NEW RAYS OF HOPE FOR SOLAR POWERS FUTURE
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New rays of hope for solar powers future
High cost of fossil fuel and advanced technology improve
this energy sources prospects.
By Mark Clayton
Staff Writer for The Christian Science Monitor
August 22, 2008 edition
Boulder City, Nevada - From five miles away, the Nevada
Solar One power plant seems a mirage, a silver lake amid
waves of 110 degree F. desert heat. Driving nearer, the
rippling image morphs into a sea of mirrors angled to the
sun.
As the first commercial concentrating solar power or CSP
plant built in 17 years, Nevada Solar One marks the
reemergence and updating of a decades-old technology that
could play a large new role in US power production, many
observers say.
Concentrating solar is pretty hot right now, says Mark
Mehos, program manager for CSP at the National Renewable
Energy Laboratory in Golden, Co. Costs look pretty good
compared to natural gas [power]. Public policy, climate
concern, and new technology are driving it, too.
Spread in military rows across 300 acres of sun-baked
earth, Nevada Solar Ones trough-shaped parabolic mirrors
are the core of this CSP plant also called a solar thermal
plant. The mirrors focus sunlight onto receiver tubes,
heating a fluid that, at 735 degrees F., flows through a
heat exchanger to a steam generator that supplies 64
megawatts of electricity to 14,000 Las Vegas homes.
Today the United States has 420 megawatts of solar-thermal
capacity across three installations including Nevada Solar
One. Thats just a tiny fraction (less than 1 percent) of US
grid capacity. But Nevada Solar One could signal the start
of a CSP building boom.
Efforts to generate another 4,500 megawatts of solar
thermal power are now in development across California,
Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico all of which have the
flat, near-cloudless skies most desirable for solar
thermal, the Solar Electric Industries Association reports.
Photovoltaic panels that produce electricity directly from
the suns rays work well on rooftops, but are still too
costly for utility-scale power generation. Solar thermal,
however, is nearing the cost of a natural gas-fired turbine
power plant making it a winner with several power
companies that have signed long-term contracts to purchase
solar-thermal power.
Desert land lures developers In fact, theres a land rush at
the federal Bureau of Land Management. As of July, the BLM
reported more than 125 applications to build solar power on
about 1 million acres of desert, up from just a handful of
proposals a few years ago.
We think theres a good market there, says Travis Bradford,
an expert at the Prometheus Institute, a Boston-based
solar-energy market research firm. His firm sees 12,000
megawatts (12 gigawatts) of solar thermal installed by 2020
and maybe 20 times that in coming decades.
Dr. Mehos says perhaps 100,000 megawatts (100 gigawatts)
could be built across the US Southwest over the next 30
years.
You could supply the entire US with the sun power here in a
little piece of the Southwest, says Dan Kabel as he strolls
beneath a row of trough-shaped mirrors. Mr. Kabel is chief
executive of Acciona Solar Power, which owns the $266
million Nevada Solar One project. As fossil fuel costs
rise, this plant is unaffected. If America doesnt do this,
if we dont install many more of these clean solar-power
systems, well just end up seeing a lot more fossil-fuel
plants instead.
Still, the cost of power remains critical. Commercial CSP
systems emerged in the late 1990s, only to be squashed by
falling natural gas prices.
Today, as natural gas prices rise along with concerns about
carbon emissions and global warming, the stable,
predictable costs of carbon-free solar thermal is
increasingly comforting to utilities.
Whats different now from the 80s and 90s is that we have
much higher natural gas prices than back then, Mehos says.
I dont think people foresee a serious drop in natural gas
prices now. Even if they fell 30 percent, CSP would look
attractive.
The importance of tax credits Concentrating solar
technology produces electricity for about 17 cents per
kilowatt hour (kWh), Mehos estimates. But subsidies remain
critical to solar thermal development in both the US and
Spain, two global hotbeds of CSP development. With the
federal investment tax credit, or ITC, costs drop to about
15 cents per kWh low enough to compete with natural gas.
