| The E-Solar plant at Lancaster was one such plant I wanted to see for myself whether this was for real or just a whole lot of great PR.
Backed by venture capital, a major utility and Google, the E-Solar concept design is a modular solar thermal plant with a field of heliostats or moving mirrors, reflecting and concentrating sunlight onto a nominated target. Working on the premise of approximately 1MW of generation per 1,000 homes, the first plant E-Solar have built, a 5MW pilot plant, should be capable of providing enough electricity for 5,000 homes when fully operational.
The first plant comprises 24,000 mirrors, according to the NY Times and Fox Business network, and began operation in August. Below is a picture with reference to the NY Times article from 6 July where E-Solar programmers have programmed the mirrors to form a patter which looks like the US flag and the continents.... or the statue of Liberty.... or Jimi Hendrix?
E-Solar have teamed with NRG and appointed Fluor Corp, a major industrial plant design and construction firm, to design the first modular 46MW plant. Each 46MW block will consist of 16 towers and mirrors spread over 200 acres. The process itself replaces the fuel heated boiler component of an ordinary power station with a sun/solar heated boiler. NRG will operate up to 11 plants throughout the SW of the United States as they would 'coal fired' power stations without the 'coal fired' component.
Coming up on Tuesday 29 September is a National Geographic "World's Toughest Fixes" episode featuring the tower assembly, mirror tracking and alignment programming and turbine installation.
Link to a promo video of this episode can be found here.
E-Solar have also struck a deal with an Indian technology firm, ACME, to build, own and operate up to 1,000 Megawatts in India over the next few years with the first 100 MW getting started on later this year.
So to get those figures into perspective, that is 1,500 Megawatts of generation capacity and if we add those 3 zeros again to the MW part, we get total homes covered as 1.5 Million homes. But the Indian homes capable of being supplied with this technology, will likely be much higher than 1.5 Million as per capita, Indians use much less energy than the average US citizen.
My visit was at the very start of August. I had contacted E-Solar and had originally intended visiting their Pasadena offices, but when I started researching whether they had an operational plant, the Lancaster facility returned a search and it was a spur of the moment decision to test out LA's public transport and see if I could make it out into the desert unscathed.
Here are my photos of the site. All have been reduced to a small size, but are bigger on my website.
  
The first 3 shots show the boiler towers and what appear to be secondary frame towers. There appeared to be no piping to these secondary towers and yet there were a lot of them. The mirrors were pointed both at the boiler towers, the big ones, and the smaller structures. I have a theory on the smaller towers and sent the theory through to the E-Solar PR email address, but did not receive a confirmation whether the purpose of the smaller towers was correct or not. I'll come back to my theory in another diary.
  
The second 3 photos show the Sierra Tower constructors as well as the power block. The power block being the place where the steam and water side of a rankine cycle turbine alternator set come together and where the power comes out. From what I could gather, it appeared the condensor cooling will be evaporative air cooled. But I could be wrong and couldn't walk the site to confirm this.
  
The last 3 shots show the expansion of the site with the construction already underway on the smaller towers. And of course the office/warehouse in Palmdale which I had suspected was a factory, but now think more likely a distribution point and possibly design and administration office. The office is in what appears to be a new technology park with some other high tech neighbors. Lockheed Martin one of the other major tenants so there are some big names in the area. |
