The Victoria project FAQ mentions they're building plants to produce needed pieces first so there are still risks.

On the other side the PV cell itself is coming from Spectrolab who has been in the business (for space use in decade length missions) for 50 years and still making progress. The rest is sun tracking mirrors which are not really new either. And if I believe this press release (cited on wikipedia) the CS500 model has been running commercially since 2003 (with a less efficient PV cell but the rest look identical).

BTW I didn't notice but BNP Paribas is also listed as member of the financing team for Jerome wind farm.

http://www.q7wind.nl/en/windpark.asp

Annual power production:     435 GWh

So that's slightly above (3.5%) the 420.5 GWh I computed so it puts the price per installed effective watt at 10.3 USD for wind (vs 10.7).

* http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy05osti/37322.pdf
page 2: after reevaluation the current cost and use of concrete/aluminium adds 3-5 monthes to payback time

* http://jupiter.clarion.edu/~jpearce/Papers/netenergy.pdf
there are difference in favour of roof mounted against centralized plants but they're small in time to payback

* http://www.csudh.edu/oliver/smt310-handouts/solarpan/pvpayback.htm
Interesting data on solar cells reusing waste product of chip production, and solar cell only silicon being 10 times less energy intensive than chip silicon.

All in all I still think it's just a myth: payback time is greater for PV than wind but it's not significant.

And I wouldn't be surprised if the average payback times for installed PV drop below wind in the coming years.

For payback time, I see that no study looks at concentrated solar PV (as used for the Victoria project) energy cost. The PV cell itself is very small (but likely more hazardous components) the rest is mirror and tubes.

But one interesting thing is that the Victoria project is using a large number - 19250 - of relatively small CS 500 Heliostat dishes to produce the advertized 154 MW peak, so that's 8 kW peak per dish, so about 1.6 kW assuming 20% load (average price per dish of the plant is 18130 USD).

These numbers for one dish are not far from home consumption so this has great potential as a very distributed system.

wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andasol_1_solar_power_station

Storage of energy is a nice feature for this plant, and it is certainly worth something.

Some information for energy storage technologies:

• http://www.eurotrib.com/comments/2006/9/4/8515/48189/12
  
• http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2007/5/14/91654/2347#3
  
• http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2007/1/28/183633/609#3
  
• http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2007/7/12/203228/318#17

In one of the largest contracts for an energy storage system in the wind power industry, VRB Power Systems Inc. has contracted to supply a 1.5 MW x 8 hour Vanadium redox battery system. This will be driven from phase 2 of the wind farm and will enable surplus electricity to be generated when demand is low, and will improve consistency or supply to the electricity network

http://www.leonardo-energy.org/drupal/node/959

says the cost of the battery system is $6.3 millions.

French 2006 average grid power use is 55GW (peak use was 87GW), so 1.3TWh per average day.

Cost of storing one average day of France electricity use by this system is thus 682 billions USD (37% of 2006 France GDP). Of course we don't have to store all of it in batteries but this gives a reference number :).

That's 1.5*8=12Mwh for 6.3 millions USD so 525 USD per battery stored kWh.

I couldn't find wh figures for andasol, assuming the "6 hours" cited means a quarter of a day production, daily production being 490 Mwh that makes it to 122 Mwh of energy stored, which is worth 64 millions USD by the battery price above. That's 15% of the plant price so overall not a big difference if my computations hold.

More on energy storage here:

http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/energy_storage/index.html

The vanadium stuff is mentionned and many more.

http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2007/04/11_mw_solar_tow.html

11 MW peak, 24.3 GWh per year for 47 millions USD so 2.7 MW installed effective MW so 17 USD per installed effective watt.

In no sense is offshore windpower mature, and while the long-term prognosis is exceptional, the technology can not truly be considered commercial.  Q7 pushes the frontier in both financing and water depth for a large project, but it uses quite conventional turbines.

The first real offshore turbines are still being tested at onshore prototype sites, including REpower 5M (4WTs), Multibrid 5MW (2 WTs, one with a tripod foundation), and the Enercon 6MW (evolved from a number of turbines beginning at 4.5 MW).  I've visited all these turbines, but won't climb until next month.

Several other smaller turbines have offshore versions, including one Nordex N90 about a 100 or so meters offshore in Rostock harbor.  The German offshore test station is planned to begin construction next year.

REpower has installed one 5M turbine near the Beatrice oil rig at depths around 45 meters, so while this is not a "large commercial" project, it is the state of the art currently.  A second 5M was intended to be installed last year, but was pushed back to this summer as the rig was not available.  I don't know if the second WT is already installed.

The real state of the art will be floating foundations, as the rest of the world does not look the pool table equivilent of the North Sea.  Floating foundations will allow projects to be sited far enough from coasts to obviate conflicting use and visual effects, which in most parts of the world have depths up to 200 meters.

