A contract has just been signed to deliver 600 gigawatthours a year of solar power between the US division of Spain’s giant Abengoa, and PG&E in California. Abengoa Solar hopes to succeed where BrightSource recently failed to overcome local NIMBY issues and Senator Feinstein, in its plan to site a 250 MW solar thermal plant in the made-for-solar Mojave Desert.

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The long-awaited commercial deployment of the world’s most efficient solar technology looks like it will now be near Phoenix, in a 1.5-megawatt, 60-unit deployment of Stirling Energy Systems’ solar thermal collectors.

Announced late last week, the 60-dish Maricopa Solar project will be the first commercial-scale solar facility built using Stirling Energy Systems/Tessera Solar’s SunCatcher concentrating solar technology.

The SunCatcher consists of a solar concentrator in a dish structure that supports an array of curved glass mirrors. Iterations of the SunCatcher have been among the world’s most efficient machines for solar-to-grid electric conversion for twenty years, most recently breaking the record last year with the highest-ever conversion rate of 31.25%.

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After less than a year of construction, the Sierra SunTower Plant that’s touted the first of its kind in the USA was finally officially launched by eSolar.

Located in Lancaster, California, this is the first eSolar concentrating solar thermal power plant with 24,000 mirrors instead of the company’s usual 12,000. The entire plant was built less than a year through the use of eSolar’s pre-fabricated components. Within that span of time, the plant’s heliostat mirrors have been utilized in various occasions, not to harness energy, but to greet the company CEO on his birthday and celebrate USA’s Independence Day. As was intended by Southern California Edison and eSolar, the 5-megawatt Sierra SunTower plant was connected to the grid this August 5 to power 4,000 homes in California’s Antelope Valley.

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Exciting developments are occurring in solar PV (photovoltaic) power generation. New technologies are improving manufacturing processes. Thin-film and organic (plastic) films promise to reduce PV power cost. Solar “grid-parity,” the time when solar power will cost the same as fossil fuel power, is coming soon. 

PV refers to devices that turn sunlight into electricity. In a previous post, I discussed generation by solar thermal (Solar Thermal: The Other Solar Energy). Both schemes have advantages and disadvantages.

PV can turn solar energy into electricity that can supply households and industry without using any moving parts. Since mechanical devices are less reliable than electronic, these systems are nearly maintenance free. Solar Thermal requires a heat engine, such as a steam engine, and an electrical mechanical generator to produce electricity.

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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.

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Solar venture investments hit a three-year low in the second quarter, the Cleantech Group said Wednesday. According to Brian Fan, senior director of research for the group, solar startups in North America, Europe, China and India raised a total of only $113.8 million for the quarter, which is down 7 percent from $365.7 million in the first quarter and down 86 percent from $834.7 million in the year-ago quarter.

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A new study from Greenpeace, the European Solar Thermal Agency, and the International Energy Agency’s SolarPACES Group has shown that concentrated solar power (CSP) could generate a quarter of the world’s energy needs by 2050–and create thousands of new jobs and prevent millions of tons of CO2 from being released.

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Last week, we took a look at San Diego’s revolutionary solar plan, which will allow residents to pay for solar panels through property tax bills over a 20 year period. But don’t pack your bags for Southern California just yet. Annapolis, MD has a similar plan , dubbed the Annapolis (EZ) Energy Zone Program.

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Albiasa Solar

“The arrival of Albiasa Corp. is yet another big step toward establishing Arizona as a leader in the sustainable-industries sector.” - Arizona Governor Jan Brewer

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France

The vast majority of the electricity generated in France comes from its 59 nuclear reactors. It has not been considered a global leader in renewable energy, but France has taken some bold steps recently to support growth in this industry.

The government plans to have 23% of its electricity generated from renewable energy sources including hydroelectric by 2020. A feed-in tariff of 30 Euro cents for commercial buildings has been introduced to encourage solar energy growth.

France now exceeds Denmark in wind energy capacity after adding 950 MW in 2008. The country currently has 3,400 MW of wind power and plans to increase this to 25,000 MW by 2020.

