By Dave Harcourt •
October 31, 2009
Eskom, the South African state owned electricity generator, recently announced that it has budgeted a billion dollars over the next ten years for a demonstration and pilot concentrated solar power (CSP) plant. However, moving from budget to implementation is proving more difficult!
Why Concentrated Solar Power
Two of the widely used alternatives for collecting the suns energy are the concentrated solar power (CSP) plant where sunlight is focussed on a receiver in which a circulating working fluid is heated and used as the heating media for a conventional power station and the photo voltaic (PV) plant where sunlight is converted directly into electrical energy.
By Tina Casey •
October 27, 2009
San Diego Gas & Electric has embarked on a demonstration project to test the commercial viability of a new concentrated solar power system that uses shallow pools of water as a passive cooling system for high-efficiency solar cells. The unique proprietary technology was developed by Pyron Solar of Sorrento Valley, California.
The new technology could be attractive in land-rich areas, and it may also have some application for introducing sustainable energy to more densely developed areas, since its use of high efficiency solar cells enables it to pack more generating capacity into less space. It also may prompt some new exploration of the opportunity to double up solar energy generation with other operations, such as fish farming.
By Fred Etcheverry •
July 17, 2009
Aora-Solar, an Israeli company, has constructed and launched the first solar energy natural gas hybrid electric power plant. The flexibility of their design permits small communities to tap into solar power.
It’s not diamonds. Nor is it gold. But it might be just as lucrative. European firms this time have their eyes on North African deserts as the location of a giant network of solar thermal plants to provide low-carbon energy for Europe.
By Carol Gulyas •
May 28, 2008
The planets may be aligned to finally make solar competitive with coal, according to an article in Bloomberg.com by Greg Chang. Rising natural gas prices, the extension of tax credits for solar investment, and the near-certainty that carbon emissions caps will be imposed by the next U.S. administration, will make it happen. A concentrated solar thermal plant in California’s Mojave Desert, run by FPL, Inc., uses 550,000 mirrors [...]
By Timothy B. Hurst •
February 22, 2008
Las Vegas, Nevada - The current period of sustained growth in the American Southwest is putting tremendous demands on important resources like water, wildlife habitat, and, with the light beaming from the top of Las Vegas’ Luxor Hotel as a reminder, electricity. Nevada currently gets about 90% of its electricity from fossil fuels, and the majority source fuel is natural gas.
As natural gas prices are predicted to [...]
By Maria Surma Manka •
January 7, 2008
Scientific American has a thought-provoking proposal in its January 2008 issue. The magazine proposes a massive, far-reaching plan to get solar power generating 69 percent of America’s electricity 35 percent of our total energy by 2050, thus replacing all of our foreign oil needs and slashing global warming emissions. Below are some of the highlights of that “solar grand plan.”
Technology
The American Southwest would be the home of massive amounts of solar power needed for this clean energy conversion. Specifically, two types of solar power would be employed: Photovoltaic (PV) cells and concentrated solar power.
According to the solar grand plan, 30,000 square miles of PV cells would provide 3,000 gigawatts (GW) of energy. The “30,000 square miles” part made me flinch, but already existing solar installations indicate that the land needed for each gigawatt-hour of solar energy in the Southwest is less that the amount of land needed to run a coal plant and mine the fossil fuel for it.
Concentrated solar power would supply about one-fifth of the solar energy in the plan. Concentrated solar power uses long metallic mirrors that focus the sun’s rays onto a pipe filled with fluid. The fluid is heated and runs through a heat exchanger that produces steam that turns a turbine. Nine plants like this already exist in the in U.S.
