There are several solar power plants in the Mojave Desert which supply power to
the electricity grid. Insolation in the Mojave Desert is among the best
available in the United States, and some significant population centers are
located in the area. These plants can generally be built in a few years
because solar plants are built almost entirely with modular, readily available
materials. Solar Energy Generating Systems is the name given to nine solar
power plants in the Mojave Desert which were built in the 1980s, the first
commercial solar plant. These plants have a combined capacity of 354
megawatts which made them the largest solar power installation in the world,
until Ivanpah Solar Power Facility was finished in 2014.
Nevada Solar One is a solar thermal plant with a 64 MW generating capacity,
located near Boulder City, Nevada. The Copper Mountain Solar Facility is a 150
MW photovoltaic power plant in Boulder City, Nevada. The Ivanpah Solar Power
Facility is a 370 MW facility which consists of three separate solar thermal
power plants just off interstate highway 15 on the Nevada-California border in
the Mojave Desert. There are also plans to build other large solar plants in the
Mojave Desert. Overview
The southwestern United States is one of the world's best areas for insolation,
and the Mojave Desert receives up to twice the sunlight received in other
regions of the country. This abundance of solar energy makes solar power plants
a cleaner alternative to traditional power plants, which burn fossil fuels
such as oil and coal. Solar power stations provide an environmentally
benign source of energy, produce virtually no emissions, and consume no
fuel other than sunlight. Some groups are also encouraging more distributed
generation, or rooftop solar. In 2008, solar electricity was not cost
competitive with bulk, baseload power. However, it does provide electricity
when and where power is most limited and most expensive, which is a strategic
contribution. Solar electricity mitigates the risk of fuel-price
volatility and improves grid reliability. Since then costs have
decreased to make solar electricity increasingly competitive.
While many of the costs of fossil fuels are well known, others are indirect and
difficult to calculate. These are traditionally external to the pricing
system, and are thus often referred to as externalities. A corrective pricing
mechanism, such as a carbon tax, could lead to renewable energy, such as solar
thermal power, becoming cheaper to the consumer than fossil fuel based energy.
Solar thermal power plants can generally be built in a few years because solar
plants are built almost entirely with modular, readily available materials. In
contrast, many types of conventional power projects, especially coal and
nuclear plants, require long lead times. Solar plants
= Solar One and Solar Two = Solar power towers use thousands of
individual sun-tracking mirrors to reflect solar energy onto a central
receiver located on top of a tall tower. The receiver collects the sun's heat in
a heat-transfer fluid that flows through the receiver. The U.S. Department of
Energy, with a consortium of utilities and industry, built the first two
large-scale, demonstration solar power towers in the desert near Barstow,
California. Solar One operated successfully from
1982 to 1988, proving that solar power towers work efficiently to produce
utility-scale power from sunlight. The Solar One plant used water/steam as the
heat-transfer fluid in the receiver; this presented several problems in terms
of storage and continuous turbine operation. To address these problems,
Solar One was upgraded to Solar Two, which operated from 1996 to 1999. Both
systems had a 10 MW power capacity. The unique feature of Solar Two was its
use of molten salt to capture and store the sun's heat. The very hot salt was
stored and used when needed to produce steam to drive a turbine/generator that
produces electricity. The system operated smoothly through intermittent
clouds and continued generating electricity long into the night. Solar
Two was decommissioned in 1999, and was converted by the University of
California, Davis, into an Air Cherenkov Telescope in 2001, measuring gamma rays
hitting the atmosphere. = Solar Energy Generating Systems =
Trough systems predominate among today's commercial solar power plants. Nine
separate trough power plants, called Solar Energy Generating Systems, were
built in the 1980s in the Mojave Desert near Barstow by the Israeli company
BrightSource Energy. These plants have a combined capacity of 354 MW. NextEra
says that the solar plants power 232,500 homes and displace 3,800 tons of
pollution per year that would have been produced if the electricity had been
provided by fossil fuels, such as oil. Trough systems convert the heat from the
sun into electricity. Because of their parabolic shape, trough collectors can
focus the sun at 30-60 times its normal intensity on a receiver pipe located
along the focal line of the trough. Synthetic oil circulates through the
pipe and captures this heat, reaching temperatures of 390 °C. The hot oil is
pumped to a generating station and routed through a heat exchanger to
produce steam. Finally, electricity is produced in a conventional steam
turbine. The SEGS plants operate on natural gas on cloudy days or after
dark, and natural gas provides 25% of the total output.
= Nevada Solar One = Nevada Solar One has a 64-MW generating
capacity and is located in Boulder City, Nevada. It was built by the U.S.
Department of Energy, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Acciona Solar.
Nevada Solar One uses parabolic troughs as thermal solar concentrators, heating
tubes of liquid which act as solar receivers. These solar receivers are
specially coated tubes made of glass and steel, and about 19,300 of these four
meter long tubes are used in the plant. Nevada Solar One also uses a technology
that collects extra heat by putting it into phase-changing molten salts, which
enable energy to be drawn at night. Using thermal energy storage systems,
solar thermal operating periods can even be extended to meet baseload needs.