Except in the North Sea, it makes no sense to go offshore until high value onshore wind sites are operational.  Onshore remains the focus of any chance we have to meet necessary renewable targets worldwide, but even including the remaining sites in northern Europe.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

First of all, the notion of a price per MW is atrocious. The only relevant price is that of $/kWh, i.e. per energy output. Prices per capacity can have relevance for intra-industry comparisons (i.e. comparing the cost of one wind farm vs another) but not to compare different technologies. Prices per kWh include the initial investment cost (and the financing cost), the operating cost and the fuel cost.

Laurent has chosen USD/installed effective watt as benchmark, which is just installation cost (in $) / output (Wh) * the number of hours in a year (365*24). Perhaps not the measurement I would have chosen, but nothing wrong with it per se as long as you want to compare installation costs. I guess the assumption is that the differences in financing and operating cost is small. Fuel cost is the same, zero.

solar around 15-20c/kWh

Thermal, PV or both?

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se

First of all, the notion of a price per MW is atrocious. The only relevant price is that of $/kWh, i.e. per energy output.

If you read my post carefully you see that I quote only output figures, I just divide them by 365*24.

Why do I do this division and post in installed efficient MW and not USD/kWh "retail price"?

Because I don't have data for financing, maintenance and lifetime of the power plants which is needed to provide the retail price per kWh. Financing being equal we have to guess the relative value of other parameters if we want to get the kWh retail price.

several years before construction starts

My understanding is that the CS500 solar dish model is in production since 2003 at the Umuwa site according to the company document I cited, but it has only 10 dishes (at a price of 207 500 USD per 22kW peak dish, probably first prototypes :).

google map of the Umuwa plant:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http%3A%2F%2Fbbs.keyhole.com%2Fubb%2Fdownload.php%3FNumber%3D893511&am p;t=k&om=1&ie=UTF8&ll=-26.473512,132.01476&spn=0.002295,0.003616&z=18

Here is an Oil Drum post with a nice photo of Umuwa dishes:

http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/2583

The 22kW peak dishes at Umuwa have a diameter of 13.7 meter, height of 14.5 meters:

http://www.bcse.org.au/docs/Project%20Profiles/Anangu%20Pitjantjatjara%20Solar%20Station.pdf

I don't know if the dish will be the same or different at the Victoria plant.

Of course all projects carry risk, overestimates are floating around but that's life :).

There seem to be a lot of solar power plants of various kind being built in Spain right now, plus their supporting part plants, with EU/state/region providing part of the funding which is quite encouraging.

I don't search through spanish well so I had some trouble finding what's going on after the initial in english press release :).

If you have links to pages in spanish about those projects I'm interested: I'm able to grok them but finding them via google is harder for me.

So all in all I'd say according to published numbers concentrated solar PV can already be cheaper than wind (unless I did misundertand something :).

Of course we should do both, but there's no reason to dismiss photovoltaics.

This post was about updating the "we're not there yet on solar PV techno for plants on a cost basis" line to the latest developments.

Now, from the link you provided:

July 30, 2007

From 40.7 to 42.8 % Solar Cell Efficiency

University of Delaware-led team sets solar cell record, joins DuPont on $100 million project.
Newark, Delaware [RenewableEnergyAccess.com]

Using a novel technology that adds multiple innovations to a very high-performance crystalline silicon solar cell platform, a consortium led by the University of Delaware (UD) has achieved a record-breaking combined solar cell efficiency of 42.8 percent. The current record of 40.7 percent was attained in December 2006 by Boeing's Spectrolab, Inc.

[...]
Barnett and Honsberg said that reaching the 42.8 percent mark is a significant advance in solar cell efficiency, particularly given the unique small and portable architecture being used by the consortium and the short time--21 months--in which it was developed.

Honsberg said the previous best of 40.7 percent efficiency was achieved with a high concentration device that requires sophisticated tracking optics and features a concentrating lens the size of a table and more than 30 centimeters, or about 1 foot, thick. The UD consortium's devices are potentially far thinner at less than 1 centimeter.

"This is a major step toward our goal of 50 percent efficiency," Barnett said. "The percentage is a record under any circumstance, but it's particularly noteworthy because it's at low concentration, approximately 20 times magnification. The low profile and lack of moving parts translates into portability, which means these devices easily could go on a laptop computer or a rooftop."

[...]

In November 2005, the UD-led consortium received approximately $13 million in funding for the initial phases of the DARPA Very High Efficiency Solar Cell (VHESC) program to develop affordable portable solar cell battery chargers.

[...]

So they pushed from 37% efficiency in 2005 (end of wikipedia table) to 42.8% in less than three years on 13 millions USD funding (aka peanuts), plus the stuff need far less sun concentration which means less temperatures and other issues.

ThatBritGuy should send them a postcard :).

http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/reinsider/story?id=49617

Kenya, not a place that comes readily to mind as a PV leader is, in fact, just that. With roughly 30,000 small (truly small, 20-100 watts, not kilowatts, per household) systems sold per year, has the world's highest household solar ownership rate.

Interesting!