Everything’s bigger in Texas, they say, and so Australian solar energy company EnviroMission today said it is proposing to build a 200- megawatt solar tower outside El Paso that could be as tall as 3,000 feet. The company announced it has submitted a bid to El Paso Electric (EE) in response to the utility’s request for proposals to supply 300 megawatts of electricity. EnviroMission didn’t specifiy the size of the tower but a 200 megawatt plant it earlier proposed building in the Australian Outback would have reached 3,000 feet (1,000 meters). The company subsequently scaled down the tower in an unsuccessful bid to get Australian government funding for the project last year. Since then the company has turned its attention to the United States, studying potential sites in the Southwest. Green Wombat chronicled the company’s six-year quest to build the solar tower in "Tower of Power," which appeared in the August 2006 issue of Business 2.0 magazine. Here’s how the technology is supposed to work: A glass canopy – a mile or two wide – heats the air underneath. Hot air rises and the tower operates as a vacuum. As the air is sucked into the tower, it will produce wind to power an array of turbine generators clustered around the structure. The turbines in turn generate electricity.
Sky-Scraping Solar Tower Proposed for Texas
April 2, 2007 by Todd Woody
Green Wombat 
I wonder if the temperature under the glass green house is to hot to grow something like sugar cane. Because you should be able to recycle water from the tower because of the temperature gradiant. Moist air will condence into water at the cooler top of the tower. Kind of like a alchohol still were the steam is cooled in the coils.
What surprised me about this concept is that it generates energy over the full 24 hour day. The warmed earth continues the cycle after the sun sets, though naturally at a smaller energy output. This phenomenon could be enhanced by “heat batteries” (materials that would absorb daytime heat to be released at night)
The Spanish prototype showed many plants grew fine under the canopy. Perhaps allowing limited forage for cattle production as secondary use of the large “footprint”.