Texas Just Got a New 1.1-Million-Panel Solar Farm - Slashdot

Texas Just Got a New 1.1-Million-Panel Solar Farm

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• Re:

  I don't think storage is essential in Texas yet (utilities offer "free nights" plans), but with the company selling the RECs that covers about half the costs, so they would be less dependant on time shifting. If/when it does make sense I am sure they can add it.

• Annually?

  Texas Solar Nova will generate enough electricity to power over 190,000 homes annually

  What's annually got to do with it?

  • Re:

    Averaged

  • Re:

    It means it was written by someone that studied journalism at university, as opposed to some subject that required some understanding of math or engineering.

  • Re:

    And it's really only half that as the farm can't power them at night.:-)

    So either 95,000 annually or 190,000 semi-annually.

  • Re:

    There is a federal statue in place that specifies that all communications published in the USA which discuss any energy or power-related topic MUST include an inappropriate division by some factor of time, such as "KW per day".

    Or at least that's what I presume, since I don't recall ever seeing any news article that did not include this.

• Re:

  Of course they have energy storage. I suspect people would see plenty of energy storage in Texas if they only know what to look for. Look for large steel tanks full of natural gas.

  The natural gas industry loves to see more wind and solar power project pop up since that means more customers for them. Big steam power like coal or nuclear fission (and in some cases thermal solar) can't follow load well so to make up for the relative rapid gain and loss of solar power every day there must be a reserve of nat

  • Re:

    There is a factor which gives solar storage a huge advantage over natural gas, natural gas storage costs a lot of money to produce the fuel you are storing. By contrast the marginal cost of producing fuel to store with solar is close to zero. Of course energy conservation is cheaper than either, which is why we have but abandoned energy conservation as a strategy. There is no money to be made, at least not on an investor friendly scale.

  • Re:

    Some form of storage is a given these days. It can double the profit of the farm.

    OTOH this is Texas, so... maybe they sell the midday excess to Bitcoin miners instead of doing something useful with it

• Re:

  Not likely. What they do with these solar plants is oversize them, or under max them. If it can produce 100MW at full power, they only rate the plant at 70-80MW. That way they can be at 'full power' over a longer period of the day no matter the weather or season. This is important for grid stability. (in TX....haha)
  
  And yes you could say the 'extra' is currently wasted. But since there's zero fuel spent, it's effectively zero operational cost. But it's also a future source of additional capacity on

  • Re:

    The extra unused capacity isn't free. There was capex, the cost of the loan or bond or whatever was used to build it, and a larger facility requires more maintenance, which is opex.

    I'm in favor of over building infrastructure but let's not fudge the math on it. That's how everything turns into an unexpected cost over run and budgets get fucked and so on and makes the next project harder to fund.

    • Re:

      'effectively'. There's no fuel cost to it.
      
      And it's literally planned. The cost of building 120% of planned power output is the cost of being able to provide 100% over longer periods and less than perfect sun. It's smoothing out the variable output of solar. The extra power you curtail at noon without storage is part of the system and is costing 'effectively' nothing. It's part of the design.
      
      Cost overruns aren't at all the same thing.

      • Re:

        That's all good, I'm with you except it's not 'free' or even effectively free. The cost is built in as you say which makes the cost per kWh go up.

        TANSTAAFL

• Re:

  It looks from the summary that they already have contracts with large scale consumers that will pull every joule they can crank out even during peak output. Maybe they can add storage later if those contracts expire or if the grid in Texas for some reason loses their backup natgas capacity.

  • Re:

    The Texas grid collapse? Gasp! That could never happen!

    That was one of the major reasons I skipped Texas when looking for a new place. They don't know how to run a state. Coming from California it would just have been frying pan to fire.

• Re:

  No need. Texas can just build more crypto farms to stabilize the grid./s

  • Re:

    I hope they're producing enough power to store my NFT collection.