A key feature of solar thermal is its potential to use
heat-storage technology to generate power after the sun
sets. Nevada Solar One is considering adding a molten-salt
or similar system to allow it to supply power for several
hours after sundown.
With such storage systems, solar thermal becomes even more
attractive to utilities, experts say. Arizona Public
Service is contracting with Abengoa to build a 280-megawatt
solar thermal plant near Phoenix that will cost more than
$1 billion and have molten-salt heat storage. Arizona
Public Service really does want to put this [solar thermal]
plant in because in the future this really could replace
natural gas, says Reese Tisdale, an analyst at Emerging
Energy Research, a market-research firm in Boston. Theyre
the first to say that once this plant is installed, the
fuel is free.
So far, US development of solar thermal is dominated by a
handful of big overseas companies, including Abengoa and
Acciona (Spain), as well as Solel Solar Systems (Israel),
Solar Millenium (Germany), and Ausra (Australia), now
headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif.
To stimulate development, Spain has deployed hefty, long-
term feed-in tariffs. But in the US market, solar thermal
is hanging by a thread. The investment tax credit, which
covers 30 percent of a CSP facilitys cost, will expire at
years end unless renewed by Congress. But bills to renew
the ITC have been blocked eight times this year by Senate
Republicans.
What were seeing with all these companies lining up for
solar thermal is hugely promising, says Monique Hanis,
spokeswoman for the SEIA. But without the ITC, all of these
solar thermal plants will be put on hold.
That would pour cold water on a raft of potential
breakthrough solar-thermal technologies promoted by US
companies. So far this year, five US-based start-up CSP
companies have gotten $419 million in private funding for
their technologies, Emerging Energy Research reports.
BrightSource Energy, Stirling Energy Systems, eSolar,
Skyfuel, and Infinia Corp. are start-up US companies
pursuing refinements of existing technologies and major
new ones and the funding to prove them. One of the key
goals is to make mirrors and receivers more efficient in
order to achieve higher temperatures which tend to make
for greater efficiency and lower cost.
BrightSource Energy, funded by Google and others, received
$100 million in May to proceed with its advanced central
receiver approach. It has refined 1990s technology to
develop simpler, cheaper to manufacture mirrors that focus
the suns rays on a tower receiver, heating water to nearly
1,000 degrees F.
By contrast, Stirling Energy Systems in April received $100
million to further develop its SunCatcher approach a
relatively small system in which a 38-foot dish supporting
82 curved glass mirrors automatically tracks the sun. The
solar heat is focused onto a high-efficiency four-cylinder
reciprocating Stirling engine. The Stirling engine uses
solar heat to expand (not burn) hydrogen gas to move its
pistons, which spin an electric motor with no fuel cost or
pollution.
Each SunCatcher dish generates about 25,000 watts, turning
about 30 percent of the sun power that strikes it into
electricity, compared with about 20 percent for parabolic-
mirror systems.
Although the technology has yet to be proven on a
commercial scale, Stirling Energy Systems announced in June
that it had applied for permits to build a 750-megawatt
Solar Two facility on 6,500 acres of desert in Californias
Imperial Valley about 100 miles east of San Diego. When
complete, the plant could supply power for about 500,000
homes.
Another technology called linear fresnel is being pursued
by Ausra, which has opened a factory in Las Vegas to build
inexpensive mirrors mounted on rolling platforms. Though
operating at lower temperatures, the technology could
operate at costs well below current levels, some observers
say.
Back at Nevada Solar One, Mr. Kabel looks out across the
desert to a hulking building on the horizon a natural gas
fired turbine power plant an arch rival power producer. But
maybe not for too much longer.
The way things are going, with our costs coming down, this
valley is going to see a lot more of these, he says,
gesturing to the rows of mirrors. Fossil fuel generation is
headed one way like the dinosaurs.
End of forwarded message from "Tom Davos" <tomd...@yahoo.com>
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