DOE Races Against the Clock: Two Solar Loans Closed, Seven More to Go

DOE Races Against the Clock: Two Solar Loans Closed, Seven More to Go:

The deadline to complete the remaining DOE loan guarantees is 48 hours away from the end of the fiscal year close.

The DOE just finalized a $337 million loan guarantee to Mesquite Solar 1, part of a 700 megawatt photovoltaic project as well as for the Crescent Dunes solar thermal project which includes thermal storage for $737 million.

That's two down but the there are seven more outstanding conditional commitments for solar projects. And two of them (SolarStrong and Topaz), as we've covered, are not going to make it.

Here's the list of projects that are likely leading to some long days and nights at these firms and at the DOE loan guarantee office -- In the free time they have that's not occupied by the Solyndra affair.

• 
  First Solar's Antelope Valley 230-megawatt project with a loan guarantee of $680 million remains in the pipeline.


• 
  First Solar's 550-megawatt Desert Sunlight project with a partial guarantee of $1.88 billion remains in the pipeline.


• 
  First Solar's Topaz project with a partial guarantee of $1.93 billion will not meet the deadline.


• 
  Prologis Project Amp partial guarantee of $1.4 billion could close in the next two days.


• 
  SolarCity's SolarStrong with a partial guarantee of $344 million will not meet the deadline.


• 
  SunPower California Valley Solar Ranch loan guarantee of $1.187 billion for the 250 megawatt project is still in play.


• 
  Fotowatio's partial guarantee of $45.6 million for the 20 megawatt Apex plant in Nevada is still in play.


• 
  The is also a wind (Nordic Windpower) project and a biofuels project (Abengoa) in the queue.

Note that this deadline is just for the 1705 program and that projects using newer technologies like CPV or new inverters can take advantage of the 1703 program. This interview with Jonathan Silver of the DOE by the folks at GigaOm does a good job of explaining some of the intricacies of the loan guarantee program.

The two solar projects that have just reached the finish line:

Sempra Generation's massive 700-megawatt Mesquite Solar project, located near Phoenix, Arizona with Zachry Holdings as the EPC and Suntech as the panel supplier for the initial 200-megawatt (DC) phase of the build. The project is located near the Hassayampa 500-kV switchyard, a major transmission hub with access to southwestern U.S. markets. Transmission upgrades and site grading for the entire project have been completed in advance on the flat, privately held land. A 20-year power purchase agreements has been signed with Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) for the first phase of the project. When completed in 2013, Mesquite Solar I will be one of the largest photovoltaic solar installations in North America. The project will use "a non-trivial" number of Pluto panels, Suntech's high-efficiency PV panels. Mesquite will use transformer-less and liquid cooled inverter technology from Advanced Energy.

SolarReserve of Santa Monica, California closed a $140 million venture round in 2008 and just closed a $737 million loan guarantee from the DOE for a 110-megawatt molten salt storage power tower with more than 10 hours of thermal energy storage. This will be the tallest molten salt tower in the world, according to the DOE website. The firm licenses the molten salt power tower solar technology from Rocketdyne, a division of Hamilton Sundstrand, a subsidiary of UTC. SolarReserve has a power purchase agreement (PPA) with NV Energy for this project.

According to this chart from the Las Vegas Review Journal the PPA price for the Crescent Dunes project is $0.135 per kilowatt-hour







Will the DOE be able to close the other five projects?

Will Solyndra take a further toll on these lower-risk solar projects?

And will solar thermal projects be financeable in the future absent a loan guarantee?

We'll be able to answer at least two of those questions in the next 48 hours.

***

Here are some detailed stats on the Crescent Dunes project courtesy of Brett Prior at GTM Research:

Project Name: Crescent Dunes

Developer: SolarReserve

Technology: Power Tower

Capacity: 110 megawatts

Location: Tonopah, Nevada

Total Capital Cost: $983 million

Capital Cost: $8.93 per watt

Capacity Factor: 55 percent

Solar Resource: 2685 kWh/m^2/yr

Electricity generation: 480 GWh/yr

Solar-to-Electricity Efficiency: 17%

Acres: 1600 = 15 acres per megawatt

Cooling Method: Hybrid

EPC: UTC Pratt & Whitney

Operator: SolarReserve

Electricity Purchaser: NV Energy

Construction jobs: 600

O&M jobs: 45

# of heliostats/mirrors: 17170

Tower Height: 165 meters

Heat transfer fluid:Molten salt

Inlet Temperature (°C) 288 °C

Outlet Temperature (°C) 566 °C

Temp Difference 278 °C

Storage (hrs) 10

Break ground Oct-11

On line Jul-2013

PPA Date Dec-09

PPA Rate ($/kWh) $0.135/kWh

PPA/Tariff Period (yrs) 25

PPA approved by PUC Y

Land Type Public

Fast-tracked Y

Draft EIS 9/3/10

Record of Decision 12/21/10

Notes Thermal storage efficiency 99%

New SolarWindows Would Be First See-Through Windows To Generate Electricity

New SolarWindows Would Be First See-Through Windows To Generate Electricity:

Solar technologies are constantly evolving, becoming more and more effective as new designs and discoveries are made in the field. New Energy Technologies continues this trend with the advent of their new product, the SolarWindow. The new windows will be the first see-through windows that can also generate electricity through a specially designed spray put on the window.

They are developing six different types of SolarWindows for different situations:

• Commercial- A flat glass window for installation in commercial buildings


• Structural Glass- Structural glass walls and curtains for tall structures


• Architectural Glass- Textured and decorative interior glass walls, room dividers, etc.


