On August 5, eSolar announced the commissioning of its 5-megawatt Sierra SunTower solar power plant in Lancaster, California. The 24,000-mirror solar plant will produce enough electricity to power 4,000 homes in the Antelope Valley area, through a power purchase agreement (PPA) with Southern California Edison.
All of that is pretty interesting, but the really big news about this concentrating solar thermal power plant is that it was built in less than a year, and cited on private land near transmission facilities to speed operational status.
As Dan Reicher, Google.org’s director of climate change and energy initiatives observed, it marks a game-changer in the solar energy industry, moving solar from a costly, time-consuming peripheral energy technology closer to the mainstream. The Sierra SunTower is, according to eSolar, the only power tower of its kind currently operating in the United States.
Google was one of the investors in the Lancaster plant. eSolar also partners with NRG Energy, an Xcel Energy spinoff divested in 2000 before its merger (as NSP) with New Century Energies, Inc. of Colorado to form Xcel. In 2002, Xcel reacquired NRG, which in 2003 went through bankruptcy restructuring. NRG is now a wholesale power generation company with about 40 wholly or partially-owned operating power plants in the U.S., one in Australia and one in Germany.
R. Rex Parris, mayor of Lancaster, concurred, noting that the United States should never have to build another coal-fired power plant again. In fact, given that baseload, coal-fired power plants (1,000-megawatt capacity) can take up to four years to build, and a simple gas-fired peaking plant (5 megawatts) over a year, it wouldn’t make sense to build them if we didn’t have to, since both coal and gas are declining resources.
Bill Gross, eSolar’s CEO, notes that the solar plant is just a beginning, marking an era when eSolar’s concentrating solar technology can be deployed worldwide to provide clean, renewable, affordable energy.
The company’s solar technology uses small, flat mirrors programmed by precise algorithms to track the sun. The heat from the mirrors is reflected onto a tower-mounted receiver, which boils water to create steam which runs a turbine and generator in typical power generation fashion.
eSolar’s use of disturbed or abandoned private land avoids many of the permitting difficulties faced by developers who use public lands. It has also earned the support of some regional environmentalists, who see solar power in the Mojave Desert as potentially disruptive of fragile, desert ecosystems.
The Lancaster project isn’t large, in terms of electricity production, but it does confirm that eSolar’s technology is a valid model, and one easily deployed at larger capacities, and in fact eSolar is working with NRG to develop three plants in California and New Mexico that will deliver up to 465 megawatts of electricity using the same technology. In March, eSolar licensed the technology to Indian company ACME Group to develop 1 gigawatt of solar power in that country.