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Bids in 300MW Saudi solar tender breach two cents
- peteretep 9y ago> US$1.786 cents There's got to be a better way of writing that
- dragonwriter 9y agoSince that's just flat out wrong, yes. It's either $0.01786 or 1.786¢ (if you need to specify the US, then definitely the first with either “USD” or “US $” in place of the plain “$”.)
- Faaak 9y agoIt would be more logical to to put units at the end, as the SI norms say. eg: USD 24k is a bit stupid, whereas 24 kUSD is more clear. It's even worse with things like 1/(USD 800/kWp) which gives things like:.8kWp/USD 1 ?
- kristianp 9y agoThe article title is flat out misleading too.
- ashleyw 9y agoUSD0.01786
- philipkglass 9y agoSome more background here: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/saudi-solar-bid-makes-solar-cheapest-electricity-in-world https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/saudi-solar-bid... PV has become a lot cheaper in recent years, and Saudi Arabia has plenty of sun, but these bids are so low that they may require behind-the-scenes support. Or they might not come to fruition. India has recently had similar problems where bidders tried to guess how fast hardware costs would continue to fall when bidding on future projects, and guessed too optimistically. https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/indias-renewable-energy-auctions-may-not-be-sustainable https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/indias-renewabl...
- Rexxar 9y agoIt's a "feature", too optimistic bidders always get the bid as they give the best price. That's part of the reason this sort of bids go wrong so often.
- seb1204 9y agoCorrect, initial bids rarely match the final cost in this part of the world. They also are highly dependent on the level of detail and soundness of the specification/scope that was bid for.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Gustomaximus 9y ago> Saudi Arabia has plenty of sun This could be a problem as above 25c panels can lose efficiency so temps in the middle east could drop panel efficiency quite a bit.
- philipkglass 9y agoGiven a constant level of illumination, solar cells perform better at lower temperatures. But for higher total generation it's better to install panels in hot-and-sunny regions than cool-and-cloudy ones, even if the panels in the latter region convert a higher percentage of light to electricity. Cold-and-sunny conditions are harder to come by, but on (e.g.) a clear winter day at noon, with cold air temperature and plenty of sun, panels can perform beyond their nameplate ratings.
- zeristor 9y agoSo where is the most efficient place for solar panels, given that the solar panels are heated by the sun, they could be coated to reflected IR. A cooler climate could help heat be convected away. High altitude deserts like the Atacama might be ideal, but there's less atmosphere for convective heat transfer. I do love an optimisation challenge.
- r00fus 9y agoI can imagine that if proof-of-work remains a prevailing feature of popular blockchain systems, setting up e.g. bitcoin mining operation off near-free solar would be a nice passive income stream. How fast can modern ASIC hardware pay for itself if mining?
- Filligree 9y agoPower is largely fungible, though. It doesn't merely need to pay for itself eventually, it needs to pay better than simply selling the power.
- philipkglass 9y agoIt's not a completely crazy idea. Building transmission infrastructure to connect remote solar farms to load centers can be a significant part of the project cost and timeline. Crypto-mining on a detached solar farm could export its financial value over a low-capacity wireless data link instead of heavy wires and towers. It might have more siting flexibility than projects that plan to deliver electricity to existing load centers. Of course it would just intensify the red queen's race among the crypto-miners.
- ThrustVectoring 9y agoFor historical precedent: whiskey distillation was often used as a cheaper-to-transport alternative to shipping and selling grain amongst American farmers in the 18th and 19th century. Similarly, bitcoin is much easier to ship places than electrical kilowatt-hours are.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- 6nf 9y agoThe thing with crypto mining is you really need 24/7 electricity. Difficulty increases all the time and if you don't break even ASAP your hardware will become obsolete before you start making money. Solar panels can't do 24/7 without very expensive batteries.
- vkou 9y agoHow much of this is due to the near-slave working conditions and compensation that imported manual laborers in Saudi Arabia have to deal with?
