Solar plants in Southern California: Electricity Too Cheap To Meter?

[NNadir]

Those familiar my tenure here at DU (and in my earlier tenure at SmirkingChimp, where I've resigned from posting) are probably aware of my strong advocacy, on environmental grounds, of nuclear power. It may be less clear that I am also a strong advocate of solar power, even though I believe that in most cases, solar power is somewhat more dangerous than nuclear power.

Both forms of energy are the subject of some mystification in my view, but the mysticism, at least on the left, takes different paths: Nuclear energy is thought of darkly and with inappropriate suspicion, whereas solar energy is often presented in often credulous and overly optimistic (dare one say overly "bright") terms.

If a person on the political left advances, as I do, the desirability of the rapid expansion of nuclear fueled generating capacity, several rote usually objections present themselves. Readers of the posts of my critics will be familiar with most of these.

One of the more questionable criticisms launched against nuclear energy is that it is not "too cheap to meter." This criticism is based on a remark made in 1954 by a US government official who suggested that this would be the ultimate result of nuclear generated electricity. Although there is currently no form of energy "too cheap to meter," somehow some people believe that this criticism, when applied to nuclear energy alone, is an argument for shutting it down. It seems not to matter to some that there were no commercial nuclear plants anywhere in the world at this time the remark was made, so the it had no experimental data to support it. Very clearly the official was confusing the cost of fuel (which is, in fact, almost "too cheap to meter" today) with the cost of capital equipment (the plant itself and its debt servicing) which remains expensive. Often my critics, while raising this point that nuclear energy is NOT too cheap to meter, will make the point that "solar energy is free."

Recently a poster here directed me (thank you) to consider that not all solar electricity is derived from PV cells, which are still very, very expensive. Some solar electricity is generated by steam produced from solar energy focused by parabolic mirrors. I looked into it. It happens that this form of solar energy is already commercial in Southern California, where 354 MWe of capacity has been installed. This capacity is equivalent to about 1/3 of that of a typical nuclear plant. The difference between the nuclear capacity, and the solar capacity, of course, is that the solar capacity - ignoring the ability to fuel these plants with fossil fuels at night - is only available during the day when the weather is good.

These plants are described in this report: http://www.volker-quaschning.de/downloads/VGB2001.pdf

Included in this report is a figure for the capital cost of construction of this capacity: 1.2 billion dollars. This means that the cost of constructing a solar plant is $3.4 million/MW. Construction costs for US nuclear power plants in the 1980s ranged between $2 billion and $6 billion depending on the need to retrofit the designs to satisfy the increasingly unlikely failure scenarios imagined by people who styled themselves (dubiously in my view) as "environmentalists." These construction costs were part of the reason that utilities in the United States stopped building nuclear plants.

What this all means, of course, is that cost of installing the Southern California solar capacity is roughly in the mid range for a nuclear plant (even without opposition): To install 1000 MWe of parabolic solar capacity will cost about 3.6 billion dollars. Thus we see that the criticism that nuclear power is not too cheap to meter cannot be improved upon by the installation of solar capacity.
(To be fair, however, solar stations are simpler to build inasmuch at they can be built in a modular fashion: One doesn't need the whole 3.6 billion at once.)

I note that in France and Japan, largely because of superior administrative policies, nuclear capacity is far less expensive to install than it was historically (at least in the late phases) in the United States.

None of this is meant to denigrate parabolic mirror solar electricity power plants. I don't think that 3.6 million per megawatt is an unacceptable cost for greenhouse free energy. I am very happy that this solar capacity exists, and though I don't have a very good idea of it's external cost, I suspect that this capacity is probably very very clean, possibly comparable with the cleanest electricity of all, wind, and possibly better than nuclear energy. These types of plants are probably only suitable in sunbelt/desert areas, but I applaud their use. I do however want to note that they are not free.