Are we talking magical solar "watts" or physicist watts?
3000 Mega"watts" with a 20% capacity loading, typical of solar loading capacities, is the equivalent of a 600 MW plant operating at 100% capacity.
A six hundred megawatt plant (continuous load) at 3.2 billion dollars is, frankly, a lousy investment. That is over $5,000/kw. A 900 MWe gas fired (thermal) plant is built for around half a billion dollars - ignoring the external costs, which are dumped into the earth's atmosphere. This is way out of line with an acceptable capital investment in a business, and probably an environmental, sense.
I will believe the 40 year old claims of the solar PV industry when it begins to report itself in units of
energy and not peak power. I recall vividly day dreaming about just such stuff while biking down the Strand in Hermosa Beach in the late 1970's. I was young then, and I believed almost anything. I have heard this story so many times in my lifetime, that I find the whole claim dubious. I also see it, like the critic in the link, as a typically Republican "screw the poor to benefit the rich scheme."
I suggest that for peak loading capacities, solar concentrator plants in the California desert could be built much more cheaply and at a much lower cost to the environment. Moreover the benefits of these plants would be distributed over the entire population of California, and not just some rich kids living in the hills above San Jose powering up their 500 watt stereos with slightly less guilt involved. Shit, who knows, with even less guilt, they'll probably crank the power
up and brag insipidly about it too.
My qualitative guess is that the energy spent in producing web sites extolling the benefits of solar PV power almost entirely consumes the world output of PV cells.
I have yet to see a grand solar PV scheme that promised anything in a 5 year time frame and certainly I have never seen such as scheme that actually delivered any where near what was initially claimed in the interminable series of press releases. This one, of course, constitutes a new solar PV record in that it claims it will be available in only 11 years. My prediction: It won't be. I would prefer records that produce units of
delivered significant energy. The nuclear industry, my favorite, has been setting such records regularly over the last several years. It would be wonderful, for instance, if we could say, "California produced half an exajoule of solar PV electricity last year," but we can't say that. The target date is always 15 to 50 years off, and when you come back in 15 to 50 years, it is
still off 15 to 50 years.
For the record, according to this link:
http://www.physics.uci.edu/~silverma/demand.html the peak power demand in California is around 38,000 watts. Thus even at peak, this three billion dollars won't produce a significant portion of California's load, less than 10%, and then only on sunny days.
To the extent that this alleged capacity actually is installed - and I don't believe for a second that it ever will be, as the industry has been far too long on promises and far too short on delivery for far too many decades - it will be useful to the extent that it replaces the 27,000 megawatts of
natural gas capacity that currently exists in California. But even if it did succeed, it would represent a drop in the global climate change bucket.
I would be thrilled, of course, to be proved
wrong but I very much doubt I will be.
But it's no skin off my back. If the citizens of California want to spend their money this way, I don't really care. I suppose it is a more reasonable investment than investments in new prisons and new freeways, but it is probably not as good as an investment in education or health care or mass transit, but, hey, I don't live there any more.