Solar Power Industry Looks Toward 500-Megawatt Plants and Critical Market Mass

---

Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas). Although nuclear power seems certain to provide the major portion of new ‘clean’ base load electrical power over the next fifteen years, the battle to claim the title of best renewable and sustainable energy source for the future is by no means over. To keep a grip on the energy claim game, you must remind yourself that coal and other fossil-based fuels, oil and gas will also continue to claim cleaner and more efficient energy generation performance and will provide the absolute majority of new base load power from all sources.

Solar power is coming in for a new wave of support in the form of developing technologies, new major generating projects and support from some governments and industry experts. For related news item see February 27, 2006 – Solar Power Takes Off in Nevada.

Solel Solar Systems (Bet Shemesh, Israel) is planning to build and operate Israel’s first solar power plant in Israel’s Negev Desert. The first phase of the project, which recently received the approval of the country’s Ministry of National Infrastructure, will have an initial output of 100 to 150 megawatts, which will form a base for future expansion to 500 megawatts of power output.

The technology to be used in the $1 billion plant is the solar-thermal system, which is more suited to larger output plants than the photovoltaic (PV) cell type installation, which traditionally has been used to provide power in isolated off-grid situations and dedicated, standalone commercial and domestic applications. The solar-thermal system uses a system of collector modules where the sun’s rays are tracked and concentrated in ‘solar fields’. The concentrated solar energy is used to heat oil or water to produce steam to drive a generator’s turbine.

Although a solar-thermal system has a high level of reliability and low operation and maintenance costs, it has not yet closed the gap in price per power unit with conventional forms of power generation. Solel has targeted a price of electrical power generated at a cost of 6/7 cents per Kw hour within five years. This price level, the company believes, will mark watershed for massive acceptance of the solar power source globally.

Since the late 1980’s, Solel, and its predecessor Luz, have been providing power to California from nine solar plants in the Mojave Desert with a combined output of 354 megawatts. These plants use a now obsolete version of solar trough technology.

Research continues for a system to efficiently store energy accumulated during the hours of sunshine-powered generation and a large solar plant project typically will have a conventional oil, gas or biomass fed power unit onsite when conditions are cloudy and during the night.

An influential group of researchers from Imperial College London (ICL) has stated in Nature Materials that solar energy-based on PV technology could match and exceed the nuclear industry’s current output in the U.K. before any new reactor could begin operating. Professor Keith Barnham of ICL says in the article, “Fusion is still perhaps 40 years away from being effectively developed and in any case is likely to produce electricity at one quarter of the electrical power density, which the solar cells that we are working on are already producing in London. It’s absurd that these funding bodies are putting huge amounts of money into something that may not deliver, rather than supporting something that already does.”

He goes on to say that the next generation of PV cells now under development, known as quantum cells, convert direct sunlight and can track the sun to keep light focused on the cell. Early tests show that they can produce twice as much electricity per unit area as the conventional systems now in use. They are based on technologies similar to those used for amplifiers in mobile phones. This means that the ability to manufacture on a large scale is already in place.

The U.K. government recently halted its rooftop solar panel program. But Germany, which has a similar sunshine profile to U.K., will generate 12,000 megawatts of solar power by 2012, which is equivalent to the amount of power currently produced by nuclear power stations in U.K.

Even if the partisan enthusiasms of the promoters of solar sourced energy systems are bought at a discount, it appears that the industry will reach a degree of critical mass in the total energy market by 2012, assisted by bridging subsidies. The fact that there are a number of workable approaches and synergies to commercial scale generation from solar is an indication of coming maturity and strength. At the other end of the power scale, the refinement of smaller application PV cells (wafers) by major manufacturing players is gathering pace with the opening of new production plants worldwide and the products’ integration into domestic and personal power systems.

Industrial Info Resources (IIR) is a Marketing Information Service company that has been doing business for over 23 years. IIR is respected as the leader in providing comprehensive market intelligence pertaining to the industrial processing, heavy manufacturing, and energy-related industries throughout the world.