Solar power: great in the desert, not so much elsewhere

Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park

Above photo I from a series of award-winning photos here.

Commercial solar, as above, uses about 300 times the land as the same capacity nuclear. That’s fine if you’re land rich, like Saudi or Australia. But not good if you’re Hong Kong or the UK. Or most of Europe. Or China. 

An article setting out the different land needs for wind, solar and nuclear: here.

Yet here in Hong Kong, we’re pushing solar. When we should be pushing nuclear. We already get a third of our power from just a half of Daya Bay Nuclear Power Station. Another one the same and we’re done! Or else buy from one of the four other reactors in nearby Guangdong. Yet we continue to pissant around with solar and even wind which we’ve even less chance of getting enough power from. 

The Saudi facility above doesn’t mention the need for storage. Or back-up fossil fuel. It has to be one or the other because of solar intermittency — even in sunny Saudi they do have night time. Storage would have to be battery, as they don’t have the water or mountains to make water storage. That will cost about four times the cost per kWh of the solar generated. Nuclear has no such issues. 

ADDED: we have rooftop solar in our place in Discovery Bay, Hong Kong. It’s only worth installing  because the government subsidises the Feed-in-tariff that China Light and Power are obliged to pay us, vs what we pay for the grid electricity they supply to us. 

The subsidy is huge. 

CLP pay us $HK 5/kWh for the Solar we feed to them and we pay them $ 1/kWh for the grid power we use that they supply. That’s a 400% subsidy. CLP gets its money back by selling RECs — Renewable Energy Certificates — in the open market, which the buyer can use to offset their carbon emissions. I can’t help thinking there’s some sort of double-dealing in there though I’m not quite sure how. In any case, if the subsidy dropped to, say, “just” 200% it wouldn’t be worth a householder installing, as the payback period would be too long. All up, I think the whole rooftop solar thing is a bit of a nonsense, essentially doing very little to combat carbon emissions but at huge cost.