Solar thermal power plants designed for solar-only generation are well matched
to summer noon peak loads in prosperous areas with significant cooling demands,
such as the south-western United States. The cost of Nevada Solar One is in the
range of $220–250 million. The power produced is slightly more expensive than
wind power, but was less than photovoltaic power. As photovoltaics
became less expensive, some proposed CSP projects have been converted to
photovoltaics projects. = Copper Mountain Solar Facility =
The Copper Mountain Solar Facility is a 150 megawatt solar photovoltaic power
plant in Boulder City, Nevada. Sempra Generation began construction of the
plant in January 2010 and the facility began generating electricity on December
1, 2010. At its construction peak more than 350 workers were installing the
775,000 First Solar panels on the 380 acre site. The power from Copper
Mountain Solar Facility is being sold to Pacific Gas & Electric under separate
20-year contracts. Californian utilities were required to obtain 20 percent of
their energy supply from renewable energy sources by the end of 2010,
increasing to 33 percent by 2020. = Nellis Solar Power Plant =
In December 2007, the U.S. Air Force announced the completion of the Nellis
Solar Power Plant, a solar photovoltaic system, at Nellis Air Force Base in
Clark County, Nevada. Occupying 140 acres of land leased from the Air Force
at the western edge of the base, this ground-mounted photovoltaic system
employs an advanced sun tracking system, designed and deployed by SunPower.
Tilted toward the south, each set of solar panels rotates around a central
bar to track the sun from east to west. The 14 MW system generates more than 30
million kilowatt-hours of electricity each year and supply approximately 25
percent of the total power used at the base. The Nellis Solar Power Plant is
one of the largest solar photovoltaic systems in North America.
= Sierra SunTower = The Sierra SunTower is a 5 MW commercial
concentrating solar power plant built and operated by eSolar, located in
Lancaster, California. The project site occupies approximately 8 hectares in an
arid valley in the western corner of the Mojave Desert at 35° north latitude.
= Fort Irwin Solar Project = Fort Irwin Solar Project could have been
the largest renewable energy project in the Department of Defense's history. The
initial development plan projected more than 500 MW of renewable energy with one
billion kilowatt-hours of clean, renewable solar energy generated per
year by 2022. Construction began on one smaller installation, a 2.4MW array at
the new hospital along with a contract for a 1MW concentrating photovoltaic
test installation and a proposal for a 15 MW traditional PV farm.
= Ivanpah Solar Power Facility = The 392 MW Ivanpah Solar Power Facility,
located 40 miles southwest of Las Vegas, is the world’s largest solar-thermal
power plant project which became fully operational on February 13, 2014.
BrightSource Energy received a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the United
States Department of Energy to build the project, which deploys 347,000 heliostat
mirrors focusing solar energy on boilers located on centralized solar power
towers. In February 2012, Ivanpah was awarded the CSP Project of the Year by
Solar Power Generation USA. = Mojave Solar Project =
The Mojave Solar Project is a solar thermal power facility in the Mojave
Desert in California, about 20 miles northwest of Barstow. Surrounding the
hamlet of Lockhart, Mojave Solar is adjacent to Harper Lake and the SEGS
VIII–IX solar plant. The 250 MW concentrating solar power plant will
cost an estimated $1.6 billion in total and should be completed in 2014. The
developer, Abengoa, secured a $1.2 billion loan guarantee from the US
government for the project. The nominal 250 MW solar electric
generating facility generates steam in solar steam generators, which will
expand through a steam turbine generator to produce electrical power from twin,
independently operable solar fields, each feeding a 125-MW power island. The
plant should generate 617,000 MWh of power annually, enough power for more
than 88,000 households and will prevent the emission of over 430 kilotons of CO2
a year. Pacific Gas & Electric has agreed to a 25-year power purchase
agreement. = Antelope Valley Solar Ranch =
The 230 MW Antelope Valley Solar Ranch is a First Solar photovoltaic project
now owned by Exelon in the Antelope Valley area of the Western Mojave
Desert. In September 2011, the project received a $646 million loan guarantee
from the US Department of Energy, and its construction was estimated to
generate 350 construction jobs and 20 permanent jobs. It features an
innovative utility-scale deployment of inverters with voltage regulation and
monitoring technologies, which will "enable the project to provide more
stable and continuous power". Electricity from the Antelope Valley
Solar Ranch project will be sold to Pacific Gas & Electric Company under a
25 year contract. Land use issues
A 2013 study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory concluded that the
average large photovoltaic plant in the United States occupied 3.1 acres of
permanently disturbed area and 3.4 acres of total site area per gigawatt-hour per
year. The average CSP plant in the US occupied 2.7 acres of disturbed area and
3.5 acres of total area per GWh/yr, A 2015 life-cycle analysis of land use for
various sources of electricity concluded that concentrating solar power had a
land-use footprint of 9.0 m2/MWhr for trough, and 14 m2/MWhr for power tower.
The concentrating solar footprint was smaller than that of coal power, but
larger than the other sources studied, including ground photovoltaic, natural
gas, and wind power. When considering land use impacts
associated with the exploration and extraction through to transportation and
conversion of fossil fuels, which are used for most of our electrical power,
utility-scale solar power compares as one of the most land-efficient energy
resources available: The federal government has dedicated
nearly 2,000 times more acreage to oil and gas leases than to solar
development. In 2010 the Bureau of Land Management approved nine large-scale
solar projects, with a total generating capacity of 3,682 megawatts,
representing approximately 40,000 acres. In contrast, in 2010, the Bureau of Land
Management processed more than 5,200 applications gas and oil leases, and
issued 1,308 leases, for a total of 3.2 million acres. Currently, 38.2 million
acres of onshore public lands and an additional 36.9 million acres of
offshore exploration in the Gulf of Mexico are under lease for oil and gas
development, exploration and production. Some of the land in the eastern portion
of the Mojave Desert is to be preserved, but the solar industry is mainly
interested in areas of the western desert, "where the sun burns hotter and
there is easier access to transmission lines", said Kenn J. Arnecke of FPL
Energy, a sentiment shared by many executives in the industry.
See also Deployment of solar power to energy
grids List of solar thermal power stations
Renewable energy commercialization Solar power in California
List of photovoltaic power stations Renewable energy in the United States
Renewable portfolio standard References
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