Solar Facility Disappointments

COVID-19 and failures of some large-scale solar facilities have plagued the industry recently. First, what about the virus? The coronavirus pandemic will have a significant impact on the global solar PV market. Construction and development are slowing as countries around the world enforce unprecedented lockdowns. As the world economy faces severe disruption research and analysis firm Wood Mackenzie has downgraded its forecast for 2020 installations for 129.5GW to 106.4GW, a reduction of 18%. ¹

Crescent Dunes

All this aside, in recent times there have been a number of large-scale solar disappointments; Crescent Dunes, Medicine Hat and Saudi Mega Solar Plant. The $1 billion Crescent Dunes solar plant developed by SolarReserve in Nevada was going to be the biggest solar plant in the world in its investment phase back in 2011, but by the time the project completed, it was already obsolete. Taxpayers remain on the hook for $737 million in loan. ² Unlike solar facilities in Minnesota, which use photovoltaic (PV) panels to turn sunlight into electricity, the Crescent Dunes plant used an array of mirrors to heat a tank filled with molten salt that would then heat water to generate steam and electricity. ³ The difference between solar PV and thermal solar plants like Crescent Dunes is important because PV panels have seen a reduction in cost of about 80 percent since 2010, causing solar thermal plants to fall out of favor with developers. As a result, solar thermal projects like Crescent Dunes are going belly up. But according to the Obama administration, it wasn't supposed to be this way. It appears the future was lost, as the facility has been shut down since last April after the facility lost its last customer because the solar installation was too unreliable. The cost of generating electricity from Crescent Dunes was $135 per megawatt hour, which is about 4.2 times more than the electricity generated at the Sherburne County coal plant in Becker, Minnesota. ³ Solar advocates will argue that he declining cost of solar PV is reason to continue building it, but they are missing the point. It is true that solar PV costs have fallen about 80 percent since 2010, but solar panels are still more expensive (and less useful) than natural gas plants. ⁴

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Medicine Hat

Early in 2019, the Canadian city of Medicine Hat announced that it would cease operations at a concentrated solar plant after five years due to low production and spiraling expenses. The plant was expected to cost $9 million upon completion in 2014 but the city has had to pay an additional $3 million to cover overrunning expenses. With the facility producing less than one megawatt of power, Medicine Hat leadership decided to abandon the ineffective facility.⁵ Much of the facility's struggles have been based on the geography of Canada, which is largely unsuitable for large-scale solar production due to lack of sunlight. Medicine Hat itself receives an average of 2,544 sunshine hours a year, significantly lower than the 3,470 sunlight hours a year enjoyed in California, the US state with by far the largest solar production.

Saudi Mega Solar Plant

In March 2019, Japanese conglomerate SoftBank and the Saudi Public Investment Fund announced plans for a titanic 200GW solar facility, which would increase the country's solar production by orders of magnitude, from, the 50MW installed by the end of 2018, and cost up to $200 billion. However, concerns over financing and support for the project have ultimately undermined its feasibility. ⁵

NREL Report

The government's leading laboratory for renewable energy has released a new report detailing the strengths and flaws of concentrated solar energy. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) published the report with the stated goal of using very mixed feedback on existing concentrated solar projects to create a list of suggested best practices going forward. ⁶ The report is titled CSP Best Practices, but it can be more appropriately viewed as a mix of problematic issues that have been identified, along with potential solutions or approaches to address those issues. The report details issues with concentrated solar as it's being implemented today. This kind of report is normal, but concentrated solar is a long way from standardized and high performance installations, reports Mark Mehos. ⁷

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Parabolic trough concentrating solar power (CSP) plants use solar collectors to heat water and generate steam heat, the same as a traditional coal or even nuclear power plant. But in between is a stage called heat transfer (HTF), where a fluid medium like oil or liquid metals carries the heat from the collection area to the turbine. The report says some of the issues with these systems are the extreme heat of the heat transfer systems and the waste hydrogen produced by these processes. Designers have also positioned elements vertically at a higher cost, when most plants are built in rural places with plenty of space. ⁸ The other kind of plant is a tower design, where mirrors concentrate the solar power directly into a central reservoir usually made of molten salt. These plants take a very longtime to come to temperature and are subject to leaks and under performance. All of these factors mean that molten salt plants have not yet reached their performance goals or the number their builders have often promised locals served by the grids. The report says these plants have often exceeded their planned operating budgets because of surprise maintenance costs as well as a poor understanding of what the true operating costs will even be. The bottom line? Plant contractors and operators are doing their best, but the technology isn't uniform or understood enough for the approach these builders have been taking. “The very nature of fixed-price, fixed-schedule, full-wraparound performance-guarantee contracts has likely been a main reason for issues experienced at existing plants,” the report concludes. While it may still hold true that solar holds the great promise for the future of clean energy, bloated government contract projects mired in litigation, bureaucracy, and limited reflexivity to changing technology and trends are most certainly not the answer. ²

References

1. Philip Gordon, “Global solar PV set for major drop due to COVID-19 says Wood Mackenzie,” smart-energy.com, April 14, 2020
2. Haley Zaremba, “Are large scale solar projects doomed to fail,” oilprice.com, February 9, 2020
3. Isaac Orr, “The one billion dollar solar failure in Nevada,” americanexperiment.org, Jauary 8, 2020
4. Mark Bolinger et al., “Empirical trends in project technology, cost, performance, and PPA pricing in the United States, 2019 Edition,” Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, December 2019
5. J. P. Casey, “Road to nowhere: great solar disappointments,” power-technology.com, November 6, 2019
6. John Fialka, “Futuristic solar plants plagued by glitches, poor training,” scientificamerican.com, June 17, 2020
7. Mark Mehos et al., “Concentrating solar power best practices study,” nrel.gov, June 2020
8. Caroline Delbert, “Why the world's most advanced solar plants are failing,” popularmechanics.com, June 23, 2020