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?
More Pages:
- Solar Power: How Much Does Wind Power And Solar Power Cost? (5/2/2011)
- Solar Power: How Much Does Solar Power Cost? (5/7/2011)
- Solar Power: How Much Does It Cost To Produce Solar Power In Contrast To Oil Or Power, Per Watt? (5/27/2011)
- What are the ‘cons’ to solar power energy?
- What’s a good source of information about solar power?
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Approximately $ 5,876,908,087.67, that’s an approximation though.
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!
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