circuit. AC current is easily interrupted due to its cyclic nature, which is often considered an inherent safety element as well.

Equipment to convert to AC is also expensive and is required at every node.

Not true. On a per KWh basis, solar and wind clearly get the highest subsidies.

I think that was posted here recently, and if you read the comments you'd soon realize it is a pipe dream.