Florida Power & Light building biggest U.S. photovoltaic plant

[kristopher]

Florida Power & Light building biggest U.S. photovoltaic plant

The company that provides Springfield with wind power is building a new photovoltaic solar plant in less time than it takes to build a coal plant.

Unlike most large-scale solar plants, which use big mirrors to concentrate sunlight, the SunPower project will use the same solar panels that homeowners install on their rooftops.

It will be built in Florida's DeSoto County and will generate up to 25 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 18,750 homes. SunPower also will build a smaller facility, generating 10 megawatts, at Kennedy Space Center.

Both plants will be owned and operated by Florida Power & Light Co., an electric utility. The two companies are not releasing financial details of the deal.

As utilities across the country try to find cleaner sources of power, some are turning to large-scale solar plants. But most of those plants don't use photovoltaic panels, which generate electricity directly from sunlight. Instead, they use mirrors to focus sunlight, heat water, produce steam and turn turbines....

http://www.thereisaway.us/2008/07/florida_power_light_building_b.html

[NNadir]

1. Wow, this is the 832,040th "world's largest solar plant" announced at E&E without solar

producing 0.1 exajoules of the world's 500 exajoule energy demand.

Florida Power and Light also built the "world's largest" IGCC coal plant, a Potemkin village sort of idea designed to distract attention from its 1600 MW Polk coal plant.

As for the "up to" in the misleading and fraudulent "25 MW," that is the power produced in for about 5 minutes on a cloudless day when the inclination of the sun is exactly right, which it is for 2 days out of 365.25 days.