User:Pgmoka/sandbox
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Criticism of "Concentrated Solar Power" Wikipedia Article
The article “Concentrated Solar Power” is a pretty good article talking about an alternative form of energy, but it lack a few citations, and in the discussion tab, it seems like there is a lot of conversation about the specific numbers used in the article. In the “History” tab, the 4thparagraph to the last are missing citations. In the “Deployment Around the World” tab, the first paragraph is missing a citation in the end. The “Efficiency” tab is missing citations(it only has two in the beginning).
The language in the beginning might be a little lacking as seen in the third paragraph when the article says: “In most cases, CSP technologies currently cannot compete on price with photovoltaics (solar panels),”. This wording might deceive the reader, and it should actually cite a study, or an economist that has this belief. I don’t think this is intentional, so I don’t doubt the information given by the article.
The article seems to have citations for reliable sources, universities, books, research papers. Citation is also up to date, and everything later than 2000 is used is the “History” tab.
As mentioned before, most of the discussion is around numbers the article uses. There seems to be a lot of questioning around the specific technology the articles sites when talking about certain kinds of technologies the Solar panels were using. There is also a highlight in the article possibly using the wrong units.
What my contributions to the discussions would be:
Quoted price of nuclear?
From the article: "To put this in perspective, Arizona Public Service (APS), Arizona‘s largest utility company, purchases power from the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station at a cost of 1.65 cents per kilowatt-hour".
Question: perhaps if this nuclear power station is state-owned, the price paid for electricity only covers the operational and not the capital cost? I have heard levelised energy costs for nuclear that are significantly higher. Jdpipe (talk) 06:20, 11 July 2011 (UTC)
- It anyway appears daring to draw such a parallel, as there has not yet been found a single place to store the nuclear waste. One could mention that casually. --Hans Dunkelberg (talk) 08:19, 11 July 2011 (UTC)
Have to agree, since the Wikipedia article on the Palo Verde plant currently says that it's 29.1% owned by APS, so they're probably getting a special rate. Also, it says that the wholesale price of the electricity was 6.33 cents per kWh in 2007, and 2.5 cents per kWh in 2002. The quoted price of solar is unsupported in the cited link also. I added a section on that. Essentially, you can't tell what power will cost just from the construction costs, you also need to know the plants operational lifetime and its operating costs. Also, if the construction costs are a loan, you need to know the terms. Too many numbers given in the energy industry are misleading enough to amount to outright lies. Kieran M O'Callaghan (talk) 19:43, 16 January 2012 (UTC)
- Hi - I just wanted to give you a bit of a warning. When they discussed this the guidelines on what could be in an article were likely far more loose than they are now. When adding to an article you need to summarize an existing source - you can't synthesize or draw conclusions/parallels based on what is in the source. I do see where you have this mentioned above, but I wanted to emphasize this because it would be considered original research and would be likely to be reverted. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 19:49, 2 February 2018 (UTC)
Unsupported price claim
From the article: "As of 9 September 2009 (2009 -09-09)[update], the cost of building a CSP station was typically about US$2.50 to $4 per watt,[19] while the fuel (the sun's radiation) is free. Thus a 250 MW CSP station would have cost $600–1000 million to build. That works out to $0.12 to $0.18/kwh." This is pretty much a paraphrase of the quoted article, but for starters $2.50 times 250 million is $625 million. More importantly, it works out to $2500 to $4000 per kilowatt of capacity. Wattage tells us how much power the plant puts out continuously (well, on average). The statement on $0.12 to $0.18 per kilowatt-hour is unsupported because you can't figure out the kilowatt-hours without knowing how long the plant will last and what the operational costs are. The cited article says nothing about that, although it does make the clearly unsupported claim of $0.12 to $0.18 per kilowatt-hour. There are approximately 8766 hours in a year, so if the example plant has no operating costs, then the quoted prices would mean that the plant would only last $2500/$0.12/8766 years = 2.377 years for the low cost and $4000/$0.18/8766 years = 2.535 years. That's not realistic, so we have to assume a plant lifetime. If pull a more realistic number out of the air and say the plant can last a highly probable 30 years, then that's $2500/(30*8766) = $0.0095 per kilowatt hour on the low end, or $4000/(30*8766)= $0.0152 per kilowatt on the high end, once again without operational costs. If we take those base figures and apply them to the quoted prices from the article, then that's $0.1105 operational costs per kwh on the low end and $0.1648 on the high end. For the whole plant, that works out to $242,160,750 per year on the low end and $361,159,200 per on the high end for operational costs. Similar numbers come out for any realistic plant lifetime. That means yearly operational costs greater than a third of the plants construction costs. According to http://nuclearfissionary.com/2010/03/15/operating-costs-of-a-nuclear-power-plant/ operating costs for a nuclear power plant are about $0.0186 per kWh, which works out to $0.0186*8766*250,000=$40761900/year for an equivalent nuclear plant. It's hard to imagine that a nuclear power plant would have operating costs 6 or more times lower than a solar plant. Essentially, the quoted numbers have to be either just pulled out of the air or they come from some other calculation that doesn't appear in the cited article. Kieran M O'Callaghan (talk) 08:52, 16 January 2012 (UTC)
- The numbers in the article were calculated based on the expected output. Solar power does not operate 24 hours a day (the sun does set each day), and the calculation of 12 to 18 cents/kWh for construction costs of $2.50 to $4.00/watt seems about what should be expected. The paper[1] gives the formula for calculating LCOE as LCOE = summation ((I + M + F)/(1 + r)^t)/(E/(1+r)^t) where I is the investment cost, M is the maintenance, F is the fuel cost (0 for CSP), r is the discount rate, t is the year, and E is the annual generation, which is a function of the amount of sunshine where the plant is located. Apteva (talk) 06:42, 9 September 2012 (UTC)
Ivanpah in lead needs updating
In 2015 Ivanpah made 69% of its yearly capacity, rather than the 40% stated here (which most likely referred to 2014). http://breakingenergy.com/2015/06/17/ivanpah-solar-production-up-170-in-2015/ I don't really understand why this is in the lead anyway, it should be in a later section.137.111.13.204 (talk) 04:54, 11 April 2016 (UTC)
- How has that number change through time? Is there a more current report from a good source? - Pgmoka (talk) 06:25, 1 February 2018 (UTC)
Rotary Steam Engine
No innovation is welcome unless it is carefully studied and understood. New concept like the Quasiturbine Air (storage) / Steam Engine has a perfectly balanced rotor and joined torque pulses for quasi-continuous steam flow and torque. It is a sort of hybrid between Conventional Turbine and Rotary Wankel, being a low-rpm-high-torque uniflow positive displacement rotary design, particularly suitable for direct drive Solar steam power system.
As a first introduction to this new QT technology, one can have a look at the University of Connecticut « Brash Quasiturbine QT.6LSC Air / Steam Car » Video : All day long Run (0,3 min.) and Variable speed Run (9 min.) and more on Brash power system For these reasons, readers interested by Thermal Concentrated Solar Power may want to know about the Quasiturbine for a complete Solar thermal overview. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.56.253.176 (talk) 20:14, 26 March 2011 (UTC)