South Australia to get 150 MW CSP plant

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There's a sort of Heisenberg uncertainty principle at work in renewable energy: you can get (reasonable) certainty about output, but not price, if you go with fossil fuel generation, or you can get certainty about price but output is variable, if you go with renewables.  Except for concentrated solar power (CSP), where you can get both.

It produces stable output at a fixed price.  In fact CSP is better than "baseload" because it produces dispatchable power, power on demand as it were, because of its molten salt storage, which is an integral part of the process.  This is why I have found it so interesting and intriguing: it provides the "gap filler" ("firming") which will allow us to go to 100% renewables.  And CSP produces no toxic effluent, uses no water, can produce power 24/7 or as required, and is surprisingly cheap.  Also, CSP uses the infra red (heat) rays from the sun as well as visible light, whereas solar PV just uses visible light.

I've talked about CSP often, but you might find these particular posts helpful:

CSP gets dirt cheap
CSP on steroids
Baseload solar at 6c per kWh
Yes we can
Solar Towers

And RenewEconomy has a nice piece on the Port Augusta CSP plant here.

The South Australian government has contracted with Solar Reserve, builder of the pioneering Crescent Dunes CSP plant in Nevada, to provide the electricity needed by all state government operations in the state.  The plant will have a capacity of 150 MW (with output of 135MW )which is the largest in the world, and will have 1100 MWh (or 8 hours) of storage.  Electricity demand in South Australia is (rough average) 1.5 GWh per hour.  So this plant can provide 9% of South Australia's demand and more than 100% of the state government's demand.

It will deliver electricity at A$75/MWh (US$56/MWh).  This is even cheaper than SolarReserve's Likana solar energy project at Antofagasta (Chile), a triple CSP plant which is contracted to supply the Chilean grid at US$64/MWh.  It's cheaper than new coal (A$100/MWh for brown coal and A$110/MWh for black coal) and not much more expensive than existing coal (A$37/MWh) which is cheap because the aging power stations are fully depreciated.

But coal power stations cannot scale output up and down like a CSP power station can.  So during daylight, power could come from solar PV, currently A$60 to A$65 per MWh, then at night it could come from the stored power in the molten salt reservoirs of the CSP plant.  This ability to dispatch power when needed is far more useful than the fixed output of a coal or nuclear power station.  And all those old, and therefore cheap, coal power stations will have to close down over the next 10 to 15 years, because it will be far too costly to upgrade them. even ignoring a carbon tax.  And compared to new coal power stations at A$100 plus, a combination of wind, solar and CSP will be half the cost, with perfect energy security.

If this doesn't silence the conservative naysayers I don't know what will.  Nothing, probably.  Their passion for coal is so bizarrely dotty that there is no explaining how they reach their opinions. But make no mistake: this signals the death knell of coal.  Queensland will want a CSP plant too.  And Victoria.  And NSW.  And the success of this plant and all the others SolarReserve is building around the world will encourage other places with lots of heat and sun to build their own.  At this price it would be a no-brainer not to.  Who will want or need "baseload" now?