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National security is big business, and no one has benefited more than Lockheed Martin. Approximately $105 from each US taxpayer goes to Lockheed Martin.  From defense contracts to supporting the invasion of Iraq, Lockheed Martin is in deep with the US government’s priority of national security.

Recently, Lockheed Martin announced that increasing the development of renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies is just as important to national security as building fighter jets.

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]]> http://redgreenandblue.org/2009/03/16/lockheed-martin-national-securityrenewable-energy/feed/ http://inspiredeconomist.com/2009/02/17/solar-thermalthe-other-solar-energy/ http://inspiredeconomist.com/2009/02/17/solar-thermalthe-other-solar-energy/#comments Tue, 17 Feb 2009 05:25:47 +0000 Fred Etcheverry http://inspiredeconomist.com/2009/02/17/solar-thermalthe-other-solar-energy/ The American smart grid promises to increase the efficiency of solar voltaic and wind energy. These sources are still limited to about a 20 to 30% of our electric demand. With current technology, they cannot replace base-load (constant output sources) such as coal that supplies 50% of US electricity. In about ten years, solar thermal may compete with coal as a base-load source.

The European Union is investigating connecting a smart grid to solar thermal generators in Egypt and the Mediterranean. Mexico is also investigating solar thermal. Test plants have been built in Spain, California and Colorado.

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Corporate image ads are scattered around political news. They’re often masked as green tech, but their pitch more often advances corporate self-interest. We might dismiss them as hype, but they often succeed in pulling the wool over the public’s eyes.

As the news reports a fly ash (burned coal) spill in Tennessee that may be the greatest environmental catastrophe, the coal industry continues to pitch “Clean Coal.” During the presidential campaigns, both Obama and McCain supported clean coal, as do most of the Democratic and Republican representatives.

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At first glance, the latest numbers from the Cleantech Group look like terrific news. After all, they conclude that 2008 was a record year for cleantech investments, with venture deals in North America, Europe, Israel, China and India reaching a total of $8.4 billion, up 38 percent from $6.1 billion in 2007.

But most of that money was dealt out in the first three quarters, with investment slowing significantly – as expected – in the fourth quarter.

According to preliminary numbers, venture capitalists in these regions committed $1.7 billion in 99 deals in the fourth quarter, down 35 percent from the third quarter and 4 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007. In North America, by far the biggest venture-capital region, fourth-quarter investments totaled $1.14 billion, a decrease of 38 percent from $1.83 billion in the third quarter and of 5.8 percent from $1.21 billion in the last quarter of 2007.

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The Shiraz solar power plant boasts a modest 250 KW energy production capacity. It’s a solar thermal plant that uses parabolic mirrored troughs to gather sunlight. The mirrors focus the sunlight in an intense ray on a tube that runs the length of the array of mirrors. Inside the tube, a liquid insulated by a vacuum transfers the heat of the mirrors to a traditional generator, where it’s used to produce steam and generate electricity.

Placing an economic value on renewable resources makes sunny Iran rich in solar energy potential. Iran took its first step toward the large scale realization of that potential this week with the inauguration of its first solar energy plant. The plant was constructed with domestic materials and labour in Shiraz, the Fars province.

This solar thermal plant joins some 4,075 small scale solar thermal installations throughout Iran–3,781 residential solar water heaters and 294 public baths heated with solar thermal energy. Iran makes less use of photovoltaic energy, but the Ministry of Energy News Agency mentions a 40 house solar village supplied with photovoltaic energy.

• » See also: Solar panel discount company allows you to apply for Sonoma County’s SCEIP (property tax solar financing) program without a home visit.
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The Iran Daily reports that Iranian energy minister Parviz Fattah sees the Shiraz plant as a first step in Iran’s commitment to solar energy technology, which will increase in Iran along with greater government investment.

“The country backs the use of alternative and renewable energy sources,” said Fattah. “In future alternative energy sources will be greatly developed in the country. The growth of investments in this sphere is expected.”

English information about the Shiraz plant is hard to come by, but more photos of the plant and information in Farsi is available via the Renewable Energy Organization of Iran. Another source, an article in the Tehran Times (no longer available in the paper’s archives, but republished here by a reader) suggests that the completion of the solar plant was several years behind schedule, having been initially slated for the Iranian year 1383 rather than the current year 1387.

