Germany is about to turn on a 40MW solar electric power plant near Leipzig.  

An average American home uses about 18,000 Kilowatts per year.  I suspect German homes are both slightly smaller and use less energy (no AC for example).  This power station can provide power to approximately 2,222 American homes for a year and probably more German homes.    

The German facility uses a surface area of 200 soccer fields (usually slightly larger than an American football field).  

The article mentions that an 80MWatt plant will be operational in California in 2011.  This should provide electricity for up to 4400 American homes.  

I wonder about the long-term prospects of solar but in an increasingly energy-starved world every little bit will help.  

Read the rest here.

Rush talks on occasion about the solar panels he had on his house when he lived in Rio Linda.  He says they were useless and provided no payback on his electric bill.  I would think that technology has improved since he lived there but who knows.  It all depends upon the area of the country.  Solar panels here in Pittsburgh would be useless as there isn't enough regular run to do the trick.

What about the fact that the sun is possibly going into a solar minimum and we might be facing an ice age?  It has been 2 years since it had the solar flares it's supposed to be having.

I suspect the technology has changed or something along these lines wouldn't be possible.  40 and 80 megawatts is a lot of power.  How practical they will turn out to be, long run, is another question.  

Even if the earth enters an ice age our power still comes from the sun.  If we can trap that power effectively it is a good thing.  But, I hope this doesn't turn out to be yet another ethanol boondoggle.

I'm no expert, but I think solar energy has become much better (more efficient) over the last 10 - 20 years.

Still, it would only ever be an adjunct to whatever our primary source of electricity generation will be.  That is, it can never provide for all of our electricity needs.

For example, to provide all of our houshold electricity needs (according to the soccer field analogy paleo gave) would require 86,000 sq km of solar panels -- roughly all of Minnesota paved with solar panels.

Since household consumption is about 1/3 of the U.S. total electricity consumption; producing all of our electricity with solar energy would require about 260,000 sq km -- about the size of Texas.

That's not to say that it shouldn't be used, or that it's not worthwhile (I don't know what the cost of the electricity would be, or its reliability).  But, it's never going to be a major part of our energy production.

If I did all the math right, it would appear that this technology would take approximately 7,093.75 square miles to power 50 million homes.  As a reference point the state of New Jersey is 7,400 square miles.  

The way I did the math is:

50,000,000 homes in America (taken from WikiAnswers)
The California solar plant would power approximately 4400 homes
The German solar plant would require 200 soccer fields to power 2200 homes
The American plant would be approximately twice as large.
A soccer field is 2 Acres.  
50,000,000 homes divided by 4400 = 22800 solar plants
22,800 solar plants times 200 soccer fields = 4,560,000 soccer fields
4,560,000 soccer fields times 2 acres = 9.12 million acres
9.12 million acres = 14,250 square miles or nearly twice the size of the state of New Jersey.  (36,907.33 square kilometers)

That is far less space than Eyas estimated.  Check my numbers and see if I made a calculation error.  If my numbers are correct, that means the solar cells they are using for these projects are about two times more efficient than they used to be, assuming Eyas' numbers add up too.  

Clearly this technology alone is not the solution.  We can't cover half of Minnesota (although many people might not mind covering New Jersey) to provide power for homes.  

The German plant cost 200 million dollars to build.  I have no idea what they cost to operate.  Is it safe to assume the California plant will cost twice as much since it is twice as large?  

Does anyone know how much a coal, natural gas or nuclear plant cost to build?

1000MW nuclear plant = $2 billion

700MW coal plant = $642 million

300MW natural gas plant = $1.1 billion

I found these figures through Google searches. I don't know how to include a web address in a post, my apologies.

If those costs are correct then the costs per type of plant work out as follows:

MW........Cost....................Type..........$/MW
1000.....2,000,000,000....Nuke........2,000,000
700..........642,000,000....Coal............917,143
300.......1,100,000,000....Gas..........3,666,667
40............200,000,000....Solar........5,000,000

That means these new solar plants are 2.5 times more expensive to build than a nuclear plant per megawatt!   Now, what can we learn about the cost to operate?

[Sorry but my browser never renders fonts properly, especially in tables.]

I was reading something about Nuclear power plants the other day and if memory serves, New Jersey derives 50% of its electricity from 4 Nuclear power plants. I just checked the housing numbers and the I could only find numbers from 2006. 3,472,643 homes so that makes it 1,736,321 and ½.

The way the build them now it could take less than a year for construction. The paperwork and the bellyaching is what take forever.  Some even say 1.5 billion is average cost, not counting the land purchase.  

Candy Land Corzine is even for it.  

Wouldn’t take to many earmarks to fund the building of them and then sell them off to investors as Public Utilities once there online. That would be the incentive for Government to get them done fast, cheap and right.

From what was said the price is in the construction. Running them is cheap. Storage of spent fuel is something I have no idea about.

I will try to figure out where I was reading about this and post the link.

Okay, this one has me confused. But, here goes.

Estimated operating costs.

Nuclear = 1.68 cents per kilowatt hour

Solar = 6-10 cents per kilowatt hour

I don't understand precisely what a kilowatt hour is, but nuclear is clearly cheaper. The nuke op costs include surcharges for waste disposal.

I could not find clear comparative data on coal or NG.

All I can say is that Germany must be counting on Global Warming for their system to be effective.