Stealth Bay Area solar startup OptiSolar has quietly revealed plans to build the world’s largest photovoltaic solar farm on the central California coast — a $1 billion, 550-megawatt monster that would be nearly 40 times as large as the biggest such power plant operating today.
PV solar power plants essentially take solar panels similar to those found on suburban rooftops and put them on the ground. Unlike solar thermal power plants that use mirrors to heat a liquid to produce steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine, photovoltaic power stations generate power directly when the sun strikes the panel’s semiconducting cells. That means there’s virtually no moving parts or need for industrial infrastructure like power blocks, turbines and piping. (A photo of a PV solar farm in Serpa, Portugal, is above.)
But because photovoltaic solar is less efficient at converting sunlight into electricity than solar thermal and requires big swaths of land, it has not been considered economical to build large-scale PV power plants in the United States. (Unlike in Portugal, Spain and other European countries where utilities pay a premium rate for green energy.)
Furthermore, OptiSolar makes thin-film solar cells, which are even less efficient than traditional solar panels. The hoped for advantage of thin-film solar is that the cells can be printed on rolls of metal much more cheaply than bulky conventional solar cells. They also use far less polysilicon –an expensive semiconducting material — than standard solar cells.
Still, hardly any thin-film solar companies in the U.S. have begun mass production, let alone tried to build a huge power plant. OptiSolar intends to both produce solar panels and build and operate solar power plants. It currently has deals to build more than 20 solar farms representing more than 200 megawatts in Canada, which pays higher rates for electricity generated from renewable sources.
“We have propriety technology and a business approach that we’re convinced will let us deploy PV at large scale and be competitive with other forms of renewable energy,” OptiSolar executive vice president Phil Rettger told Green Wombat recently in an interview about the Hayward, Calif.-based company’s plans.
Says Reese Tisdale, a solar energy analyst with Emerging Energy Research: “At this point I see it as an announcement with plenty to prove.” He says the benefits of a large-scale photovoltaic plants are low operation and maintenance costs and the fact that thin-film prices are falling. But he notes that thin-film solar’s low efficiency and inability to store the electricity generated — solar thermal plants can store heat in water or molten salt to create steam when the sun sets — puts such power plants at a disadvantage.
And the large tracts of land needed for such solar farm could create conflicts, particularly when threatened or endangered animals and plants are present. “Environmental groups will go crazy,” Tisdale says.
OptiSolar has kept a low profile and has said little about its technology or how efficent it is, other than that it uses just 1% of the silicon needed in conventional solar cells. Many thin-film solar cells have efficiencies of five to six percent though Global Solar Energy CEO Mike Gering recently told Green Wombat that his company has achieved 10 percent efficiency in production runs.
Founded by veterans of the carbon-intensive Canadian oil sands industry, OptiSolar has a factory in Hayward and just signed a deal to build another manufacturing facility in Sacramento.
The company’s Topaz solar farm would be constructed on nine-and-a-half square miles of ranch land in San Luis Obispo County near the site of the 177-megawatt Carizzo Plains solar thermal power plant planned by Silicon Valley startup Ausra. Optisolar spokesman Jeff Lettes told Green Wombat that the company has taken options to buy the 6,080 acres of land from farming families if the county approves the project.
Who would buy Topaz’s electricity remains to be seen. The plant would be in PG&E’s (PCG) territory and Rettger acknowledged that the company has been in talks with big California utilities such as Southern California Edison (EIX) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE). Lettes says the company is currently negotiating a power purchase agreement for Topaz but could not comment further.
OptiSolar says its solar farm would generate electricity for about 190,000 homes. Unlike other PV power plants, OptiSolar will not place its panels on trackers that follow the sun throughout the day. That will lower the cost of the plant but also reduce its efficiency. If approved by the county, construction would begin in 2010. Unlike solar thermal plants, photovoltaic power stations do not need to be licensed by the California Energy Commission, a process that can take a year or two to complete.
Still, OptiSolar will face challenges. Some residents have objected to the size and environmental impact of Ausra’s project and the prospect of another large-scale solar facility in their backyard will raise new concerns. The OptiSolar site is also habitat for the protected California kit fox.
Green Wombat 
Well good luck to them but that is a lot of land. Right off the top of my head I am guessing about 60,000 acres and that can’t be cheap. A solar thermal plant would produce that amount in about half the land. Ausra claims it could do it in a about three square miles. Some advantages are they won’t use much water and I would expect the man power to run the place would be more inexpensive also.
