Solargenix Energy Secures Approvals for 64MW Solar (Nevada)

[jpak]

http://www.solarbuzz.com/News/NewsNAPR552.htm

Solargenix Energy has secured the approval of amendments to their Power Purchase Agreements with Nevada Power Company and Sierra Pacific Power Company by the Public Utility Commission of Nevada. This approval by the PUCN will allow Solargenix to complete the development of Nevada Solar One, a 64-megawatt (MW) Solar Thermal Electric Generating Plant located in Boulder City, Nevada.

Solargenix Energy says that Nevada Solar One will will be the third largest solar thermal electric power plant in the world. This project will make Nevada one of the largest generators of solar energy in the U. S.

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According to published information from the U. S. Department of Energy through the U.S. National Laboratories, which is available on the Solargenix website, the parabolic trough technology utilized in this plant represents one of the major renewable energy success stories of the past 2 decades and has a near-term potential to compete directly with conventional fossil fuel powered technologies.

In addition, the DOE has issued a report that identifies suitable land and solar resources in Nevada that could produce over 600,000 megawatts (MW) of power generation using concentrating solar technologies. Currently, Nevada’s electricity consumption is less than 3% of this resource capacity. This same report claims that the economic benefits far exceed the cost to develop this clean renewable energy source. The Boulder City plant located in the El Dorado Valley is scheduled to begin production of electricity in early 2007.

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[skids]

1. Troughs are neat.

Simpler to fabricate than a dish, and only have to be tracked along the slow axis, because the fast-axis offset only affects the delivery of light to the edges. Very efficient design.

[hunter]

2. Here's the DOE site for these projects:

http://www.eere.energy.gov/solar/csp.html



I've been out to the solar trough plant at Kramer Junction and it's impressive.

[NNadir]

3. When Luz went bankrupt building these in 1991, natural gas was cheaper.

It's worth noting that Luz went bankrupt building the plants, but the nine plants they built are all still operating. These are plants with high capital costs, but they probably run for quite some time - assuming decent maintenance - afterward in a cost effective manner.

I recall the matter very well, since I lived in San Diego at the time. There was a lot of hope invested as well as money.

These plants, though, are nowhere near as dithering as PV plants - this is actually serious stuff particularly since the systems are adaptable to provide process heat.

Most of them were actually hybrid plants, solar during date light hours and natural gas plants at night. This, of course, reduced the fixed cost problems (low capacity loading) that dog many renewable systems.

The new "hybrid" technology involves, predictably, coal:

http://www.eere.energy.gov/consumerinfo/pdfs/solar_trough.pdf

One drawback is that these plants require water to run at maximum efficiency; however the place where there is the most sun are precisely the places where there is the least water.

However there are places that one could imagine an ideal mix of conditions. The area around the Salton Sea in California comes to mind. The Salton Sea is a man made feature, formed during a disaster that occurred during an attempt to divert the Colorado River in 1905 and maintained since then by agricultural run-off water from the Imperial Valley. One imagines that these types of plants could theoretically be used to generate peak electricity for California and to recover, via desalination, some of the water in the Salton Sea, at least as long as the Sea exists. (Someday the water wars in the Southwest will doom the Sea - all of the water will end up in toilets in Los Angeles, San Diego, and Las Vegas.) Presumably it would also be possible to recover salts, and maybe some of the selenium that pervades the area.

One could also use process heat from solar trough technology for the recovery of biodiesel starting materials from locally grown algae. The agriculturally polluted water in the area should be ideal for that sort of thing.

This certainly isn't a magical solution, or necessarily a scalable solution - but it's one that conceivably on a niche basis makes sense.

[dcfirefighter]

4. niche

It seems to me, once we fill all the 'niches', we'll have a very large part of our problem solved.