BrightSource Energy, Inc., yesterday announced that the U.S. Department of Energy has conditionally committed to provide $USD1.37 billion in loan guarantees to support the financing of BrightSource’s Ivanpah Solar Electric System.
The Ivanpah project is a 400 megawatt solar farm comprised of three separate solar thermal power plants.
In a solar thermal farm, solar panels are not used. Solar thermal technology uses sunlight reflected by thousands of small mirrors called heliostats onto a boiler filled with water that sits atop a tower. The focused sunlight raises the temperature of the water inside the boiler and creates high temperature steam, which is then piped to a conventional turbine which generates electricity.
When constructed, The Ivanpah project will generate enough clean electricity to power 140,000 homes and will nearly double the amount of solar thermal energy capacity currently in the USA. BrightSource Energy says the Ivanpah project will reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by more than 400,000 tons annually, which is the equivalent of taking more than 70,000 cars off the road.
The Ivanpah Solar Power Complex is located in California’s Mojave Desert, near Ivanpah, close to the California-Nevada border.
In order to conserve precious desert water, the Ivanpah project will use an air-cooling technology to convert the steam back into water in a closed-loop cycle, using 25 times less water than competing solar thermal technologies that employ wet-cooling. BrightSource will mount the heliostats on individual poles placed directly into the ground, allowing the solar farm to be built around the natural contours of the land and avoid areas of sensitive plant species.
Commencement of construction on the first plant is scheduled for the second half of 2010 and the first plant is scheduled to come online in mid-2012.
