Wind Turbine Generators

Back in September, the City of Houston agreed to buy all the solar power from a proposed NRG $40-million solar plant on a 25-year power purchase agreement, or PPA.

The deal called for NRG to foot the bill for the plant, and the city to pay for the power at a rate of 8.2 cents per kilowatt-hour for the first year. What this meant, in real-world terms, was that NRG would supplant some of the solar output with power from other plants, giving the city an effective rate of 8.2 cents, though the agreement overall calls for Houston to pay 19.8 cents per kilowatt-hour.

If built, the 10-megawatt solar plant would have been the biggest in the state, providing up to 1.5 percent of the city’s electrical needs at a locked-in price on 90 percent of production – a fixed rate that would have served the city well if Reliant Energy raised its rates due to rising costs of oil, gas or coal. Reliant Energy’s generation mix is 39.8 percent, followed by natural gas at 23 percent and coal at 22.5 percent – the former two prices likely to rise as the recession eases and tension over Middle East oil prices and production rises.

The plant would have been constructed on 70 acres of NRG land near Highway 249 and Beltway 8, a move which New Jersey-based NRG felt would help keep land costs and transmission upgrades to a minimum.

It was that or two new nuclear plants with 2,700 megawatts of capacity at a cost of $10 billion, though comparing the two is like comparing apples to oranges, and the price of the nuclear plants has since gone up, to $17 billion. This is not taking into account ongoing fuel costs (solar has none) or the cost and difficulty of storing or disposing of spent nuclear fuel. Not to mention the low maintenance costs of solar as opposed to keeping a nuke plant operational given all the NRC mandates.

In spite of that, the nuclear plants – an expansion of the South Texas Project via two new Westinghouse PWR units – looks to be the winning bid, even though residents are alarmed by the Project’s less-than-stellar safety record, which resulted, in 1993, with the units being taken offline to resolve failures in the feedwater pumps – a repair outage that lasted more than a year.

Surprisingly, Houston City fathers have backed out of the deal. According to a city spokesman, the city doesn’t like to commit future (taxpayer-generated) funds without some sort of oversight and approval, and future elected leaders may be reluctant to get behind an agreement put in place by a former administration, so the city has an escape clause: long-term agreements must be re-approved yearly.

As a result, the solar plant scheduled for operation in the summer of 2010 has been pushed to a back burner, with both the city and NRG agreeing that the project is dead in the water unless the impasse can be bridged.
Not likely, says city spokesman Frank Michel, and NRG agrees, saying it can’t spend the $40 million without some kind of long-term deal in place.

The switch is being heartily opposed by the Texas branch of the Sierra Club, and by clean energy advocates everywhere, who see the abandonment of solar energy in favor of nuclear power as a failure to consider long-term environmental consequences in favor of immediate energy gratification.

The worst part of the deal is the official closing of Yucca Mountain as a spent fuel storage depot, with no alternative waiting in the wings. Where does NRG plan to store the spent fuel?

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Tags: Solar Energy, Solar Panel, Solar Power