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Re:Wendelstein 7-X: Gigajoule energy turnover generated for ... by jahnu on Friday August 11, 2023 @03:50PM (#37093153)
That seems amazingly cheap! Are we really down to that low level of cost?
Re:Wendelstein 7-X: Gigajoule energy turnover generated for ... by sp332 on Friday August 11, 2023 @04:14PM (#37093454)
Grid-scale solar is $33/MWh (+) https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/utility-scale-solar-2022-ed... and the Netherlands uses 1,000,000,000 MWh/year https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/netherlands so it's only off by a factor of ~2.

(+) These numbers are for the USA. I found a mention of a cheaper project in Chile https://about.bnef.com/blog/cost-of-new-renewables-temporari... but I don't know what the situation is in Europe. And wind might be even lower.

Re:Wendelstein 7-X: Gigajoule energy turnover generated for ... by aeyes on Friday August 11, 2023 @04:27PM (#37093613)
Chile is an outlier, the plants are in remote locations in the Atacama desert where you have two compelling reasons to build solar plants: There is a lot of space where nobody lives and the sun is always shining. There are mountains but there are also lots of places which are flat for as far as the eye can see, an example would be the Cerro Dominador plant which probably didn't require any ground preparation.

In Germany or the Netherlands it is a bit harder to find space for large solar plants.

Re:Wendelstein 7-X: Gigajoule energy turnover generated for ... by pfdietz on Friday August 11, 2023 @07:25PM (#37095258)
Chile is cheaper, and in a solar-powered world energy intensive industries will move to such places. If (say) Sweden wants to try to preserve industries by building nuclear power plants, they'll find the expensive power from nukes competing against the dirt cheap power from Chilean (or Namibian, or Australian, or Saudi Arabian) solar.
Re:Wendelstein 7-X: Gigajoule energy turnover generated for ... by worik on Friday August 11, 2023 @08:22PM (#37095626)
> in a solar-powered world energy intensive industries will move to such places.

And to windy places. Happening already in Europe, building new industrial plant close to the huge and fast growing offshore North Sea wind power plants

Re:Wendelstein 7-X: Gigajoule energy turnover generated for ... by t0mas88 on Saturday August 12, 2023 @03:07AM (#37097787)
1 euro per kW of capacity isn't that low, residential systems can get below that and it includes installation cost and an inverter which would both scale better for a bigger system.