The facility, though cost effective at the time it was planned (2009), is now twice as expensive to run as solar photovoltaic technology, which has decreased in price much more rapidly than was expected in the 15 years since Ivanpah’s construction began.
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.
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.
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)
Thermal concentrator cost is basically fixed: mirrors of a specific quality, tracking mounts, an eye of sauron cooling loop. That tech doesn’t change much. Same with parabolic pipe plants.
But the bulk of photovoltaic installation cost is the panels. And those get exponentially cheaper.
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 (so a generation 2 system), rather than directly heating water with sunlight to generate the steam (generation 1), not only does the efficiency go up but you can keep on generating power during the night as long as there’s enough heat left in the salt, and whilst the basic principle is the same a lot of the engineering of the system changes because you’re circulating melted salt rather than steam, you want to store some of the heated salte for the nighttime and you need to concentrate more sunlight to reach higher temperatures so the area of mirrors is larger.
Solar thermal concentrators, they get so hot they have to use liquid metal.
They also function as adequate bird-zappers from what I’ve heard.
Parabolic plants also exist w/o a tower of sauron.
Why would anyone want that when the alternative is a tower of sauron
All I want for Christmas is new petty gods with towers to worship.
Real talk, there are not enough minor gods in the modern world. GIVE ME DICKOCALYPSE DAMMIT! (nsfw link)
But half the fun is having a gleaming tower of doom!
Didn’t this exact plant go bankrupt due to solar panels being so much more efficient?
If you mean the Vegas one, then yes it’s closing, don’t know if it’s gone bankrupt exactly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility
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.
Well that makes no sense, I need it to keep from being shut down to get Euclid’s C-Finder to work.
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.
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)
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 much. Same with parabolic pipe plants.
But the bulk of photovoltaic installation cost is the panels. And those get exponentially cheaper.
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 (so a generation 2 system), rather than directly heating water with sunlight to generate the steam (generation 1), not only does the efficiency go up but you can keep on generating power during the night as long as there’s enough heat left in the salt, and whilst the basic principle is the same a lot of the engineering of the system changes because you’re circulating melted salt rather than steam, you want to store some of the heated salte for the nighttime and you need to concentrate more sunlight to reach higher temperatures so the area of mirrors is larger.
Here is a paper I found about this stuff.
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 that have to be kept clean are a pretty significant fixed cost.
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 even cheaper than a tracking mount, I guess.
It’s been static for a while in the large installations I have seen.
There are hundreds of these.