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Posts Tagged ‘solar power plant’

Green light for world’s first space-based solar farm

Posted in green policy, green startups, solar energy, solar power plants, Solaren, tagged , , , on December 3, 2009| Leave a Comment »

image: Mafic Studios

Could this be another sign that Jerry Brown’s return to the California governorship is imminent? As I write Thursday in The New York Times, the state’s public utilities commission has greenlighted a contract for the world’s first orbiting solar power plant:

California regulators on Thursday went where no regulators have gone before — approving a utility contract for the nation’s first space-based solar power plant.

The 200-megawatt orbiting solar farm would convert solar energy collected in space into radio frequency waves, which would be beamed to a ground station near Fresno, Calif. The radio waves would then be transformed back into electricity and fed into the power grid.

“At the conceptual level, the advantages of space-based systems are significant,” said Michael Peevey, president of the California Public Utilities Commission, during a hearing on Thursday. “This technology would offer around-the-clock access to clean renewable energy, and while there’s no doubt this project has many hurdles to overcome, both regulatory and technological, it’s hard to argue with the audacity of the project.”

“It’s hard to argue with the audacity of the project.”
— Michael Peevey, California Public Utilities Commission
A Southern California startup called Solaren will loft components for the solar power plant into orbit and sell the electricity it generates to Pacific Gas & Electric, the major utility in northern California, under a 15-year contract. The project is supposed to be turned on in 2016.

You can read the rest of the story here.

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Google-backed eSolar to build New Mexico solar farm

Posted in alternative energy, energy, enviro startups, environment, eSolar, First Solar, renewable energy, solar energy, solar power plants, Southern California Edison, tagged , , , on June 11, 2009| 1 Comment »

eSolar Sierra
photo: eSolar

California may be in the midst of licensing dozens of massive megawatt solar power plants but New Mexico may be first state out of the gate with a big project using next-generation solar thermal technology. On Thursday, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson announced that Pasadena, Calif.-based eSolar and utility giant NRG Energy will build a 92-megawatt solar thermal power plant — the state’s first — near the Texas border that will go online in 2011.

“The New Mexico Public Utilities Commission has approved the project, we have the permits and  we already have the land so we’ll be breaking ground in 2010,” eSolar CEO Bill Gross told Green Wombat. “We already have the equipment and the financing partner, NRG. We’re ready to go.”

In February, Google-backed (GOOG) eSolar agreed to supply its technology to NRG (NRG) to develop solar farms generating 500 megawatts.

eSolar will use fields of mirrors to focus the sun on water-filled boilers that sit atop towers. The heat vaporizes the water and the resulting steam drives electricity-generating turbines. Competitors use large, slightly curved — parabolic — mirrors to focus sunlight. That requires big and expensive steel frames to hold the glass in place.  eSolar’s solution: make small flat mirrors the size of an LCD television screen that clamp on to a  5 x 12-inch frame and then use software and Big Iron computing to position the mirrors to create a “dynamic parabola” out of the entire heliostat field.  Gross says eSolar’s small heliostats can be cheaply manufactured take up less land than conventional mirrors.

That means eSolar can build modular power plants near urban areas and transmission lines, lowering costs and avoiding some of the endangered species fights that have slowed Big Solar projects in California. (See Green Wombat’s column on Grist for a first-hand look at eSolar’s Sierra demonstration plant in Southern California.)

The New Mexico solar farm will be built on 450 acres of agricultural land about 10 miles from El Paso, Texas. Utility El Paso Electric (EE), which serves parts of New Mexico, will buy the electricity generated by the solar power plant — enough to power 74,000 homes  — under a 20-year power purchase agreement. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“We think there’s room for a lot more solar power plants at this price,” says Gross. “The sun is very good in New Mexico and all the economics that make this project work are very good there.”

In March, First Solar (FSLR) said it would build a 30-megawatt thin-film photovoltaic solar farm in northeastern New Mexico.

eSolar’s five-megawatt Sierra demo plant outside Los Angeles, pictured above, has begun producing steam and will soon start generating electricity — “It’s the only solar power tower operating in North America,” Gross says.

Next year, ground will be broken on an eSolar power plant in India and NRG and eSolar have a deal to supply utility Southern California Edison (EIX) with 245 megawatts of solar electricity.

“The idea of these plants dotting the desert and producing electricity has been our dream for a long time,” says Gross, “and now it’s a reality.”

