Plants' Scale and Operations
The plants have a 354 MW installed capacity. The average gross solar output for all nine plants at SEGS is around 75 MWe — a capacity factor of 21%. In addition, the turbines can be utilized at night by burning natural gas.
NextEra claims that the solar plants power 232,500 homes (during the day, at peak power) and displace 3,800 tons of pollution per year that would have been produced if the electricity had been provided by fossil fuels, such as oil.
The facilities have a total of 936,384 mirrors and cover more than 1,600 acres (647.5 ha). Lined up, the parabolic mirrors would extend over 229 miles (369 km).
As an example of cost, in 2002, one of the 30 MW Kramer Junction sites required $90 million to construct, and its operation and maintenance cost was about $3 million per year (4.6 cents per kilowatt hour). With a considered lifetime of 20 years, the operation, maintenance and investments interest and depreciation triples the price, to approximately 14 cents per kilowatt hour.
Read more about this topic: Solar Energy Generating Systems
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