110000 BOE per day = 7.78 GW. An estimate from 2013 cited on Wikipedia claims the cost of the vessel is US$10.8 to 12.6 billion. Is there a reliable estimate of how much solar power you could install for the same cost?
You could get approximately 7.78 GW of solar installed for US$ 10.8 to 12.6 billion... the trouble is that this would be 7.78 peak GW. The corresponding average GW would depend on the location of the installation... in Perth, Australia, which has exceptionally good insolation, you might get 1.4-1.5 GW on average over a year. And then, you'd have no power on demand, you would have to take it when it is available, or waste it.
OTOH... the ~8 GW you mentioned is thermal power, if it is electricity you want, you will need to spend another $12-15 billion on power generation plants (and infrastructure such as LNG tankers, import terminals etc.). And then, with an exceptionally efficient combined cycle plant, you only get abt 8*55% = 4.4 GW of electric power (but it is "on demand").
Furthermore, the cost of producing the gas is not just the cost of the vessel - you need to drill wells and connect them to the vessel via pipelines/manifolds/risers. You need to pay for the operations, maintenance and repairs. And to begin with, you need to explore for gas, spending hundreds of millions of dollars with no guarantee of success.
By the time you consider the full picture, solar power is competitive with gas for electric power generation, more so in some places (like Australia, where Tony Abbott is going full retard on renewable energy) than others (like Germany, which leads the world in installed PV capacity).
In 2012 something like 3.5 GW were installed for something like $12 billion USD.
See the graph titled "U.S. Solar Industry Forcast" for output
See the graph titled "Value of Yearly U.S. Solar Instalations" for cost
Personally, I hope that the US solar instalations will last more than 25 years. I also hope that Shell is paying Australia for the gass that is being pumped out. I presume that the total cost will be about the same as solar. However, natural gass is really usefull stuff and can be shipped and stored more efficiently than electricity. So even though the price is about the same as solar, the value is higher.
Installed capacity would seem to suggest peak MW. Later on in the report they say that 490MW of "combined electric capacity" in schools equates to 642 GWh, which suggests that they're figuring annual output to be about 15% of installed capacity.
So, is that 3.5GW of panels (in which case about 0.5GW averaged over a day) or 3.5GW of average capacity?
