The image you see above, though picturesque, is a shot of the Yenikoy coal fired thermal energy plant located in the southern city of Yenikoy in Turkey. It represents a breed of power plants that were constructed during a wave of privatization and capital injection in Turkey, during the 1980’s. It’s a perfect portrayal of what energy looked like during the late era’s of the post world war 2 countries. Massive, disruptive and providing much needed electricity to the region ripened for growth. A few km’s up the road to the Yenikoy power plant, you’ll find the true source of the energy. A strip mine which extracts lignite (a younger form of brown coal that has a lower energy coefficient compared to standard coal). Conveyor belts bring this coal from the mine straight to the power plant.
The Yenikoy power plant is just one of a few dozen coal fired power plants that are located in the Aegean region of turkey. The mines setup here can be seen in the picture’s below. They span across multiple kilometers and are open faced, meaning they are simply holes in the ground, dug up until the fuel is reached, leaving a very visible footprint. What happens next is quite basic. The fuel is used to fire burners which heat up water to spin large turbines. These turbines in the region produce a combined 6 GWh/year of electricity.
So, why am I explaining all this? I wanted to analyze how much of a solar power plant we would need to produce the energy equivalent of such a plant . I did’t want to do a cost analysis, but rather focus on land usage. Simply put, the Yenikoy power plant has a maximum power output of 420 MW. The land it covers you can see is quite vast, if you take into account the mine that’s located adjacent to it, which produces it’s fuel.
On google earth I was able to calculate a complete land usage of the mine, ash deposit and the power plant itself.
The total area usage based on the polygon is 856 + 13 + 74 = 943 hectors of land. Now, I know that all of this land isn’t suitable for a solar farm, but for the sake of this argument, I’ll be looking at land usage an not the actual location. So, let’s assume that it’s pristine solar farm land.
There is a nice paper release by NREL (http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/56290.pdf) that studies how much energy on average, can be produced by a solar farm, per acre. The study was done in 2013 and pv panel densities nor efficiency’s haven’t changed much since then.
According to NREL, for a small PV farm of fixed axis, we require 5.8 acres to produce a megawatt of power. As we calculated above, we have 943 hectors of land, which amounts to 2330.2 acres. A quick calculation shows us that we could produce 2330 / 5.8 = 401.7241 MW if we were to cover this land with solar panels and inverters. That’s not bad at all. Though there is one major difference. A thermal power plant like Yenikoy is working 24h around the clock, as a result the yearly production is 2730 GW/year.
For solar farm of 401 MW would only produce around 989 GW/year and wouldn’t be producing on cloudy or rainy days. So things are not so simple, we would require roughly 2.7 times the size of our existing solar farm to match the production of the coal fired power plant. Which means, we need 2332 * 2.7 = 6296.4 Acres of land. That is significantly more, but still not horrible. Though, we are not there yet. We still need a mechanism to store this energy so that it can be used in night time and unproductive days. Though storage isn’t a major land user, it’s more of a cost. Current grid scale storage solutions that use batteries are generally shipped in 20–40ft containers which are stack-able if needed. Though adding the cost of this would almost quadruple the $/watt of production.
It’s a beautiful sight to see solar farms popping up left and right in Turkey, but it is also important to see the magnitude of that farms that are needed to offset current power production to be carbon neutral alone. The Yenikoy power plant is an old dinosaur of a power plant, current similar power plants will have much more generation capacity with a much smaller footprint. We need to drastically move to a carbon neutral society. One of the advantages for solar is in the rooftop space, the ability to re-purpose existing land for energy generation can reduce this land impact. So let’s all cheer on Solar City and Tesla, as this has the potential to reclaim our empty rooftops and turn them into true generation plants with integrated storage. Vertical integration is key in reducing costs while scaling up such operations and reclaiming rooftops is a natural space to begin.
