Boundary Dam 3 CCS Could have Cost Less and Been Solar

POW! This huge new #solar farm near LasVegas provides power day & night https://t.co/Aip0F3Fg2m #climate #GLOBE2016 pic.twitter.com/Iff4rvjQtn

— Mike Hudema (@MikeHudema) March 3, 2016

SaskPower writes about its comparably sized “clean coal” project:

This project transformed the aging [sic] Unit #3 at Boundary Dam Power Station near Estevan, Saskatchewan into a reliable, long-term producer of up to 115 megawatts (MW) of base-load electricity, capable of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by up to one million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) each year, the equivalent of taking more than 250,000 cars off Saskatchewan roads annually.

– Emphasis mine.

Before the Boundary Dam CCS plant was to be built, CBC reported:

The new generating unit will have a capacity of 110 megawatts.

Q: But the sun doesn’t shine every day, and not at night. Clean Coal can be burned any time, right?

A: SaskPower admits:

Our [SaskPower’s] target is to operate [Boundary Dam CCS] for 85% of the hours in the year, leaving room for scheduled and unscheduled maintenance.

Outside Las Vegas, see the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project

But a massive new solar plant, sprawling over 1,670 acres near Las Vegas, was designed to solve that problem. It provides energy on demand, even when it’s dark.

“Whether it’s in the daytime or the nighttime, it provides base-load stable power,” says Kevin Smith, CEO of SolarReserve, the company that built the new plant. “If you get a bit of cloud cover that goes across at three o’clock in the afternoon, we’re always drawing out of storage, so we continue to operate at 110 megawatts. We don’t miss a beat, and the utility doesn’t see any fluctuations in the power output over the day.”

-Emphasis again mine, to compare to Boundary Dam 3 CCS.

Q: But I thought solar couldn’t provide “baseload”, that’s what SaskPower says?

A: That will teach you how much you can trust a coal-burning utility company influenced by a political party who takes oil company donations.

The CCS plant cost SaskPower, its customers, and Canadian taxpayers $1.5 billion CAD.

Crescent Dunes cost around $1 billion [USD] to build.

At 2012 exchange rates, through to the present inequitable 140%, the most a Crescent Dunes style plant would have cost Saskatchewan for an equivalent CSP plant, would be the same $1.5 billion CAD we instead spent on Boundary Dam 3 CCS. SaskWind projects the CCS plant to lose taxpayers $1 billion in the coming decades, not counting the millions paid in penalties to Cenovus for failing to deliver greenhouse gas to them as promised.

The heat reserve lasts about 10 hours. The video states 75,000 homes can be powered, at peak. With 410,000 households in Saskatchewan, we’d need at least 5.47 of these style CSP plants. At today’s exchange rate, that’s potentially $8.2 billion CAD to have every home in Saskatchewan converted to baseload solar power. Compare this to my earlier estimate for variable solar power.

My plan is given additional validity by the claims put forward by these researchers at Stanford. Later this morning, read more about this.

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Here’s a Moose Jaw business that isn’t waiting around for the Saskatchewan Government to deliver it clean, green energy.

The panels will generate approximately 45,000 kWh (kilowatt hours), which Jacques says is enough to handle their company power usage in their building on Mackenzie Lane. According to Canadian Geographic, the average household in Saskatchewan uses 12,954 kWh per year.