World’s Largest Solar Power Plant Coming to Arizona

[bruce]

The lucky sunny state of Arizona is about to become home to the world’s largest Solar Plant! Thanks to a just-announced contract between Abengoa Solar and Arizona Public Service Company (APS), the enormous solar plant called Solana will power up to 70,000 homes, and will be the first example in the country of a major utility...

http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/02/25/...izona-in-2011/

[sparky]

I wonder if the people being served electric from those will also have their rates always go up too. I can imagine it now:

Consumer: "Why have my rates gone up? Has the price of sunshine gone up"?
Electric Company: "2010 was a pretty cloudy year, and the forecast for next year is just as bleak."

Seriously though, this is pretty cool

[LMagic007]

I guess one may consider changing power supply companies if they don't like the rates of their current supplier.

[Besoeker]

Originally Posted by bruce

The lucky sunny state of Arizona is about to become home to the world’s largest Solar Plant! Thanks to a just-announced contract between Abengoa Solar and Arizona Public Service Company (APS), the enormous solar plant called Solana will power up to 70,000 homes, and will be the first example in the country of a major utility...

http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/02/25/...izona-in-2011/

The technology obviously has merits, energy storage being one of them. For intermittent sources that is, in my opinion, often a limitation.

The word "enormous" is used a couple of times. I suppose that, in the context of other solar plants, it is enormous.
In the context of US consumption of just electrical energy it would produce maybe 0.02% of that.

I'm not knocking the idea - just trying to put it in perspective.

[LMagic007]

This power station looks to be a mix of solar trough, tower and PV, primarily trough. This Solar technology is just another of many relatively clean and safe ways of providing power. That's exactly what the world wants to achieve. Low CO2 footprint is a key criteria in the Climate Change era. Costs can expect to fall as technologies mature.

Solar tower technology looks to offer the cheapest energy storage for solar, using molten salt for energy storage. Trough technology uses oil and thus does not store energy at the higher temperature range of molten salt. PV of course uses electric batteries and is very expensive, storage wise, per kwh of power stored. The steam turbine and Stirling Engine approaches both look to offer promise.

It's also been mentioned that in terms of land use when you factor in mining and exploration of coal, Solar Tower technology fairs better in terms of kwh generated, pare acre. Of course explored land might be able to be reclaimed at some stage for alternate use, at a cost.

If these clean technologies can be repeated on a large scale, they can help form the basis of greater more significant energy contributions. These technologies also would require less expertise to operate than fossil fuel based systems and be more accessible to second and third world nations.

Once the technologies mature their costs can fall and their scales can increase with confidence.

[arno]

Hopefully this will be the first of many such plants in America

[LMagic007]

Originally Posted by arno

Hopefully this will be the first of many such plants in America

And Australia

See also;
Solarsphere - Solar Power in Mass Production

Solar Systems (company - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Solar furnace - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia