Earlier this month, Richard M Swanson had an interesting article in Science "Photovoltaics Power Up". What caught my eye, was the 2nd page, wherein he said "the PV industry installed more than 2 GW of PV power plants in Spain during 2008. Construction times for 2 GW of conventional generation would be 10 to 15 years." The Spanish, and Germans, have taken the lead in renewable energy power plants. Heck, even here in Arizona and in Nevada, the Spanish are building large scale solar facilities.
Meanwhile, here in America, it's "Drill Baby Drill" by our domestic energy corporations.
8 years ago
cool. although I think concentrated solar thermal is much better for power generation than PV
ReplyDeleteit IS better efficiencies, but it also takes up copious amounts of water (up to about a million gallons a day per 700 megawatts). Not a good thing in the solar plentiful desert.
ReplyDeleteIt's a solvable problem, e.g. http://climateprogress.org/2009/04/29/csp-concentrating-solar-power-heller-water-use/
ReplyDeleteAlthough I'm partial to the stirling-based generators (despite being mostly nonexistent so far).
sweet!
ReplyDelete