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The age of the gigawatt-scale solar deal has arrived. Major U.S. utility company Southern California Edison and solar thermal upstart BrightSource Energy have inked contracts for seven major power plants, which, when/if built, will eventually generate 1.3 GW from their Mojave Desert locations in southeastern California.
Construction on the first 100-MW installation (the others will be 200 MW) is set to begin later this year, with expectations of completion in 2013--once/if regulatory approvals have been finalized.
This is the second big deal signed by BrightSource with a California utility, the first--900 MW worth of contracts with Pacific Gas and Electric--was announced last spring, with the great California desert as the site of those proposed power plants as well. The company says it has a total of 4.2 GW of projects under development.
The numbers are staggering, exceeding the generating capacities of any existing or planned thermal arrays in the state.
Add them to the already-prodigious photovoltaic solar farms and distributed-generation plans in the works--such as SunPower's 250-MW and OptiSolar's 550-MW installations set for San Luis Obispo county, SCE's own scheme to deploy 250 MW of panels over the next five years on warehouse and other commercial rooftops, and the L.A. Department of Water and Power proposal to install at least 400 MW on city properties by 2014 (if Proposition B passes in the upcoming municipal election)--and the promise of solar playing a major role in a renewable-powered Golden State seems within reach.
BrightSource is banking on the ultimate scaleability of its Luz Power Tower technology. Thousands of mirrors called heliostats reflect sunbeams onto a boiler resting in a tower to produce 500°C steam, which is then piped to a Siemens turbine to generate electricity. An air-cooling scheme converts the steam back into water, which then flows back to the boiler.
Although only one LPT system exists--a demo-scale 1.5-MW installation dedicated last June in the Negev desert in Israel-- the company claims that its next-gen concentrated thermal approach has/will have the lowest capital costs and highest efficiencies in the industry.
Speaking of capital, BrightSource announced in May that it had raised $115 million in additional funds, some of it coming from such high-profile sources as Google and Vantage Point. But estimates in the $2 billion-$3 billion range have been cited for the cost of building the PG&E projects, which means the expenses incurred for the SCE plants would likely end up more than doubling that amount.
While I would love to see the elegant, futuristic power towers sending solar-sourced juice from the Mojave to the metropoles of California some day, color me a wee bit skeptical. The LPT concept is unproven on a utility scale, and BrightSource's manufacturing value chain has yet to be scrutinized and fully evaluated in the public domain.
There's still billions of dollars to be raised to fund the thermal components that will need to be produced and the power stations yet to be built, and large-scale financing, especially for a risky venture, is a little tight right now, to say the least.
And what about all those new, big transmission lines that will have to be approved and then strung from the desert to the population centers to carry the new gigawatts of load? Questions have also been raised about the potential danger of all that heliostat-reflected sun inadvertently blinding pilots flying over the area.
I hope my skepticism proves unwarranted. But ample goodwill, promising technology, copious venture capital, and signed contracts with utilities are no guarantee of success for the challenges of gigawatt-scale solar power.
