 | Prof Peter Newman Diamonds of Hope (Part A) | TOD: Australia/New Zealand | Sydney must prepare now for peak oil |  |
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I think Ausra's claims need to be thoroughly tested before they can be taken as gospel. Photovoltaics are suprisingly sensitive to cloud cover and I'd guess the same is true of solar thermal.
As I see it there is an over-overbuild problem. The first overbuild is for charging the yet tentative storage system. The second overbuild is to replicate the collectors in distant areas to provide backup. Then there are transmission capital costs, at least a million dollars per kilometre I'd guess for HVDC. I'd like to see 24 hour output curves for a pair of linked plants to see how much peak power can be inferred to regularise their share of typical demand.
Of course there are whole weeks when a country is swathed in slow moving cloud. Both solar and wind may underperform. That suggests peaking plant needs to be on standby to supply the whole grid if necessary. That may require gas we simply do not have in the future.
My guess is that if the numbers stack up they will expand quickly. If not there will be the usual calls for special assistance.
Large scale solar thermal plants seem to be destined for desert areas with strong solar insolation (in this case, the desert on the California / Nevada border). These areas tend to have very little cloud cover at any time of year.
Not to mention the cost increases from tight silicon production (Traditional silicon based solar cells) and high raw material costs for the thin solar cells (eg gallium). I'm not yet convinced that solar can be ramped up globally as a large portion of a country's energy mix without some sort of new solar technology being developed without these limiting factors. The high prices could quickly kill these very big schemes.
Solar thermal doesn't use any silicon.
Silison as a material is incredibly plentiful in any case - as demand rises so is manufacturing capability - you can expect the same sort of price drops for the material long term as we have seen for semiconductors in the past, once output catches up to the fast rising demand.
The situation for thin film using rare metals is less clear, but there are silicon based thin film approaches.