• Residential- Window glass for installation in residential homes


• Flex- Flexible films that can be applied to existing windows


• BIPV- Building product components associated with building-integrated-photovoltaic(BIPV) applications in homes, buildings, and office towers.

7 Places Poo Will Power the Future

In the not-so-distant future, don't be surprised if you find poo providing energy in any of these places. Read more

Scientists Developing Fuel Cell that Generates Power While Cleaning Nuclear Waste

Scientists Developing Fuel Cell that Generates Power While Cleaning Nuclear Waste:

Researchers at Michigan State University (MSU) have isolated and explained the phenomenon that causes microbes to generate electricity while cleaning up nuclear waste. The team is hoping to use their findings to create a microbial fuel cell that is capable of generating renewable energy while it cleans up environments exposed to nuclear waste. The bacteria the team studied is a kind of geobacter that is covered in a coat of tiny, natural nanowires that protect the bacteria from the toxic materials. The nanowires are also the essential elements in immobilizing radioactive material and preventing it from seeping into the groundwater. While completing the complex task of stabilizing radioactive spills, the bacteria simultaneously creates energy that can be harnessed and used as a zero-emissions power supply.

Read the rest of Scientists Developing Fuel Cell that Generates Power While Cleaning Nuclear Waste

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ENN Group Wants to Invest Billions in US Clean Energy Projects

ENN Group Wants to Invest Billions in US Clean Energy Projects: China's ENN group plans to invest $8 billion in US clean energy projects over the next decade, according to reports.

Concentrated solar power plants are all wet

Concentrated solar power plants are all wet: "

by John Farrell.

Concentrating solar has promised big additions to
renewable energy production with the additional benefit of energy
storage—saving sun power for nighttime—but there’s a catch. Most of the new power plants are big water users despite being planned for desert locations.

With solar photovoltaic (PV) prices dropping so rapidly, does concentrating solar still make sense?

Concentrating solar thermal power uses big mirrors to focus sunlight
and make electricity. Think kids with magnifying glasses, but making
power instead of frying ants. The focused sunlight makes heat, the heat makes steam, and the steam powers a turbine to make electricity. In “wet-cooled” concentrating solar power plants, more water is used to make power than in any other kind of power plant. The following chart illustrates the
amount of water used to produce power from various technologies:

Water consumption can be cut dramatically
by using “dry-cooling,” but this change increases the cost per
kilowatt-hour (kWh) of power generated from concentrating solar power
(CSP). In the 2009 report “Juice from Concentrate,”
the World Resources Institute reports that the reduction in water
consumption adds 2-10 percent to levelized costs and reduces the power
plant’s efficiency by up to 5 percent.

Let’s see how that changes Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s original
levelized cost comparison between CSP and solar PV. Here’s the
original chart comparing PV projects to CSP projects, with no discussion
of water use or energy storage:

To make the comparison tighter, we’ll
hypothetically transform the CSP plants from wet-cooled to dry-cooled,
adjusting the levelized cost of power.

Using the midpoint of each estimate from “Juice from Concentrate” (6 percent increase to levelized costs and 2.5 percent efficiency
reduction), the change in the cost per kWh for dry-cooling instead of
wet-cooling is small but significant. For example, all three
concentrating solar power projects listed in the chart are wet-cooled
power plants. With a 6 percent increase in costs from dry-cooling and a 2.5 percent
reduction in efficiency, the delivered cost of electricity would rise by
approximately 1.7 cents per kWh.

The following chart, modified from an earlier post, illustrates the comparison:

With the increased costs to reduce water
consumption, CSP’s price is much less competitive with PV. A distributed solar PV program by Southern
California Edison has projected levelized costs of 17 cents per kWh for
1-2 megawatt solar arrays, and a group purchase program for residential solar in Los Angeles has a levelized cost of just 20 cents per kWh.

In other words, while wet-cooled CSP
already struggles to compete with low-cost, distributed PV, using dry-
cooling technology makes residential-scale PV competitive with CSP.

But there’s one more piece: storage.

Storage

While Nevada Solar One was built without
storage, the PS10 and PS20 solar towers were built with one hour of
thermal energy storage. Let’s see how that changes the economics.

To make the comparison comparable, we’ll
add the cost of one hour of storage to our two PV projects, a cost of
approximately $0.50 per Watt, or 2.4 cents per kWh. The following chart
illustrates a comparison of PV to CSP, with all projects having one hour
of storage (Nevada Solar One has been removed as it does not have
storage):

When comparing CSP with storage (and lower
water use) to PV with battery storage, we have a comparison that is
remarkably similar to our first chart. Distributed PV at a commercial
scale (1-2 megawatts) is still cheaper than CSP, but residential PV is more
expensive.

Even though dry-cooled CSP competes favorably on price, it still uses much more water than PV. That issue is probably why many solar project developers are switching from CSP to PV technology for their large-scale desert projects.

Concentrating solar thermal power had its moment of cost advantage a few years ago, but the rapid pace (and zero water use) of solar PV installations has quickly eroded even the energy storage advantage of CSP.

Related Links:

Solar-powered oil field runs on sunshine, irony

Want to save energy? Stop wasting water

China working on solar yaks

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MIT Creating Low-Cost 24/7 Solar Power

MIT Creating Low-Cost 24/7 Solar Power: "(Source: Climate Progress) Researchers at MIT are designing a new method of building concentrating solar power plants with thermal storage that they say could lower the cost of energy by 50% compared with existing technologies.
Last month, a 19.9 MW power-tower concentrating"