Europe’s first commercially operating solar power station
Davide Simonetti @ May 3rd 2007 08:19 - Category: Solar power
It’s expensive and so far only generates 11 Megawatts of electricity but it is expected to be able to cater for the 600,000 people of Seville when it’s completed. Prices are eventually expected to fall too as the technology develops. Well it’s a start.
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4 Responses to “Europe’s first commercially operating solar power station”
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Eli Stephens on 03 May 2007 at 1:36 pm #
Saw this on BBC News (TV) last night - very cool. Especially that its solar-thermal, not solar-electric. It would be interesting to see a comparison of the efficiency (and costs) of the two; it wasn’t in this report.
It does take up a lot of room, but does it take up more room than a power plant, or a coal mine, or an oil derrick? I don’t know.
Davide Simonetti on 03 May 2007 at 1:53 pm #
Eli,
It’s hard to tell from the pictures how much space the power station uses but I doubt it can be that much more than a conventional plant because there must be a limit to the distance the mirrors can work. Of course if they put in more towers and mirror arrays then the space problem would be more evident. What I liked was the suggestion in the article that deserts could be used to supply clean energy, although I guess water would have to be pumped to the power plants.
Bob Morris on 03 May 2007 at 3:09 pm #
Ideas have been proposed to put vast arrays of solar in the deserts of the southwest US, thus theoretically generating huge amounts of power. There’s even plans to convert the power to hydrogen and store it.
DJ on 03 May 2007 at 5:24 pm #
Solar thermal in the Mojave has been done. Wikipedia has this report on the 10 MW Solar One/Solar Two thermal solar projects near Barstow, CA. Thay claim the space is much less than a hydro dam (with lake) or coal palnt (with mine). The article refers to the projects as successful, but there’s no information on why the plant was shut down.