If I were to guess, I would guess they will start small and try and line up some investors. In the electrical power industry there are a heck of a lot more projects announced, than ever get built.
Todd: Have any of the companies building plants discussed how much it costs to swap out panels once they become more efficient during an interview? Given all of the investment in the space, it would seem likely that big leaps in efficiency could come in the next five years.
good to see advancement in sustainability
Actually, 9.5 square miles is only 6080 acres rather than 60,000. PV is the way to go. No maintenance, lasts decades, and is quiet with no moving parts. Commercially available solar panels are warranted 25-30 years to 80% of rated power. Test cases have shown that this is actually more likely to be 50 years. If we could get our government to subsidize the PV industry (instead of oil) and get prices down to $1 per watt (instead of $4-5) we wouldn’t HAVE an energy crisis!
If the transmisson of electricity can become more efficient, they can have millions of acres in the middle of New Mexico, Texas and Arizona. Put some that wasteland to use.
there’s lots of sunny land in arizona, new mexico and nevada. Maybe John McCain would go in on this.
OptiSolar 1 GW –> 18 square miles.
nuclear 1 GW –> 0.3 square miles.
The boojum is gigwatt-hours!
Solar surface energy integrated over a year and conversion efficiencies. Summer noon peak generation is not annual average. Homes need electricity at night, too, on cloudy days, and during winter when insolation is minimal for short days and the sun’s shallow rise above the horizon.
It’s interesting how there is no mention of how much this PV plant will cost. Watch, it will be upwards of at least a billion or two and you better believe they will recover those costs in everyone’s electric bill.
Solar:
Clean Technology, Less Maintenance, Endless source of energy (Sun).
Oil, Coal, Nuclear:
These contaminate the world where we live, and will some day run out.
No space? If we could find a way to integrate solar panels into our rooftops, develop better storage of energy, then I would not be paying nearly $4.00/gallon for a machine that pollutes the air I breathe.
Yes Mike you are correct it would be only about 6000 acres. Guess I was tired when I posted that. Still it is a lot of land and still would take more than twice the amount a solar-thermal plant would. I think PV will eventually have a place in power production but feel for now it would be much better suited for putting on top of existing buildings. Also for right now I feel that solar-thermal has better chance to be more useful to the utilities because of the option of limited thermal storage. No plants in the US presently use the system but I know the upcoming plant in Gila Bend plans to. The present solar-thermal systems have enough heat and pressure stored to ride out small clouds without a drastic reduction in output. Utilities do not deal well with large power fluctuations. It can cause serious problems with the grid and also may cause them to have to go out and purchase very expensive power on the open market. Really for wind, PV or solar-thermal to ever be significant we are going to have to develop long term energy storage.
I am a fan of nuclear power but for the present time it is really a non issue in California. They are effectively banned and there is no political will to change that for now. Same with any new clean burning coal technology. As far as more efficient transmission lines we already have them but installing DC transmission lines would be expensive. There is one proposal to build them from West Texas to the Houston area to supply wind power. There is also a DC line that runs from Utah to Hesperia California near my home.
Screw that kit fox, we need megawatts man!
I have solar panels on my roof it’s a 5.1DC/4.7AC system. Edison then put in a new digital meter that started out at 00000 and for my first bill I ended up using 42kw. Which made my bill $6.17. So on 4/17 the meter it read 00042. Well, today is 4/25 and the meter now reads 00003. So I have actually produced more energy then I have used. I’m sure that will change in the summer with the AC on. And I have not changed my habits. I suggest getting a system on top of your house. California is paying huge tax incentives and you can play the solar installers off one another. I ended up getting a $48,000 system for $26,000. The company wanted my business so bad that they through in a free solar thermal 45 gallon water heater.
The story has been updated with the cost of the solar farm and other details from OptiSolar.
Regarding Uncle Al’s comments, it’s even worse than that. Photovoltaic (PV) can only operate at peak output for an average of about 8 hours per day year-round (zero at night, very little in early morning / late afternoon). So, to replace base load power plants, you need to generate more power while the sun shines and store it for later use. To replace a 1 GW nuclear (or coal, or gas) baseload plant, you would need around 5 GW of peak PV capacity. 5GW = 90 square miles.
6080 acres to generate a measily 550 megawatts? 1 nuclear plant could double that and use only 50 acres. Doesn’t make economical sense. What an eye sore.