- philipkglass 9y agoNot much. Even in the relatively high-labor-cost United States, only 12% of utility scale solar project costs are attributable to installation labor. See table 14 on page 56 of this report: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy17osti/68925.pdf https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy17osti/68925.pdf
- selimthegrim 9y agoThanks for this, I didn't know it had fallen so fast!
- zeristor 9y agoOne use of cheap power is to do very energy intensive operations. Egypt powered fertiliser plants from the Aswan dam, and Iceland uses hydropower to smelt aluminium. Saudi Arabia is building a huge aluminium smelter, I had thought it would be solar powered, but they would need far, far more power, and of course it couldn't run at night. http://www.bechtel.com/projects/ras-al-khair-aluminum-smelter/ http://www.bechtel.com/projects/ras-al-khair-aluminum-smelte... So I assume this is gas fired power, which seems strange.
- bamboozled 9y agoIt's interesting that we don't favour the idea of something only running in the day when transitioning to renewables. Would it be such a bad thing and would there be other operations they could happen during the night ? I know it might mean less money or whatever, but the universe doesn't seem to run on money so it's weird logic sacrifice the environment over something like operational uptime.
- philipkglass 9y agoThere are some processes where equipment lifetime is more determined by total usage than by start-stop cycles. Those processes can more or less seamlessly transition to intermittent renewables as long as the time value of money isn't very high. Given persistently low inflation rates despite years of QE, I think we might be there already. EDIT: actually, even if the processes are tolerant of frequent stop-start, the associated labor scheduling may not be. Not knowing when you'll have a shift scheduled sucks for workers. Not knowing if your regularly-scheduled workers will have favorable weather to do useful work when they show up at the plant would suck for employers. Other processes are intolerant of complete shutdown/startup cycles. Modern aluminum smelting is one of them. If everything freezes up in the production cells because of too little power for too long, it causes damage and it takes a long time to start up again. To make aluminum smelting more cycling-tolerant would require rethinking the whole plant design. Even then the cost savings from cheap but non-dispatchable renewables may not be enough to compete with existing plants powered with dispatchable electricity.
- slagfart 9y agoSorry - I must be missing something. 300 MW = 300,000 kW 6 hours of generating capacity per day, 365 days in the year, gives 2190 hours of generation per year. 2,190 hours * 300,000kW * 0.02USD gives an annual cost to Saudi Arabia of $13.14M a year, for 300MW of installed capacity. A modern panel is around 250W, so they are installing and running 1.2M panels, for ~$11/year per panel, including grid connection and transformation costs? Insane!
- epistasis 9y agoUtility panels are quite often 350W these days. But yes, still insane.
- Iv 9y agoThe wonders one can achieve in a country that still uses slaves...
- rxhernandez 9y agoIs the United States doing this? I know we have literal slavery in prisons.
- QAPereo 9y agoNo, they just make things for the military and general consumption, nothing truly useful.
- glenneroo 9y agoHere is a long list of companies that sell products made by taxpayer funded prison labor: http://buycott.com/campaign/companies/504/boycott-companies-that-use-prison-labor http://buycott.com/campaign/companies/504/boycott-companies-...
- michaelbuckbee 9y agoWhy 6 hours? Not disputing it, just assuming I'm missing something.
- woodandsteel 9y agoIt is quite telling that this solar project is taking place in Saudi Arabia, the worlds most profitable producer of fossil fuels. You know, the fossil fuel companies all see where things are going. It is only American conservatives who are in deep denial.
- aplummer 9y agoNot just Americans, Australians too.
- kogepathic 9y ago> It is quite telling that this solar project is taking place in Saudi Arabia, the worlds most profitable producer of fossil fuels. Is it? I always thought of it as smart planning. They are taking the profits from a limited resource and diversifying. Norway has been doing this for decades, albeit not directly with PV.
- woodandsteel 9y agoIn my comment I am agreeing with you, it's smart planning. The fact that renewables are going to replace fossil fuels is so obvious that even fossil fuel producers, who you would expect to deny it, are instead acknowledging it.
- jlebrech 9y agothe less fossil fuel they use themselves, the more they can sell.