Southern California Edison (SCE) announced it’s lauch of what will the the largest solar installation in the USA.  The project will install 250 Megawatts of solar panels using 65 million sq. ft. of roof space on the companies buildings.  The project should provide power to over 162,000 homes and will cost about $875 million over 5 years.  The project requires approval by the state utility regulator, which appears to be a formality. 

“The scale of this project is unprecedented,” said Mike Peevey, California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) president. “It clearly illustrates once again Edison’s leadership position in the development of new renewable technology.”

The projects will be focused on San Bernardino and Riverside counties and will add capacity at the rate of 1 Megawatt a week.  The SCE spokesperson pointed out that this new capacity will located and connected to local power stations. Generating power nearer to the customer not only reduce losses from transmission but reduces the strain on SCE’s entire network.

According to an article in The New Zealand Herald of 12/04/07, “Europe is considering plans to spend more than £5 billion ($13.5 billion) on a string of giant solar power stations along the Mediterranean desert in northern Africa and the Middle East. More than a hundred of the generators, each fitted with thousands of huge mirrors, would generate electricity to be transmitted by undersea cable to Europe and then distributed across the continent to EU member nations. Billions of watts of power could be generated, enough to provide Europe with a sixth of its electricity needs and to allow it to make significant cuts in its carbon emissions. At the same time, the stations would be used as desalination plants to provide desert countries with desperately needed supplies of fresh water.”  The technique used will be the CSP or “concentrating solar power” model which has a hollow water-filled metal tower surrounded by mirrors which focus the sun’s rays on it. Water is turned to steam and powers turbines which make electricity.

This is a similar but slightly different approach to the one being taken by Ausra Inc, which is set to begin construction on giant solar thermal power plants in the US. With backing from venture capitalists, Ray Lane of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc. (JAVA ), Pacific Gas and Electric and Florida Light and Power. The utilities have committed to solar plants that will produce 1,000MW within the decade. Starting with a 10MW Florida plant, the group’s plan is to go to 300MW for FLP. For the Pacific Group, Ausra will start with a 175MW plant. The reason the investors and utilities are willing to invest in this project is because of the technology that Ausra believes will take the cost down below ten cents per KW.

Khosla is so impressed that he predicts that the technology, which uses flat mirrors instead of parabolic mirrors, will revolutionize renewable energy both in the US and developing countries like China and India. Johh O’Donnell, the man responsible for bringing the investors together became interested in the design while reading a paper by University of Sydney professor David Mills. Unlike the nine power stations built in the 1980’s by Israeli company Luz Corp, Mill’s plan uses flat not parabolic mirrors. The Israeli power plants in the Mojave Desert are still generating 354 MW of electricity but costs never fell below 16 cents a KW, which didn’t impress investors. Mill’s design uses the heat of the sun, directly, to make steam from the water instead of oil as Luz did. Mill’s mirrors are cheaper to build and rugged enough to withstand hurricane force winds,
according to an article in Business Week, in October of 2007.

For as long as i can remember (that would be the 1960’s), Israel has taken advantage of the hot, Middle Eastern sun, mainly as a source for making hot water.  Since then, Israel has moved from a developing country, focusing in labor intensive industries such as agriculture and industry, to a leading high tech center.  Today’s Israel rivals the world in technological industries and economic growth.  It receives more U.S. patents (1325 in 2006) than dozens of countries including Belgium, Finland, Spain, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Singapore, China and Hong Kong.  Yet his high tech success,  hasn’t really Israeli society to implement a solar generating industry.

Recently the CBC reported on Israeli professor David Faimen and his recent research in solar electric generation.  Dr. Faimen has found that by concentrating sunlight onto a standard photovoltiac cell, he has increased output by over 1000 times.  Think mirrors and lenses.  Currently a US based power plants uses mirrors to concentrate light on tubes that move a thermal liquid which is used to make steam to power the turbines that make electricity.

Rather than using the heat to boil water, they focused on ”… concentrating the light a thousand times, we were able to produce 1,500 watts from a cell that normally gives only one watt,” Faiman explains.  If this technology proves affordable, suddenly a home owner could generate the 5 kw needed to power a house from area much smaller than todays panels. In fact Faiman believes that his techonology could generate over 80 Megawatts, per sq kilometer, or enough to power over 16,000 homes.

