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Thanks Victor. I agree, even for the optimistic planning phase it seems that the project is cost comparable to nuclear (with 3.6GW nuclear set up costs being 22B$) but provides "average 20h a day power". timeline is stated to be 2029, again, in the ballpark of nuclear energy of 5-10y.
So this project is not quick nor cheap and you get much less than nuclear power (with current day reactor technology, working in the field for several decades).
BTW: it is planned to take up 1500 square kilometers, another reason to be in the desert...
Probably not a rational cost effective choice.
See below- I made some estimations based on literature and analyzed a current large scale project.
cheers,
Danny
Thanks! I love your paper- very concise and well written.
I am also an amuature and very new to thinking about future energy market and technology, but here goes:
When looking at pricing (even LCoE), you should compare intermittent energy sources (PV, wind) to baseload sources (nuclear or fossil) when taking into account additional energy storage costs.
The "solar load", or duty cycle (total energy produced/time vs. peak power possible by adding up solar panel rating) is low: 10-20% in sunny areas of the globe, peaking at 30% in the Sahara. The LCoE takes the load factor into consideration I believe. But in the time Solar (or wind) is not producing, we need energy storage to step in (if we want to avoid fossil or nuclear). Battery storage LCoE is 3-4 orders of magnitude more expensive currently than energy production, at ~600-300 $/KWh compared to 0.065$/kWh for PV (note units of KiloWatt vs MegaWatt in your chart) .
A paper from 2019 ( here ) shows that if storage needs to make up for 100% of power availability by compensating a combined solar wind solution , it should drop by 1 order of magnitude to 20$/kWh. to be viable now, we need to compromise on availability.
I am unsure that battery cost will continue to drop exponentially: according to this department of energy study from 2021 , they are expected to level out at 100-300 USD/kWh:
figure from DOE paper
Note the cost to build is much cheaper for batteries (400$/kW compared to 1300W/kW for solar). I guess that storage is so bad in terms of LCoE due to its limited number of cycles (life time) and charging losses (10-15%)
Lets try to get a feel by looking at a recent real example of a project : the Xlinks Morrocan - UK project. This project (recently launched) has 10.5GW of solar and wind in Morocco, with 20GWh battery storage, and running 3800km of high voltage lines to UK (yes, 3800km power lines). The output on the UK side is 3.6GW, "20 hours a day". Cost is 22B$. They go all the way to the Sahara to enjoy 34% solar load and 51% wind load (very high indeed). Note that it probably makes economic sense to go 3800km south to increase load factors significantly (because storage is so expensive, even adding a cable it is still worth it). I did some very crude approximation here: Using reported numbers, published optimistic estimations and 0% interest rate (!), I got LCoE of about 105$/MWh for the system as a whole. Compare that to 65 and 53 $/MWh reported without storage, and we see that storage can double the cost, even if it just a small percent of the total power (20GWh compared to ~100GWh solar+wind) , and even though this system is specified to provide power only 20 hours a day.
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