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In contrast, coal-fired power plants do not suffer from this efficiency cap because they already produce electricity primarily using a steam turbine. As the sun waxes and wanes, the coal feed to the boilers can be adjusted to keep heat production steady and the steam turbine running at full tilt.
Paul Nava, a managing director of Flagsol GmbH, a solar engineering firm based in Cologne, Germany, that is commissioning a 50-megawatt solar-thermal power plant called Andasol 1 in Andalucía, Spain, says that large coal plants could easily absorb 200 to 400 megawatts of solar-thermal power, rivaling the largest stand-alone solar-thermal power projects under construction and dwarfing photovoltaic installations by an order of magnitude. And thanks to coal's carbon intensity, the emissions benefit will be higher. FPL estimates that fuel combustion displaced by its solar collectors at Martin County will be equivalent to system-wide C02 emissions of 2.75 million tons over their 30-year lifetime--the equivalent of removing more than 18,700 cars from the road each year. But the same solar collector field on a coal plant should displace about double that much CO2.
Cara Libby, EPRI's hybrid solar-thermal project manager, says that reducing carbon output is the motivation behind the nine-month feasibility study. The idea is to define a low-cost option for EPRI's industrial members to meet renewable portfolio standards implemented by many states, and to prepare for federal carbon regulations expected to put a price on every ton of CO2 that their plants release.
There are two large caveats, however. Most power plants--natural gas, coal, or otherwise--will not have the combination of strong sun and flat, open ground required to host a solar-thermal collector field. "What is normally underestimated is the distance to the solar field," says Nava. "You see proposals where there is an area and it is maybe two kilometers away. That long-distance heat transfer would be quite costly." He says that even those plants with the right sun and space will not move forward until governments put a firm price on carbon emissions from coal--something that few politicians have been willing to do--to justify trading cheap coal for more costly solar-thermal energy. "The integration is very easy," says Nava. "It's just a regulatory and political issue."
Solar-thermal developers say that more such projects, including large schemes involving coal plants, could help drive the nascent technology forward. "Solar collector fields are in a very early stage of development," says Nava. "If there are more projects around, that will definitely increase the resources."
Federal funds could help 15 gigawatts of solar projects move forward.
A new strategy could reduce coal plant emissions and cut the cost of solar power.
Concentrating Solar Won't Work in NC
I hate to burst bubbles, but because of a couple of embarrassingly simple facts, concentrating solar, or solar thermal, will be nowhere near economical in North Carolina. Or anywhere in the southeast, for that matter. While the southeast is drenched in solar energy, a huge percentage of the solar light in the southeast is diffused by clouds over the course of the year. CSP (concentrating solar power) requires fully clear skies to operate. Thus, the percentage uptime of a CSP plant is a tiny fraction of what a PV plant might produce. Even the slightest amount of high clouds will crater the output of a CSP plant, while a PV plant will keep on cranking. Anyone who bothers to run the numbers on paper with NC weather, let alone try a pilot plant for a year in NC will be gravely disappointed at its output.
New Mexico, on the other hand, has an abundance of completely cloudless days. Perfect for CSP. Along with Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and much of California.
Good luck!
Re: Concentrating Solar Won't Work in NC
Thanks for pointing out that little oversight on our part Freddy-boy. You did a great job of over-stating the obvious. Keep up the good work.
Re: Concentrating Solar Won't Work in NC
Alternative energy is good stuff but we need to put the good stuff in the right places.
I live in Arizona in an area where wind turbines would be a big waste of money. However, give me some photovoltaic or concentrating solar panels and watch me make kilowatts.
But if I lived on the East Coast of the U.S. where massive amounts of offshore wind are available I would be buying and installing wind turbines like crazy.
If I lived in certain other areas of the good old USA I could have my choice of geothermal, wind or solar. The moral of the story is:
Put the right technology in the right places. We can become energy independent if we believe this is important to the future of our country. Here is a good link to show where we have abundant alternative energy resources [pdf format].
Have a great day :-)
http://www.oceanenergy.org/Pickens_Plan_Plus_Jul_21_08_Ver_1-1.pdf
tomgarven@hotmail.com
I look forward to the day when we no longer use coal for power generation. Maybe we can use Coal To Liquid (CTL) with sequestration for transportation but I even doubt that. However, on with the story.
There are two natural gas powered generating station near where I live in AZ but I will discuss only the one located about 20 miles west of Kingman, AZ. For the most part the construction of the plant was supported by the community, local & state governments. There were of course lots of ideas how to spend all the extra tax revenue everyone was going to be receiving from the operating plant. After the plant was built however the price of natural gas spiked and it sits idle most of the time.
Well what can we do; some solar maybe? This plant is located in an area surrounded by hundreds of acres of open desert. This open area could be used to build some type of solar augmentation. Will it happen; probably not. Why not? No one has the additional $10 million to invest to make the plant a financial success. So why is this important? If we are going to use alternative fuels like natural gas for transportation some day [e.g. over-the-road trucking] instead of power generation then its important.
It is really sad to see these two power stations just rusting away in the desert sun.
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bj
50 Comments
Encouraging future Coal Use is not "Cutting" it.
The author's headline, "Cutting Coal Use with Sunshine" is inaccurate. Any tech that allows the Coal Companies to spin their industry as "green" is to be avoided, considering their mountaintop removals, sludge pits, etc. As we all found out once and for all with the TVA debacle in Tennessee, there is no such thing as clean coal. There has to be other uses to which this research can be applied, surely!
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phoenix
172 Comments
Re: Encouraging future Coal Use is not "Cutting" it.
Although the coal-fired energy industry accounts for over 50% of electricity production in the USA, this massive lumbering behemoth has a ravenous insatiable apetite which has been known to consume entire ecosystems in its path. That doen't mean, however, we have to just turn a blind eye to its environmental destruction. So keep turning up the heat on burning this dirty atmospheric pollutant BJ, because if you'd like see it replaced with solar-thermal, solar-voltaic alternatives your not alone.
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Kevin Bullis
178 Comments
Re: Encouraging future Coal Use is not "Cutting" it.
Point taken about the environmental problems with coal.
The pairing of solar and coal, however, doesn't encourage coal use--as long as existing coal plants are retrofitted with solar technology, instead of new coal plants being built. And the retrofits would allow more solar technology to be installed, since money would be saved by using existing steam turbines.
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phoenix
172 Comments
Re: Encouraging future Coal Use is not "Cutting" it.
Although during the Industrial Revolution, England was responsible for supplying about two thirds of the worlds demand for coal, the Royal Navy stopped using it to power their fleet of battleships once they were able to convert them to burning oil instead. That monumental shift in replacing one form of an antiquated technology with a slightly more advanced one, has apparently been lost on the Utlility Cartels, at least up until now. I guess all that smog released by the continued burning of this overly abundant, and reasonably cheap fossil fuel, has affected their thinking, and virtually obscured the light of sustainable energy production at the end of the proverbial tunnel in the process.
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