Costs
As of 9 September 2009 (2009-09-09), the cost of building a CSP station was typically about US$2.50 to $4 per watt, while the fuel (the sun's radiation) is free. Thus a 250 MW CSP station would have cost $600–1000 million to build. That works out to $0.12 to 0.18 USD/kWh. New CSP stations may be economically competitive with fossil fuels. Nathaniel Bullard, a solar analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, has calculated that the cost of electricity at the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility, a project under construction in Southern California, will be lower than that from photovoltaic power and about the same as that from natural gas. However, in November 2011, Google announced that they would not invest further in CSP projects due to the rapid price decline of photovoltaics. Google spent $168 million on BrightSource. IRENA has published on June 2012 a series of studies titled: "Renewable Energy Cost Analysis". The CSP study shows the cost of both building and operation of CSP plants. Costs are expected to decrease, but there are insufficient installations to clearly establish the learning curve. As of March 2012, there were 1.9 GW of CSP installed, with 1.8 GW of that being parabolic trough.
Read more about this topic: Concentrated Solar Power
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