Biggest Solar Deal in History
February 12, 2009 by Noel
Filed under Green Living
I was reading an article at wired.com about the Biggest Solar Deal in history. In a deal between Southern California Edison and Brightsource, the latter would be building a series of 7 installations that would eventually produce 1,300 megawatts of energy.
Once completed, this facility is expected to generate 3.7 billion kilowatt hours of electricity per annum. Probably bigger than some of the nuclear power plants out there and it is safer too.
The solar technology used won’t be photovoltaics (solar panels) but rather thru solar thermal power. A whole array of mirrors would be used to reflect the suns rays to a tower with a boiler. This would create steam that would turn the turbines and generate electricity.
Source: wired.com
It’s good to hear that large scale solar thermal projects like this one are finally coming online. The technology has been around a long time but has been limited to a few experimental stations.
Charging the full environmental and health costs of burning coal to the utilities that generate electricity from it would make these kinds of projects all the more common. That’s why we so urgently need a carbon tax or effective cap and trade system.