A Look at 10 Indian Solar Projects which will Prevent Future Blackouts

The reason solar may work in India is their standard of living and effluence is very low. What can you expect from a country that worships rats and treast cows like pedestrians? So it fits right in with their lifestyle. But still they will likely undergo the Spanish experience of high costs for relatively little return.

In Spain, the original model for Obama and the greens, green proponents invested heavily in wind and solar, but prices rose so high it ended up driving the mfg. industry to China and India. 2.2 jobs were lost for every 1 green job created and only 1 in 10 green jobs were permanent. In Italy it was 3.4 real jobs lost for every green job created. In Spain, unemployment rose to 25.5%, highest of any country. Not a single fossil fuel power plant was shut down and CO2 emissions went up 50% not down.

Masterresource.org:

Though solar thermal tower technology has been around since the 1970s, to date, only one plant in the world commercially generates electricity: Abengoa Solar’s 11-MW PS10 tower just outside Seville, in Spain’s Andalucía desert has been grid-connected since early 2007. Because the technology relies on heat from solar energy that is reflected by mirror arrays (heliostats) onto a tower-mounted receiver, installations tend to be site-specific, expensive, and high-maintenance.

Spanish company SENER, meanwhile, is building a 17-MW facility, with a mirror field measuring 75 acres, also in Andalusia. That plant, Gemasolar (previously known as “Solar Tres”), has been under development for 7 years now at the hands of SENER and, more recently, Abu Dhabi firm Masdar. It should be operational by 2011. Unlike PS10, it will use molten salt heated to 1,050F to transfer heat.

Molten salt technology was developed from U.S. Department of Energy pilot tests in the 1990s of the Solar One and Solar 2 projects in the Mojave Desert. This method will give the Spanish plant a thermal storage advantage of 647 MWh (permitting 15 hours of turbine load) over PS10’s paltry 20 MWh with steam (or 30 minutes), according to the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research. But that advantage will have a cost, the group said: Gemasolar’s total efficiency is 14% — worse than PS10’s 15.45%. Added to that, due in large part to the associated storage technology, Gemasolar’s generation costs will be €78.5 /MWh ($105.3/MWh) higher than that of PS10.

But the problem with solar energy is subsidies and mandates. If some plants do not face price- and volume-risks, of course this will come at the expenses of other plants. This form of “competition” resembles the idea of socialism that George Orwell made famous: all competitors are equal, but some competitors are more equal than others.

So India, so indoctrinated with the global warming fear mantra, will fall into the same trap that the EU and increasingly, the US has fallen into. You can't integrate energy poor intermittent into the grid successfully. This sort of energy has limited application and usually for remote circumstances. It's the flip side of social utopia, a Green fancy more then a real alternative.