That plant burns natural gas at a night to heat up the molten salt. That's why the capacity factor is so high. (Saudi Arabia could do that.. they currently burn fossil fuels for electricity.)

But it was very expensive.. about $360M for 20MW (or $18B per GW). The price they give -- $200B for 200GW -- would rule out this type of plant.

It's almost certainly PV.. which is currently $1/Watt for new utility scale plants. The price matches perfectly.

Where are you getting your $1.2B? Closest thing I can find is 260M GBP[0], or about $364.0M at today's mid market fx rate or ~$728.0M at 2011 fx rates. However this was completed and running in 2011, and uses salts with a starting at about 200 deg C and capping out at 500 deg C (You can have molten salts staring around deg 50C today). I wonder what a project at this scale could achieve a decade later.

But yeah, seems more likely to be PV at this investment price (assuming this will be the total for the project, which I kind of doubt, but I dont know how much costs will inflate to), would be great to get more details about what they are proposing.

[0] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1393879/Gemas...

I rechecked, and you're right about the price. I must have been looking at a different plant.. not sure, I cant find the page again. I adjusted the numbers in my post. Thanks.

there's a dead comment from a new account that says this:

"1) regarding price, it's probably PV at those prices, as CSP today comes in at least 2x of PV installed capacity cost and that's taking a very aggressive estimation- although one could probably get CSP costs down to $1/watt with the design and procurement scale economies being talked about. 2) Regarding Venning's point about demand, even with significant amount of energy storage, this would create quite a bit more peak power on sunny days than their current grid demand can handle so announcement may be based on a couple (dodgy to me) assumptions: a) either they assume building it out in phases slowly over time to accompany some aggressive assumed demand growth or b) they are thinking about power exports in a region where Saudi Arabia probably doesn't have too many politically viable customers"

1) regarding price, it's probably PV at those prices, as CSP today comes in at least 2x of PV installed capacity cost and that's taking a very aggressive estimation- although one could probably get CSP costs down to $1/watt with the design and procurement scale economies being talked about. 2) Regarding Venning's point about demand, even with significant amount of energy storage, this would create quite a bit more peak power on sunny days than their current grid demand can handle so announcement may be based on a couple (dodgy to me) assumptions: a) either they assume building it out in phases slowly over time to accompany some aggressive assumed demand growth or b) they are thinking about power exports in a region where Saudi Arabia probably doesn't have too many politically viable customers