Author Topic: The World's Largest Solar Plant Started Creating Electricity Today  (Read 3024 times)

birrbert

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Take 300,000 computer-controlled mirrors, each 7 feet high and 10 feet wide. Control them with computers to focus the Sun's light to the top of 459-foot towers, where water is turned into steam to power turbines. Bingo: you have the world's biggest solar power plant, the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System.

Long-mired by regulatory issues and legal tangles, the enormous solar plant–jointly owned by NRG Energy, BrightSource Energy and Google–opened for business today.

Full article with photos: http://gizmodo.com/the-worlds-largest-solar-plant-started-creating-electr-1521998493


...and apparently it's killing birds.

The $2.2 Billion Bird-Scorching Solar Project
Link: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304703804579379230641329484
"Dubito ergo cogito, cogito ergo sum." Descartes

SeanB

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Re: The World's Largest Solar Plant Started Creating Electricity Today
« Reply #1 on: February 15, 2014, 08:36:38 AM »
Good, at least there is some use for otherwise arid ground. As a source of high temperature you could also use it as a first stage for waste incineration and power generation at the same time. If it gets high enough to handle dioxin you can use an outer layer as a destruction layer for waste, generating both power and destroying as well. You could even use a small secondary mirror to have a furnace at ground level to incinerate or calcine low level waste, or to run a desalination system for ultra brackish ground water to feed the facility.