How much would it cost to build a Solar Power Plant?
OK so I’m in scince class right now and were doing a project on "Solar Power Plants"and we can’t find anything on them…so would anybody know on how much it would cost to build one?
Tagged with: solar power plants
Filed under: Solar Panel Questions And Additional Information
This is a very open ended question.
It could be as little as $10. But this solar power plant would only produce enough energy to light a very small light bulb!!
It all depends on the power output of the power station. I would estimate that it would cost about 100 times what it costs to build a fossil fuel powered plant for each megawatt of power produced.
So, a 10GW (Giga Watt) oil fired power plant may cost $1billion to build, so a 10GW solar plant would cost about $100billion to build (and would probably take up 1000 times the land space required for the oil plant)
And they wonder why solar hasn’t caught on yet!
Approximately $5,876,908,087.67, that’s an approximation though.
Try looking up "Kramer Junction" for an example of a solar power plant. You can use Google, but here’s one example:
http://www.solel.com/products/pgeneration/ls2/kramerjunction/
That plant uses solar thermal energy to turn conventional turbines.
If you’re looking for data on photovoltaic power, a utility scale plant is probably going to run around $6 a watt today, but expect panel prices to drop up to 25% in the coming year. So a 1 GW plant, a typical size by the way, would cost $6 billion. [Ironically, that first guy who gave a flip answer is pretty close.] Compare this to $1.3 billion for a coal-fired plant of the same size. For costs, see this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_power_plant
It cost less than $200.
See
http://www.solarpowerworldinfo.com/make-power-at-home/