Comment on How solar panels generate electricity
nevemsenki@lemmy.world 2 days agoDidn’t this exact plant go bankrupt due to solar panels being so much more efficient?
It would make sense.
Thermal concentrator cost is basically fixed: mirrors of a specific quality, tracking mounts, an eye of sauron cooling loop. That tech doesn’t change.
But the bulk of photovoltaic installation cost is the panels. And those get exponentially cheaper.
They’ve gotten cheap, in fact, that the panels are sometimes less expensive than the labor and mounting hardware.
Yeah.
At some point mounting them statically becomes the more cost-effective than the sun-tracking mount, I guess.
It’s been static for a while in the large installations I have seen.
Actually it does change, from what I read mainly in terms of what substance is used to capture the heat of the sunlight, which in turn has other implications downstream (for example, if you melt salt and the molten salt is used to generate steam, rather than directly generating the steam, not only does the efficieny go up but you can keep on generating power during the night as long as there’s enough heat left in the salt).
Here is paper I found about it.
That’s actually very cool. There’s a lot of talk of molten salt energy storage anyway, and this just integrates it.
Maybe it could be built closer to other renewables or cities, and use a big vat to store heat from other power sources, when needed.
…Still, though.
AFAIK, the (silver?) mirrors on mounted servos are a pretty significant fixed cost.
No. The issue is solar panels getting much cheaper. The advantage of solar thermic plants are low cost of panels in exchange for more difficulty to maintain. This stops making sense when solar panels become dirt cheap and they cannot shift their power generation outside of peak solar(easily possible with molten salt tanks for the night, but not free)
There are hundreds of these.
tryitout@infosec.pub 2 days ago
If you mean the Vegas one, then yes it’s closing, don’t know if it’s gone bankrupt exactly.
en.wikipedia.org/…/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
I think that’s what they called a First Generation generator.
The ones in use now will actually use sunlight to melt salt (than then is used to generate steam) rather than directly generating the steam which has way more capacity to store heat, so they have a solar conversion efficiency of between 38% and 44%, plus the molten salt can keep on being used to generate steam during the night until it cools down enough.
EmpathicVagrant@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Well that makes no sense, I need it shut down to get Euclid’s C-Finder to work.
nevemsenki@lemmy.world 1 day ago
No worry. Just throw a bug report at Bethesda, wait a few years for them to do diddly squat, bitch on all forums and then wait until a modder fixes it.