All About Solar | Green Energy News

October 30, 2005 – Vol.10 No.32

All ABOUT SOLAR.

This week’s news...

Imagine solar energy farms sprouting up all around the world as wind farms have in recent years. But unlike wind farms there’s little concern for bird strikes (the solar technology barely moves) and there’s little opposition over aesthetic issues from local residents (The solar technology is large, but nowhere near so as wind turbines.)

And the cost of the solar generated electricity is competitive with wind energy, or better.

That solar technology would be Stirling Energy Systems (SES) solar dish technology which uses a parabola of mirrors to focus sunlight and solar thermal heat on a Stirling engine generator. Stirling engines, unlike internal combustion engines, use external heat sources (any) to expand a fixed and sealed amount of gas to move a piston and turn a crankshaft.

Southern California Edison (SCE) has already agreed to buy an estimated initial 1047 gigawatt hours per year of solar thermal generated electricity from Stirling Energy. Now the 500-megawatt solar project needed to deliver that power is closer to construction with the approval of the SCE/ SES contract by the California Public Utilities Commission. That contract that says that the initial phase of the project needs to be completed in 2012 and calls for the possibility of an expansion to 850 kilowatts of capacity.

The SES technology. particularly the Stirling generator itself, uses production techniques similar to those used in the automotive industry - the manufacture of pistons, bearings, engine blocks and such. Tried and true production techniques will keep the cost of SES technology low.

At its initial size of 500 megawatts, the solar energy farm, to be built in Southern California, will be the largest in the world - by far. Visit Stirling Energy Systems at http://www.stirlingenergy.com/ .