Spain is a recognized leader in renewable energy, both in wind and solar. Now another solar power plant has been turned on. What makes this interesting is that its not PV, rather a concentrated solar power tower design.
Abengoa currently has a 11MW solar power tower, and now they’ve moved up in scale to construct and operate a 20MW tower. The tower has 1,255 mirrors focusing the sun’s rays onto the tower’s boiler to convert the water into steam to turn turbines and generate electricity. Abengoa has plans for up to 300MW of solar thermal by 2013.
The next step in the development of concentrating solar power isn’t just bigger and better towers, its also the use of thermal storage. Heating molten salt in tanks can store that thermal energy until after the sun has sent and traditional solar power is no longer available. The way that the electricity demand curves look (at least on the west coast of the United States) during the spring, winter and fall is a peak during the daytime, as well as a peak between 5-7pm as many businesses are still open, but people are also coming home from work and turning on lights, appliances, etc. This double whammy causes demand to spike after the solar generation peak has passed.
In order to increase the penetration of solar power to more than just the daytime hours, you need to store energy to be recovered later. Gigantic batteries are far too expensive, and pumped hydro requires the necessary geography or artificial structures to have water travel a long vertical distance.
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