Full steam ahead for Nevada solar project (CNET News.com)

[eppur_se_muova]

By Michael Kanellos
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: March 12, 2007, 4:00 AM PDT

BOULDER CITY, Nev.--The Nevada Solar One power plant is essentially a tea kettle, just one that happens to take up 300 acres and can provide enough power for 15,000 homes.

The plant, which will start to generate electricity for nearby Las Vegas in April, consists of approximately 184,000 mirrors arranged in long, parabolic arrays that focus the sun's energy on a receiver--a metal tube filled with oil that's encased in specialized glass--from German conglomerate Schott.

Sunlight heats the oil to 400 degrees Celsius (about 750 degrees Fahrenheit). The oil gets transferred to a heat exchanger where it makes steam, which then cranks a turbine to produce electricity. If the heat can't be used right away, it gets transferred to vats of molten salt which retain the heat for later use.
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Now, solar thermal projects are under way--or at least on the white board--in Spain, Greece, Mexico, Iran, Algeria and parts of the U.S., among other places. When it goes live, Solar One will be the third largest solar thermal plant in the world with a 64 megawatt capacity. Potentially, the site could crank out 2,000 megawatts, or enough power for about a half-million people, Cohen said. The U.S. Southwest could ultimately produce 4,000 to 40,000 megawatts of solar thermal power, he speculated, enough for 1 million to 10 million consumers.

In California's Mojave Desert, already home to 354 megawatts of solar thermal facilities, Stirling Energy Systems in conjunction with utility company Southern California Edison is erecting a 500 megawatt plant to open in 2009.
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more: http://news.com.com/Full+steam+ahead+for+Nevada+solar+project/2100-11392_3-6166113.html

Note the dateline ... apparently this didn't get covered in E/E. :)

eta correct attribution :blush:

[Pab Sungenis]

1. They just built a similar collector in Spain.

Sevilla, I think. Beautiful thing to behold.

Imagine, we can finally make efficient use of some of our desert lands as a natural resource. And the more time that goes by, and the more work researchers do, the more efficient and more powerful these plants will become.

Then picture if people start building these things in the Gobi, the Sahara, other places where there's tons of sunlight and nothing around. We might really make a dent in the need for fossil fuels, and provide power supplies to help satisfy the needs of developing nations.