It’ll be the largest plant of its kind within the globe, capable of powering 70,000 properties with out any emissions. The Solana plant, built by Abengoa Solar, Inc. will break ground later this year close to Gila Bend, AZ, 70 miles southwest of Phoenix. In addition to its exceptional size, Solana will carry out another trick: it will be able to store the power it generates throughout the day for use at one more time.
Just How Big is Huge?
The plant will make use of 900,000 parabolic mirrors to focus the suns power on a heat transfer fluid. That fluid is expected to reach a temperature of 735F, heating water to steam and driving conventional steam turbines to produce electricity. The plant ought to generate 280 megawatts of power when completed.
How Will Energy Be Stored?
Perhaps essentially the most exciting feature of this particular solar plant could be the reality that it’ll be capable of retailer power for use when climate circumstances dont permit it to produce power from the sun. A set of big thermos-like buildings will likely be filled with molten salt. As specific times throughout the production cycle the heat generated by the mirrors will be utilised to heat the salt.
When the fluid responsible for producing steam energy can not utilize solar energy to gain its heat, it’s going to rather use the heat stored inside the molten salt to do so. The salt may be used this way for as much as six hours after it was heated. This method will enable the plant to use the suns power lengthy after it has set, typically during hours when demand is highest, like throughout the early evening hours of the winter.
Just 1 of Sixteen
Solana is just one of 16 loans that the DOE will fund with $16.5B earmarked for clean energy projects. With a total projected power gain of 37 million megawatt-hours of power, the projects could energy more than 3 million properties when complete. Other projects have included wind farms and nuclear generation plants.