A Green Wombat post today states that FPL Energy, a big player in the renewable energy market, is about to build a $1 billion, 250-megawatt solar power plant in the Mojave Desert, called the Beacon Solar Energy Project.
To recap, solar thermal plants, which are very different from solar photovoltaics, use long rows of parabolic mirrors to focus the sun’s rays on tubes of synthetic oil suspended above the arrays. The hot oil is used to create steam which drives electricity-generating turbines. This new power plant will be built on 2,012 acres of former farmland beside a Honda test track near California City.
According to the Green Wombat article, California law requires the state’s investor-owned utilities — PG&E (PCG), Southern California Edison (EIX) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE) — to obtain 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2010 and 33 percent by 2020. But public utilities like LADWP only have to set green energy targets, 13 percent by 2010 and 20 percent by 2017 in Los Angeles’ case. Under California’s global warming law, the state’s greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced to 1990 levels by 2020.
Not surprisingly, those renewable energy mandates have been driving the market for large-scale solar power plants, but so far California’s Big Three utilities have placed their bets on startups like Ausra, BrightSource Energy and Stirling Energy Systems.
See my recent post on solar thermal plants.