Regardless, kudos to Iran on their first solar power plant.

Additional sources: First Solar Power Station built in Iran (Trend News via CleanTechnica); Renewable energy evolution under subsidized fossil fuel prices in Iran
by Niloofar Sharbafian and M. Mazraati of the Technology University of Vienna [PPT Slideshow]

Image Credit: Renewable Energy Organization of Iran

Second, one of the biggest advantages of renewable energy is it reduces dependence on unstable nations and authoritarian oil regimes. But in this case, those benefits might not exist, or might not in the future.  North African nations aren’t exactly representative of stable democracies.  In fact, Germany’s largest solar company, SolarWorld, has said that North Africa is too risky a location. “Building solar power plants in politically unstable countries opens you to the same kind of dependency as the situation with oil,” said Frank Asbeck, the firm’s managing director.  Granted, as a producer of Photovoltaic-style solar power, SolarWorld has a vested interest in nay-saying solar-thermal power, but the issue is certainly one to consider.  Could trans-continental cables be easily cut or dismantled, posing a serious energy security risk?

Third, is mega-project power production from abroad the future of our renewable energy grid? Should billions be spent on energy production thousands of miles away, when it is increasingly cost effective to have domestically produced, locally-owned and operated solar, wind, and hydro-power production?

Finally, does Desertec smack too much of a new type of resource colonialism? Granted there is a difference: sunlight, unlike diamonds or gold, is infinite.  Indeed, can sunlight even be called a resource in the traditional sense?  Nonetheless, the projects will be built in the Sahara and would presumably be controlled and managed by international banks and corporations for the overwhelming benefit of European citizens and businesses.  Would the project create a deeper foothold for multinationals to control other aspects of North African development, such as desalination plants or water and mineral resources?

Gerhard Knies, chairman of Desertec’s supervisory board, has dismissed these concerns, saying that local needs would come first and local jobs and income would be created.  “It creates win-win situations for the participating sides,” he told the NYT Green Inc. columnist Tom Zeller.

But haven’t we heard this before?

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Florida Power & Light, the state’s biggest utility, broke ground today on what it says will be the first utility-scale solar investment in the state — and the first hybrid solar facility in the world to combine a solar-thermal field with a combined-cycle natural gas power plant.

Consisting of 180,000 mirrors spread out over 500 acres, FPL’s 75-megawatt Martin Next Generation Solar Energy Center is situated on the Atlantic coast just north of Palm Beach County.FPL’s new facility is The Martin Next Generation Solar Energy Center will use less fossil fuel when heat from the sun is available to help produce the steam needed to generate electricity. It also matches solar power with an existing combined-cycle natural gas plant, so that when the sun is not shining, the natural gas can take over the work of powering the turbines.

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By turning a long line of mirrors, the first solar thermal plant in nearly two decades was launched last week in Bakersfield, California. Unlike solar photovoltaic systems that convert sunlight into electricity, this plant will focus sunlight on tubes that contains water. The light heats the water, creating steam, thus turning turbines.

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A Colorado company has unveiled what they call the highest performance, lowest cost utility-scale solar power system of any kind for generating electricity. The SkyTrough, by SkyFuel cuts the cost of its parabolic trough concentrator by 35% compared to other commercially available systems, largely because of a mirrored polymer which replaces the heavy glass used in other solar parabolic trough collectors.

>>More on concentrating solar power at CleanTechnica

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The Republican presidential nominee expects a 29% increase in electricity demand by 2030, and wants 45 new nuclear power plants built by then. Industry estimates put their cost at $7 billion each.

The Energy Information Administration estimated last year that adding nuclear power capacity would cost $2,143 a kilowatt (kW) before financing and inflation. That compared with $1,434 to $2,302 for clean-coal technologies.

Over the past year, the expense has more than doubled to $5,000 a kilowatt, or $7 billion for a typical reactor, utility filings and company statements show. The increase in part reflects rising prices for commodities such as steel and cement.

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