Currently the plans are to install about 6000 MW (Mega Watt) production capacity world wide by 2013, currently we have about 450 MW capacity. 6000 MW production capacity means about 43.8 TWh/a (Tera Watt hours per annum). This is roughly the current electricity consumption of 12 million households or 48 million people.
However it is no where near enough, because we are currently experiencing a phenomenon called peak-oil, which simply means that in the next 20 to 40 years we will loose roughly 80% of our annual energy production capacity, as we are running out of easily accessible petroleum. This is currently the most serious problem facing the western world today, it will have enourmous impacts on almost all aspects of our lives: from our food production to our transportation. If you have not done so already, I strongly recommend you read LATOC. For Germany alone another 500 TWh/a by 2020 and 1300 TWh/a by 2040 will be needed to replace petroleum. For comparison: Germany currently produces about 530 TWh/a, its combined photo-voltaic electricity production is only about 3 TWh/a (2007).
Most alternative energy sources (like many bio-fuels for example) are not really energy sources at all, but energy sinks. That means they take more energy to produce than they release when used. This ratio is called Energy Return On Energy Investment, or EROEI for short. Even those alternative energy sources, that actually do have a positive EROEI (like "solar" photo-voltaic panels and "wind mills") offer no where near the EROEI of about 30 to 1 that petroleum has to offer. CSP however offers an EROEI between 30 to 1 and 80 to 1 for electricity alone. So during these plants life-time of 30 to 40 years, they pump out 30 to 80 times as much energy as was used for their construction, plus enourmous amounts of desalinated fresh water and process heat. This is a much better EROEI than that of petroleum. And this is also the reason, why CSP is in my eyes the only alternative energy source available to us in time to save our great western culture.
Please have a quick look on http://www.solel.com/faq/ for a short introduction to the technology before reading on.
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The biggest problem is, that we are running out of time very quickly, and there is not a single technology which we could install in big enough quantities in so little time, except for CSP.
As Tom ("great769") on the LATOC forum put it: "Alternative [energy], could have worked but we would have had to start back in the 60's or 70's, while husbanding our oil resources. There will be and is a big surge to solar/wind, in the next few years, but even if we could convert 1% per year to these , which would be a hugh task, it would take decades to convert 50%. The world does not have decades, we have only a few years at best, we can't even breed enough horses to replace local delievery transport in that time nor bulid trains, before the crunch, even a WW2 [production] effort would come up short at this point."
This is certainly true for most renewables, but not for CSP. These plants are extremely scalable and can be easily and quickly mass-produced. In the areas where they are most viable (deserts) there are usually vast amounts of the raw materials needed to build them available locally, and so is the needed process-heat (once you have put the first one up, it can provide the heat for glass-, aluminum- and steel-production of subsequent plants) to convert them to the needed refined materials.
Also, we do have a few decades to do it. Between 2010 and 2040 we will have to replace an average of about 3.8% of our current oil consumption with alternatives each year. This is assuming that we will still need an annual increase in energy production of about 0.46% per year to keep our economy going. It also does not take the huge efficiency increase (at least 30%, up to 80%) into account, that the electrification of most currently oil-driven technology (like cars) would bring about.
This would mean replacing 1142.45 million barrels of annual oil production capacity with 1808.37 TWh electricity production capacity per year. To do this with CSP only, we would need at least 247722 MW new production capacity per year.
Now what does it take to build that kind of capacity per year with CSP?
Well, CSP plants currently in the planning stage have a typical production capacity of 200MW or 1.46TWh/a electricity, 8000 m³/a of desalinated water, and a considerable amount of process heat which can be used for industrial purposes or converted into thermal cooling to replace electrical air-conditioning. So we would need to build about 1240 of these 200MW CSP plants per year to meet our annual goal of 247722 MW, which would also supply us with almost 10 million m³ fresh water production capacity per year.
Each one would be made from about 560,000 parabolic trough mirrors (2.04 million m² of mirrors), 57,000 solar receiver tubes with a total length of about 230km, 115 kt of salt (60% NaNO₃ and 40% KNO₃), and whole lot of metal and concrete for structures and buildings. Each plant would need about 8 km² of desert. Currently (before the start of mass-production) it would take about 4000 man-years (4000 people working for one year) to build.
Each one would cost about 1167 million dollars to build. If we assume a 7% interest rate per year for the initial investment and amortisation within 15 years, the operating costs during that time would come to about 220 million $/a (incl. insurance, etc.), which could be covered by a price of about 0.11 $/kWh and 1$/m³ of fresh water. So the building and financial costs would be paid for after 15 years.
Then the price for electricity could be dropped to 0.028 $/kWh for the remaining 15 to 25 years of its life time, which gives us an average price of 0.069 $/kWh. So CSP would become cheaper than petroleum when the latter crosses the 110 US$/bbl mark, ignoring the fact that electric technology is much more efficient (so cars would have been cheaper to run on CSP electricity instead of gasoline for some time now).
To get the required 1240 plants per year built, we would need a construction force of about 5 million people world wide, if no mass-production is used. Keep in mind that towards the end of this 30-year project the first plants would soon need to be replaced, so these jobs would mostly be permanent.
Each plant would create about 50 permanent jobs for operation and maintanance, which means about 60,000 new permanent jobs per year.
It would certainly be a big project, but I think this is achievable and could possibly even be scaled up further to bring better living conditions to the third world and developing countries and/or in case we run out of petroleum even faster than predicted.
For more information, go to the TREC/Desertec website and don't forget to show your support by giving them your voice.
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