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Solar power: Not just for electricity

Posted in alternative energy, Ausra, energy, environment, eSolar, green tech, solar energy, solar power plants, tagged , , , , , , on October 23, 2008| 3 Comments »

photos: Ausra

Silicon Valley startup Ausra fired up a five-megawatt solar power plant outside Bakersfield Thursday, the first big solar station to go online in California in nearly two decades.

Ausra has a 20-year contract with utility PG&E (PCG) for a 177-megawatt solar power plant to be built some 70 miles away on the Carrizo Plains in San Luis Obispo County. But like competitors who also aim to sell solar technology untried on a large scale, Ausra constructed the demo plant, called Kimberlina, as a proof of concept for investors who will have to be persuaded in these tight times to pony up half a billion dollars or more in project financing. “It’s important because this is the technology banks’ engineers want to see so they’re comfortable recommending financing for the Carrizo Plains site,” Ausra CEO Robert Fishman told Green Wombat.

At Kimberlina’s unveiling Thursday, PG&E CEO Peter Darbee warned against letting the financial crisis derail the fight against global warming.  “The capital markets are going to distinguish between high-risk projects and low-risk projects and the high-risk projects are not going to get financed in the future,” he said. “PG&E stands ready to take on the challenge of financing renewables.”

While Ausra built Kimberlina to show that its compact linear fresnel reflector technology can generate utility-scale electricity, the plant is also designed to demonstrate that solar tech can be deployed for other industrial uses. At heart, a solar thermal power plant is a steam machine. In Ausra’s case, long rows of flat mirrors that sit low to the ground. concentrate sunlight on water-filled pipes that hang over the mirrors to create steam. That drives an electricity-generating turbine, but Ausra and other companies are looking to sell the steam as well.

For instance, take a drive around Bakersfield and you’d think you were in Texas, what with all the oil rigs rocking back and forth across a treeless landscape. Bakersfield oil is thick and heavy, so steam is injected into the ground to make it flow. Fishman wants oil companies to stop burning expensive natural gas to boil water and start using the sun.

“We’ve been doing a lot of show and tell,” says Fishman, referring to the Kimberlina plant, which sits just off the Bakersfield oil patch’s main highway. “If you look at putting a solar generator in, the economics look pretty good.”

Each 1,000-foot row, or line, of Ausra mirrors generates six megawatts of heat, according to Fishman, who says the company has talked to potential clients who would need anywhere between five and 50 lines.

Ausra also is exploring other markets for its steam technology, such as food processing.

Rival power plant builder eSolar, the Pasadena startup incubated by Bill Gross’ Idealab and funded in part by Google (GOOG), also sees other markets for its green tech. Last month, eSolar, which has a contact to supply utility Southern California Edison (EIX) with 245 megawatts of electricity, licensed its technology to stealth renewable fuels startup Sundrop, based in Pojoaque, N.M., north of Santa Fe.

Sundrop CEO John Stevens will say little about the Kleiner Perkins-backed company’s plans. “Sundrop uses low-cost concentrated solar energy to drive renewable energy into fuels,” he wrote in an e-mail. “We will produce low-cost renewable fuels.  We expect to be demonstrating scale production in 2009-2010.”

eSolar CEO Asif Ansari told Green Wombat his company will provide fields of mirrors called heliostats to Sundrop along with software and control systems to concentrate the sun’s rays on a tower. (Venture Beat uncovered documents that indicates Sundrop may plan to produce hydrogen and other fuels.)

“Basically, we’re a technology company; we don’t want to be in the construction business,” says Ansari. “What we really are trying to develop here is a standard global platform for delivering concentrated solar energy to any target that can be used for a variety of applications.”

Besides using solar energy to produce such fuels as hydrogen, Ansari, like Ausra, sees the oil industry as a potential market. He says the food processing and fertilizer industries also could substitute eSolar’s technology for natural gas to make steam.

Back in Bakersfield, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger presided over the official opening of Ausra’s Kimberlina solar plant on Thursday. (Live streaming his appearance.) “California is going green and it’s going green really fast,” the governator said before an audience that included PG&E chief executive Peter Darbee and Silicon Valley venture capitalists Ray Lane and Vinod Khosla.

The solar power station is plugged into the grid and will supply PG&E with enough electricity to power about 3,500 homes in central California. The mirror arrays were made at Ausra’s robotic factory in Las Vegas.

“This represents the best of American and Australian ingenuity and get-it-done attitude,” said Fishman at the ceremony, referring to Ausra’s roots in Sydney. “People don’t need to think of Ausra as an alternative energy company. As of today it is simply an energy company.”

Schwarzenegger gave the signal and Kimberlina officially came online, the 1,000-foot-long mirror arrays rotating toward the sun.

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