The plant is being built by Abengoa Solar, at an approximate cost of $1.5 billion. The figure of 1,500 employees is a projected number that applies only during the construction phase; after commissioning it is expected to employ 65 people. As a comarison, a 200 MW coal-fired plant project I know about in Australia employed 450 people during construction, and 30 during operation, cost $400 million, uses 3GL of water annually and has an attendant coal mine that brings tears to one’s eyes.

APS has agreed to buy all the power from the plant for a 30 year period, but assets such as this can reasonably expect to have a lifespan of 40 years. The annualised cost of the project over time will depend on prevailing interest rates, a swiftly changing subsidy environment, the choice of present value discount rate used and the assumed life span of those assets, so it would be difficult to quote in a non-technical article without loads of qualifying information attached.

The land in question is currently in use as agricultural land, and the project is expected to use only 25% of the water currently in use there. And quoting 70,000 homes is a bit of marketing fluff, but not as much as some would expect. 4kW is an OK figure to use for household consumption, as we don’t all have our kettles, toasters, fridges, light bulbs, computers, irons and so on running at full pelt all the time (though yes, air conditioning can be an issue, since they do all tend to start up at the same time). Also power plants earn money based on the spot price of electricity on the wholesale market, so trying to calculate how much this plant will earn with simple back of the envelope formulas is a tad naive. The good thing about solar plants is that their output has good correlation with demand (a hot sunny day = lots of air conditioners on) – and when demand is high the price is high, so they tend to earn more per megawatt hour than conventional plants.

Not being a biologist, I don’t know terribly much about the poor white-footed deer mouse. But since this project is being constructed on previously agricultural land, he’s probably not going to have his habitat destroyed – that already happened long ago.

Interestingly, this project also requires extra 230kV transmission lines to be installed to get the power out of there. This is often a significant component of the cost of solar and wind generation because they are located away from major grid connection points.

- Sales of $4 billion dollars over 30 years? That’s somewhere between $0.068 per KWH assuming 80% operating uptime, $0.054 at 100%. Those are pretty good numbers, and shouldn’t need subsidy. But wait . . . too good to be true with 1500 jobs and $0.05 per kwh in labor costs . . . and what about capital, maintenance, and profits?

I don’t know which numbers are wrong, or why numbers are missing. But no one should say “WOW!” without them

When that happens, I give these articles as much credibility as an email from the wife of the Prime Minister of Nigeria.

For example:

- I couldn’t find the capital cost of the plant. That’s important because part of the cost of the power includes (a) return on capital and (b) maintenance costs. Both of these are driven by the capital cost.

- 1,500 jobs sounds high, and probably includes (a) jobs created by construction (short term jobs) and (b) ongoing plant labor. If we assume they are all permanent jobs, and use $60k per employee and 292 operating days for the plant, the labor cost alone is about $0.05 per kwh.
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Does anyone know where to get these amazing solar panels? I will be the 1st to buy them. Home solar systems are a start people, albeit expensive. Eventually plants such as these will replace a similar sized coal plant. I’ve worked in and around a 600 MW coal plant, and it is disgusting. There is a huge amount of land required to house and store the coal, as well as the plant. The argument against using previously disturbed desert land is moot. if a 1KW home system has the effect of 10 trees, this plant would have the effect of 2.8 million trees cleaning the air. That is what is important.

how much is the capacity of the said plant??