From The Lab to Production

Not only is Israel involved in photovoltaic research, they’re are actively involved in large scale commercial solar procuction, thru the work of Solel Solar Systems, Ltd. of Bait Shemesh (House of Sun) Israel.  Solel is best known for having built the 9 solar fields in Californian, using mirrors to collect solar heat to boil steam for turbines. The company was recently awarded a contract to deliver a 1 million mirror collection facility covering 6000 acres and generating electricity for over 400,000 families.

Strangely enough, there are no such plants in Israel and none are planned.  So while the Israeli solar industry is building state of the art plants in the US, they aren’t selling their products at home.

If you read this blog religiously, which of course everyone should, you heard me discuss the use of a solar “chimney” designed to use a downdraft to push turbines.  The idea being: Spray water over the top opening of the chimney and the cold air generated by evaporation will drop to the bottom of the stack, creating a vacuum that will cause a downdraft.  This is a new and untested idea, but the solar chimney is not.

The “Solar Chimney” runs in reverse, a tall tower can be attached to a greenhouse like, heat sync, which would cause the heated air to rise in the stack producing an updraft thru the tall stack. Placing turbines at/near the bottom of the stack will generate electric power as the tower sucks the warmed air up the stack.  Also called a solar updraft tower, this technology has been tested.  The tower, built by Germany, in Spain was 195 meters high, with a stack with a diameter of 10 meters.  The collection greenhouse covered 11 acres and could generate a maximum of 50 kW, it ran from 1983 until 1989, when it was shutdown due to structural damage from the vortices caused by the updraft. 

Scientists today, envision a much larger tower that is capable of generating 40 MW of electricity, enough to power about 40,000 homes. Unfortunately, estimates for the cost of building such a plant, lead to estimates that range from an affordable 7 cents per Kw/hrs to an unacceptable rate of 35 cents per Kw/hrs.  Much of the cost can be attributed to the cost of land, glazing and labor needed to build a collector “greenhouse” that covers nearly 2 sq/miles.

While not a solar chimney, this updraft concept can, in theory use any heat source to cause the updraft.  This technology should be viable anywhere/anyplace/anytime that the ambient temperature is lower than the heat being sent up the chimney.  Whether this can be financially feasable, it seems quite straight forward from the standpoint of physics and civil engineering.

This week i was lucky enough to notice that WTVS, my local PBS station had scheduled a Nova, local programming and a Scientific Amerian Frontiers episode, all focused on solar energy.  There is a website on the PBS site devoted to: Nova: “Saved by the Sun”.  This special walks you thru the solar industry from it’s start in the oil crisis of the 1970’s thru today where it’s being debated as to whether it is a partial or complete solution to our global warming problems.  You see the US’s first and only powerplant using solar thermal heat (located in Kramer Junction, CA) to run electric turbines and the latest in solar technology today.

A number of experts try to rain on my solar parade by claiming that solar is a partial solution, a solution that only works during “sunny days” or a “solution for rich people”.  Most of this rhetoric is a bunch of….. compost. Sure the sun doesn’t shine at night, so we use the solar electricity during the daylight to make hydrogen gas to fuel traditional style generators at night.  Water can be pump up hill into reseviors using solar electricity and run back downhill to create hydroelectric power during dark parts of the day.  My local station went onto to discuss expansion with United Solar Ovonics, part of ECD the home of Detroit’s favorite Sun: Stan Ovshinsky, with it’s CEO.  The plan is to quintuple, production of their flexible solar electric modules to 300 megawatts by 2009.  This is good news for solar power and good news for the world.

The final program of the evening, featured Alan Alda spending time with Stan Ovshinsky and learning about Ovonics panels and it’s Solid Hydrogen storage system.  It seems that while United Solar’s panels are not the most effective cells in high sunlight conditions, they do produce electricity from the sun, even in rain and cloudy weather.  Best of all, they’re smaller, thinner, lighter and more flexible than stand panels and as Ovshinsky demoed, they can produce electricity with a dozen holes drilled through a 2 sq ft panel of the material.  With Germany being the leading solar market in the world, it’s certainly possible that places like metro Detroit, with ECD inc. leading the way, can lead solar adoption in the US.  Solar Cells that work in gray days, what a perfect solution from a company that’s headquartered in the midwest.