Chemical Engineer <cheme...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Concentrated Solar thermal has been around for 40 years and the costs > still suck. > Wind turbines were around for 1000 years but until the 1990s their costs were much too high. It is not the length of time that counts; it is the total R&D and scale of manufacturing. The LUZ CSP plants in California would have been far cheaper per watt if LUZ had been allowed to build them on the large scale they originally proposed. The power company deliberately scaled them down to a size that anyone could see would make them uneconomical. This drove LUZ out of business, predictably. They are assembling 350,000 mirrors/heliostats at the job site. How > effective do you think that is? > If the technique can be improved, it will be, by the time time they install millions of mirrors. Just allow competition and wait for capitalism to work its magic. How much more time do they need to be competitive? 50 years, 500 years, > 5000 years? > It makes no sense to measure this in years! You have to measure capacity. My guess is that 10 GW of capacity would suffice, although I would not know. I think ~10 GW actual (not nameplate) was enough to bring wind power down to the cost of coal, factoring in externalties. Asking how long it would take is unfair. This resembles the skeptical attacks on cold fusion; i.e., "it has been 23 years so why don't we have practical reactors?" Measured in R&D dollars and manpower, it has been about 2 months, compared to plasma fusion or "clean coal" research. It has been maybe 1 day compared to the cost of wars fought for oil. - Jed
