Lopburi Site Of Solar Power Plant?

[sbk]

Saw this blurb:

Many countries in the Asia-Pacific region are geographically well-positioned to harness energy from the sun, but affordable financing mechanisms need to be made available to allow the area to tap into the energy resource.

Under ADB’s maiden Asia Solar Energy Initiative (ASEI), the bank has agreed to provide $2.25bn from now until 2013, on top of a $6.75bn it is seeking from private and public investors.

The ASEI aims to help developing member countries in Asia build up 3GW of solar power by 2013.

“We’re looking at countries which have large amount of land that has no alternate use – those countries which have deserts in them such as PRC (China), India, Pakistan and Central Asia. They are the first targets,” says Seethapathy Chander, chair of the energy community of practice at ADB.

The ASEI seeks to make available a range of projects, and finance and knowledge sharing mechanisms, to attract commercial banks and the private sector to invest in these projects.

New projects that will benefit from the ASEI are expected to be announced by the end of this year, according to Chander.

“When we have a good project, a sponsor and some commercial lending, which we will catalyse together with our money, it becomes a package,” Chander tells Recharge.

“(But) it’s all in progress now. We will know by the end of this year. It takes some amount of initial upfront work in committing to a project, but once we do that then the construction period is pretty short for solar.”

ADB has already pledged up to $70m to Thailand under the ASEI to build potentially the world’s biggest solar power plant in Lopburi Province.

The project is scheduled to start construction in the third-quarter of this year and expected to be completed in May 2012.

I had no idea!

[Tywais]

ADP Loan for Solar Plant

Solar Power Project

[Puschl]

Thank you for sharing. That's good news indeed. Bringing an abundant resource that can be handled savely to good use.

I wonder why a photovoltaic solution was chosen? If I understand correctly, this is causing production/demand matching problems (no sun at night - storage in big capacitors?). There are several Concentrated Solar Power Plants (Spain, US, ...) with higher and continuous output: heating liquid salts during daytime and running a thermal power engine to produce electricity 24/7. I'm not an expert regarding upfront costs, maintainence, efficiency, etc. Just an inderested layman cheering all environmental friendly developments.

BTW: I'm glad my country said no to nuclear power in a referendum, and hope our neighbour Germany doesn't change their mind on nuclear power phase-out. I'd hate to see the Krummel plant crumbling.