Further information is now to hand on the Crescent Dunes solar plant which has now been officially declared dead.
To misquote our good friends at Monty Python: It’s not generating! It’s passed on! This solar plant is no more! It has ceased to be! It’s expired and gone to meet its maker! We’ve been stiffed! Bereft of power, it reflects in peace! […] It’s kicked the bucket, it’s shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!! THIS IS A TYPICAL GREEN PROJECT!!
Now that the curtain has finally come down, we can look at the promises and the delivery. These are eerily similar to a certain CoL I heard of once.
It was supposed to generate power at (US) 8 cents/kWh. Achieved cost = 238 cents/kWh. They only missed that target by 2,875% – close enough for the Green mathematicians, I suppose.
The plant was supposed to last 25 years and it was expected that Crescent Dunes would generate in excess of 500,000 MWh per year over those 25 years, for a total of 12,500,000 MWh. As you can see, the total production for the four years it was running never even met the one-year target. The total of 418,849 MWh is only 96.6% shy of the 25-year prediction. Pretty close really. Certainly a whole lot closer than KiwiBuild. 100,000 promised, 1535 delivered – 98.5% miss.
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