[WaxProlix]

> Utility-scale solar power projects like this are just more corporate welfare boondoggles

Citation strongly needed. Especially in a context where turning sun power into carbon-based fuel wouldn't want to be in a parking lot, but could be near or even colocated with a large solar installation.

[hinkley]

I’m sure somewhere along the way someone called the idea of centralizing power distribution in the first place a corporate welfare boondoggle.

After all, why can’t these industries generate their own power, like in the good ole days?

[titzer]

Ivanpah (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility): $2.2 billion for 392 megawatts, including a $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee. It'll be profitable (yay!)

..but that'd pay for 100,000 - 200,000 residential solar panel installs that would primarily benefit...residential homeowners. That'd be a ton of jobs, too. And there'd be no power-company profits.

We could crunch numbers on how much more efficient a utility-scale plant is, but look at the reality of who ends up with the money and the profits and who has to keep paying the same damn power bills.

[Analemma_]

Ivanpah is a CSP plant; that technology is a dead end and its cost numbers have nothing to do with PV plants, which are the only kind which get built now.

With the benefit of hindsight, Ivanpah should never have been built, but at the time both CSP and PV looked competitive, and so it made sense to invest in both. Now it does not.

[Veserv]

That is a solar thermal system not a photovoltaic system. You are comparing different technologys.

Last I checked, solar thermal is not a price competitive utility scale generation technology; photovoltaic is. That facility was probably funded as a large scale experiment to investigate the viability of solar thermal at increasing scales (or corruption).

The gigawatts of new utility scale PV being brought up every year are largely privately funded and cheaper than existing generation sources (in the current context).

[atourgates]

My biggest case against utiliy-scale solar is that it (can) displace important natural ecosystems. Whereas home or commercial solar nearly always is just displacing rooftops, or parking lot covers.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> but that'd pay for 100,000 - 200,000 residential solar panel installs that would primarily benefit...residential homeowners. That'd be a ton of jobs, too. And there'd be no power-company profits.

If those homes are not grid-tied, good luck with electrically-powered heat pumps as a winter heat source during the winter anywhere that has a winter. Not everyone has (and for the foreseeable, can have) a Passivhaus.

So that means the local grid has to be able to accept the overflow in summer and deliver in winter, which means ... power-company involvement and likely profits.

[kelnos]

In addition to the other objections raised to this comparison (seriously, attempting to compare a non-PV solar farm with residential PV installs is... silly at best), consider that you're not even comparing them in the right way. Ultimately you want to compare the cost per unit energy per unit time, amortized over the respective life of the panels. You also need to compare the cost of maintenance over the life of the panels. And you don't get to say "the residential ones are covered under warranty, so it's free"; someone has to pay for it in the end. When I was looking, all the residential solar installers I talked to would also remove and replace the panels for free when the building's roof needed to be replaced. Again, that's a cost, even if it isn't borne by the homeowner.

Saying that "it cost $X to build this, and that would pay for Y other things" is meaningless.