World's largest solar power plant to be build in U.S.

22 February 2008
World's largest solar power plant to be build in U.S.

Abengoa Solar, an international technology company, will build, own and operate the largest solar power plant in the world if operating today.

The plant, scheduled to go into operation by 2011, is located 70 miles southwest of Phoenix in Arizona. It will produce electricity with capacity of 280 megawatts, and sell the electricity to Arizona Public Service Co over the next 30 years for a total revenue of around USD 4 billion, bringing over USD 1 billion in economic benefits to the state of Arizona.

The solar plant has been named Solana, meaning “a sunny place” in Spanish. The Solana generating station will have a total capacity enough to power 70,000 homes while avoiding over 400,000 tons of greenhouse gases that would otherwise contribute to global warming and climate change.

The construction of the generating station will create about 1,500 construction jobs and employ 85 skilled full-time workers once completed.

Utilizes also molten salt energy storage

The plant will employ a proprietary Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) trough technology developed by Abengoa Solar.

The solar trough technology uses trackers with high precision parabolic mirrors that follow the sun’s path and concentrate its energy, heating a fluid to over 700 degrees Fahrenheit and using that heat to turn steam turbines.

The solar plant will also include a molten salt thermal energy storage system that allows for electricity to be produced as required, even after the sun has set. The plant's rows of mirrors, thermal storage, generating equipment and service areas will cover nearly three square miles.

Abengoa Solar is currently operating the world's first commercial CSP solar tower plant in Spain, a demonstration trough plant and the world's first commercial photovoltaic low concentration plant.

It is also building three more CSP plants in Spain with a total capacity of 120-megawatts, two trough plants that will generate 50-megawatts of electricity each, one tower plant with a capacity of 20-megawats and two hybrid gas-solar plants in Algeria and Morocco.

Abengoa Solar