Reuters has an interesting story about a project to put solar panels in North Africa, with power lines to transmit this electric to Europe. The story states:
The European Union is backing projects to turn the plentiful sunlight in the Sahara desert into electricity for power-hungry Europe, a scheme it hopes will help meet its target of deriving 20 percent of its energy from renewable sources in 2020.
“I think some models starting in the next 5 years will bring some hundreds of megawatts to the European market,” Oettinger told Reuters after a meeting with energy ministers from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia.
He said those initial volumes would come from small pilot projects, but the amount of electricity would go up into the thousands of megawatts as projects including the 400 billion euro ($495 billion) Desertec solar scheme come on stream.
$400 Billion euro sounds like a lot of money. But perhaps it isn’t, considering they are going to produce a lot of power. Let’s do some math:
Europe today gets 4.2% of it’s electricity from wind, which according to the EWEA produce 142 TWh (terawatt-hours) of electricity in 2008. Dividing by 8760 hours in a year, this is 16.21 GW (gigawatts). Dividing by 4.2% gives a total power demand in Europe of 386 GW.
Let’s generously assume that the Sahara Solar projects will provide ALL of the EU’s 20% target for electricity generation. That would mean the Sahara solar project would need to produce 77 GW of electricity. At the quoted cost, this works out to 6412 USD / kW of flowing power. Of course, solar has a low (<50%) onstream factor due to night, so the cost per installed kW is lower, perhaps around $3000/kW. But it is the flowing kW that matters.
How does this compare to other power generation options?
Well, gas-fired combined cycle plants cost between $1300 and $1500 USD/kW.
Coal-fired plants cost between $1200 and $2000 USD/kW, depending on whether it is a traditional thermal plant or IGCC type facility.
Nuclear projects cost between $3000 – 5000 USD/kW, depending on jurisdiction and local labour costs.
So this solar plan is expensive. And doesn’t provide power at night.
No wonder the company behind it wants subsidies:
2 comments
Brian says:
22 June 2010 at 11:23 (UTC -7 )
The transmission line losses could be substantial over such a large distance.
Hey if it is such a great idea , why do Siemens, RWE and Deutsche Bank need public money ?
fern st albert says:
22 June 2010 at 18:36 (UTC -7 )
California can’t deploy solar panels in the American desert because of environmental concerns. So does this mean the African desert is less sensitive or environmentally delicate? What a load of green piffle. The cost of transmission and maintenance will make the cost prohibitive. Who does this help, power hungry Europe, third world Africa or the GW alarmists and profiteers.