$1 billion is far less expensive than a comparable nuclear or even coal plant. Plus no fuel costs. Add that the land is desert and isn’t in use for other things and it ends up sounding like a fantastic deal. We need more of these!
Wow, definitely a hot topic. Good to see lots of varying opinions, history shows it’s the only way to spur real solutions. To that end I take issue with the detractors who are afraid to go forward based on fears of huge capital costs passed on to end users through their monthly bills.
We live in a free market economy, and like any situation in your life it comes down to money. If you feel your grocer is unfairly marking up a gallon of milk, you’ll shop somewhere else. Similarly, if you, and the majority of others, feel you are being unfairly charged for energy you will seek out alternate sources. Uncompetative companies will loose market share and will need to play nice with consumers, or go away. The question is, will you have options that you can turn to? There are, but they require development, technology drives this and if you stick your head in the sand and let fear rule, options will be limited.
There’s a reason that the internal combustion engine still rules today. It’s because manufacturers and major players (oil companies) realize that they need to ensure they are responsive to us and provide options for us. In this day and age we’ve told them we demand efficient vehicles and they’ve spent billions of dollars to develop options – hybrids, bio fuels etc. If they don’t do that, odds are production level electric cars are popular a long time ago (just an example). And although they’ve spent billions, the price point for vehicles is relatively similar, ie, we still buy new vehicles.
I work as a PV integrator, so I know it is not the silver bullet. Efficiencies are poor, storage and consistency are issues that need to be addressed, but we need to let innovators innovate if we ever plan to have options.
GW
Solar energy or any other energy must be the ownership of the one who is utlizing it. Building a plant to service the people will only end in high costs. The result will be the same anytime “we the people” hand over our needs to someone or something else. Solar must be placed on each home or business as needed. Maintenance and care service will then be needed.
Land is really not the issue. We have plenty of land lying absolutely fallow in highway medians. The issue is whether you can get some other use from the land when it’s not producing electricity. Or separating oncoming flows of traffic.
@Paulo
> Nuclear: These contaminate the world where we live, and will some day run out
Fourth generation breeder reactors and thorium reactors are safe, their wastes have short lives and can be stored easily, and there are MILLIONS of tons of fuel available. They can generate gigawatts, and they can generate large quantities of hydrogen to power fuel cell vehicles.
Errors –
1.) … that we’re convinced will let “ups” deploy PV …
2.) … to buy the 6,080 acres of land from “to” farming families …
The big question is can they protect them from theft. In Hawaii and more recently Minneapolis, authorities can’t even stop the theft of copper wire from the utilities.
What a huge waste of land and money!!! Both solar and wind power are viable sources of renewable energy; however, they are not well suited to centralized power production. Distributed/non-centralized power production is the future of the residential and small business sector of our economy. Ever home and small business should be at least 75% energy self sufficient. This can be accomplished today with off the shelf products and bldg techniques such as: passive solar heating and cooling, solar panels & roofs, residential scale wind turbines, solar hot water heaters, roof rain water collection, high efficiency appliances, etc, etc, etc. The only reason to try to make solar and wind power work in centralized power production is greed. All the utility companies and fuel producers think about is; we would lose our monopoly if all American homes became energy self sufficient. GREED & CORRUPTION IS THE DRIVING FORCE BEHIND THIS.
So, $1.B/190k=$5263 per house. ($10k if it ends up costing more.) Can they put $5300 worth of solar+wind on top of 190k house roofs and come out with the same yield? If so, that is better, you don’t use the land, you don’t need to upgrade the transmission lines & tie in. If it would cost $20-$30k per house, well, that doesn’t seem better.
Joe, while you’re right that solar power is much better suited to decentralised microgeneration I think a PV solar plant is better than a coal plant and will help more people to perceive solar as viable. But, as you say, there should definitely be much more done to promote it at home because:
a) We have plenty of unused “land” on our roofs.
b) We don’t need to pay for unnecessary service of long distance transmission. (Something the big power companies are scrambling not to lose out on. They are the main opponents to microgeneration.)
c) We won’t have to suffer the considerable efficiency losses of that transmission. (The efficiency gains of this approach outweigh the gains of the economies of scale of building a large plant. It just requires more personal initiative.)
Personally, I’d like to see companies renting solar panels to people’s roofs. It would take away the pressure of the big decision to pay for the whole system up front and the company would be responsible for maintaining it and making sure it provides a certain number of kWH a year. I believe at least one firm is doing something along these lines already.
why not use the sahara desert for a locateion for solar thin film photovoltaic production. this would produce two results. 1 would be to power all of africa and 2 would be to cool the desert below so that the expansion of it would be reduced and then regreened
So, where on the coast of California is this to be? Which county?
