THE IMMINENT SOLAR POWER TOWER ACHIEVEMENT

Ivanpah and the Future of Big Solar

Jim Rossi, March 21, 2013 (Nevada Institute for Renewable Energy Commercialization)

“…[BrightSource Energy’s Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System may be about to change the world…At 377 net megawatts, the Ivanpah project is an order of magnitude bigger than any solar tower project constructed before. If successful, even bigger projects will follow…[BrightSource’s] predecessor, Israeli solar thermal company Luz…built the first big solar plant in the Mojave—the Solar Electric Generating Stations (SEGS)…in the 1980s. Nearb, the U.S. Department of Energy…[pioneered] both the solar tower design and the use of molten salt to store sunlight for nighttime electricity use…[Decades later] Silicon Valley entrepreneurs including Google seede… BrightSource…

“…Ivanpah employed over 3,000 workers at the height of construction to build three 450-foot towers—each topped with an inside-out heat-trapping boiler. The towers are surrounded by three fields with a total of 173,500 heliostats (high-performance sun-tracking mirrors). The site spans over 3,600 acres, controlled by four control rooms (one for each tower and another command center), which use a proprietary computer system called SFINCS (Solar Field Integrated Control System) to operate the heliostats through 2,000 kilometers of wires. The project totals 22 million parts, not including the rivets.”

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“Two fields [will] sell their power to Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), the other to Southern California Edison. The total project was budgeted at nearly $2.2 billion, including almost $1.4 billion from a federal loan guarantee. BrightSource’s future—and maybe that of the entire solar thermal industry—has been riding on the plant’s success…BrightSource hopes to deploy storage…[in upcoming projects]…Those plants will also have taller towers…and control the heliostats wirelessly…[Such] steps expected to ‘scale up’ and significantly lower the per kilowatt-hour costs.

“BrightSource employed dozens of field biologists to [protect and] relocate desert tortoises…[and installs the heliostats in a way] which allows most of the area’s plant life to simply be trimmed down instead of uprooted. The plant uses expensive dry-cooling technology, making its total annual water use only about…equivalent to the water used to maintain two holes of a golf course…[Ivanpah is] scheduled to power up this year…as the world’s largest solar thermal power plant.”

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