September 1, 2010
250 megawatt (MW) solar-thermal power plant – California Approved
written by Steven Barrymore

The California Energy Commission has given the go ahead for the construction of the Beacon Solar Energy Project (subsidiary of NextEra Energy Resources) a 250-megawatt solar thermal power generation facility. Scheduled to be built on 2,012-acres in the Mojave Desert. The system will use a parabolic trough design — a series of curved mirrors which reflect the sun’s rays onto a glass tube (collector) containing a fluid that runs the length of the trough. The sun’s perpendicular position to the trough can be adjusted by a tilting mechanism. This will be the first solar thermal power plant permitted in California in two-decades.

Solar Trough System

The Beacon Solar Energy Project is part of a proposed 2,800 MW of solar power plant projects in California. That would be roughly enough energy to power 2.8 million homes a year.

The CEC’s last approval of Solar Electric Generating Systems was in 1990 with LUZ SEGS IX and X projects. Someone needs to design a smartphone app to control all this solar energy goodness.


Link: CEC
Image Source: Wikipedia