San Luis Obispo County.
Arizona wasteland? While I fully support solar power development, let’s not call the amazing sonoran desert of Arizona a wasteland. The rapidly expanding suburban blight of towns in Arizona like Casa Grande or Surprise or Goodyear are indeed wasteland, and our inefficient zoning laws have allowed huge tracts of frontage roads and wildcat developments to create dead zones. Let’s start using these dead tracts of low-level development for creating power… not pristine desert.
A much better idea is to put more efficient conventional solar PV panels on rooftops, which is currently wasted space. No endangered species concerns, no power plant licensing issues and delays, and no need to build new power grid infrastructure. In fact, it puts the power right where it’s needed, taking some load OFF the grid during the times of greatest demand. It even cools the building or home rooftop, reducing the amount of air conditioning needed in summer. I know because I have a solar PV system on my home rooftop. It rocks.
Can’t wait to see this. We need more of this.
Thanks
Jason Berkes
Wait a minute. Who cleans these things to make sure they operate at maximum efficiency?
And will these reflective surfaces be the cause of vertigo in unsuspecting birds leading to the tragic and untimely death of many birds?
I fell like this is probably an excellent step in the right in the right direction. Mainly because as they build more of these they will be able to do more tests, trials, make improvments, then retest, etc. With time (just like almost any technology) there is likely to be a much more efficient product. Then potentially a much smaller unit could power a much larger number of homes. This is the same for home solar power in general. I feel pretty strongly that solar power is finally getting the coverage and recognition that it needs, but now technology needs to catch up as quickly as the word is spreading. So I think this solar farm idea is definitely a great step in the right direction and I hope that more articles like this get published.
That’s not the only thin solar in California. http://www.thehumanhybrid.com is also solar.
An associate of mine working at a Nevada thermal/solar facillity said their 70MW output cost $250 million to build – that’s $3.60/watt, about double the $1.90/watt for this Optisolar PV project, and only slightly less that what a do-it-yourself HOMEOWNER would pay for a grid-tied PV installation. The Nevada solar/thermal plants availability is also poor in high wind conditions due to the need to rotate the collectors downward protect the mirror surface. They have a dedicated 24/7 polishing crew. They also have a 5 MW parasite “Hot Standby” load; Cold days or sporadic clouds have a bad effect on the local grid. Why ANYONE with a conscience would promote thermal/solar when maintenance free PV is available at the same cost is a puzzler, but apparently no one is minding the store on the publics behalf.
Well Mitch I am not sure who your associate is but I work in solar-thermal and have several friends who work at the Nevada One power plant. I would guess he does not actually work at the plant or is very new there. First not sure what “hot standby” means but that would be about what the plant would use when it is online. If he is trying to imply that is what is used when the plant is offline then he is very much mistaken.
Ok as for cost, first off Optisolar has not built anything yet. If they can build it for the cost they say then good for them but let them build something first and then say how much it is going to cost. Lots of claims out there but most just simply don’t pan out. They are also going to use about 2 to 3 times as much land as a solar thermal plant would. Nevada One was far from the cheapest design.
Ok yes they do turn the mirrors in high winds to protect mirrors but this is far from a everyday thing. They do not have a 24/7 “polishing crew”. Most companies do clean thoroughly about once a year and do minor cleaning the rest of the time. Do you really think you are never going to clean PV panels? There is no such thing as a 550 MW maintenance free plant.
Ok one last thing about clouds. Yes they do affect solar thermal plants but not anywhere close to what they do to PV panels. A couple of sporadic clouds will cause the plant to slowly go up and down in production. Solar thermal plants have a natural storage in the form of steam generators and hot oil in the field. Also the new thermal storage systems show great promise. A PV plant is basically lights on lights off. If you think a solar thermal plant affects the grid, think what will happen when a thunderhead parks itself over your field and your plant goes from 500 MW’s to almost zero in a matter of minutes.
The magazine “HOMEPOWER” has a lot of excellent technical articles about small-scale power systems, that is, home-sized. But the technical details apply even to larger installations, just at a different scale. Their website is http://www.homepower.com and the printed magazine is published six times a year.
Mitch Smith mentioned a “parasite hot standby” – it’s needed for the solar panels to maintain a load on the solar panels/invertors if the normal load is suddenly disconnected.