At last, solar energy is big enough and cheap enough to power electrical grids. Business 2.0 features the latest projects under the sun.
By Todd Woody, Business 2.0 Magazine assistant managing editor
Solar trees
The Stirling dish is a 30-year-old technology that's just now becoming cost-effective thanks to big solar-power orders from utilities. In time, 70,000 of these "solar trees" planted in the Mojave Desert by Stirling Energy Systems of Phoenix could power a million homes.
Distributed tower power
What happens if the sun's not shining? Bright Source Energy has a solution called distributed tower power: Mirrors focus the sun's rays on a boiler, creating steam which drives a generator.
Natural gas can be used to power the plant when the sun isn't shining.Heliostat concentrator
In southeastern Australia, Solar Systems will build a heliostat concentrator photovoltaic array of mirrors which focuses sunlight on high-efficiency solar cells to produce electricity.
Microdishes
GreenVolts, a San Francisco startup, is building arrays of microdishes - dinner-plate-sized mirrors that concentrate the the sun on an efficient solar cell. Small clusters of these microdishes are compact enough to be installed near cities, plugging directly into the grid to relieve overloaded substations.
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more:
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/biz2/0705/gallery.solar_tech.biz2/4.htmlHey, they're only business journos -- not even up to the standards of regular journos.
No mention of the fact that "powering the plant" with natural gas is NOT carbon-neutral (only actual $$$ amounts count), nor that there are ways to accumulate energy during the day for release at night.
Interesting that the last entry is one that was built in the
1980's -- before the Reagan/Bush policy of neglecting alternative energy caught up with it.