Run For One Planet Blog

By Chris Tilley

There are a number of companies out there working on creating large scale solar power plants. The three that we are going to look at are meant to show some of the different ideas out there. There are many more idea than these as well and as always you are welcome to post comments on any that you know about.

15 MW plant on 140 acres of Nellis Air Force Base installed by SunPower.

The first up is SunPower. They build power plants out of photovoltaic panels Photovoltaic panels are what we all think of when we think of solar power. They have installed a total of 100 MW in 5 countries so far. Some upcoming contract they have:

• 1 MW System at a Gap Distribution Center (source)
• 1 MW AT&T Office Park (source)
• 250 MW Pacific Gas and Electric (source)

Image courtesy of Ausra

The second is Ausra. Their system uses a series of flat mirrors under a pipe holding water. The mirrors tilt to focus the sun on the pipe and the water is converted to steam that drives turbines. They can also store the thermal energy and run around the clock. They currently have a 177 MW plant in the planning stages for San Luis Obispo County, CA.(source) The mirrors are flat and easy to make. Steam power is a known force and used in many other types of power plants.

The third is Enviro Mission’s Solar tower. Their idea is a 200MW plant in Australia that uses a large concrete tower at the center surrounded by a greenhouse collector. The air under the greenhouse heats and rises. The rising air needs to go up the tower and to get there they have to pass through turbines at the base of the tower. This will also generate electricity at night as the heated ground will continue to radiate heat and drive the winds. They successfully ran a 50 KW Prototype in Spain for 7 years.

There are a lot of good ideas and probably more that I haven’t heard of. This is a constantly changing area of development and the more that people demand clean electricity the better these companies are going to look and the more contracts that they will get.