[ RadSafe ] PG&E Signs World's Largest Solar Power Deal

[Sandy Perle]

PG&E Signs World's Largest Solar Power Deal

Green Wombat - Jul 25- California utility PG&E today will announce an 
agreement to buy 553 megawatts of electricity from a solar power 
plant to be built by Israeli company Solel in the Mojave Desert. 
That's enough energy to light about 400,000 homes. It's the largest 
deal of its kind, just edging out Southern California Edison's (EIX) 
2005 agreement to purchase 500 megawatts of solar electricity from a 
power plant to be built by Stirling Energy Systems in the Mojave. 
Solel's 6,000-acre Mojave Solar Park is set to begin operating in 
2011. The Solel station will be located near nine existing solar 
power plants built in the 1980s by Israeli company Luz (photo above) 
that continue to supply 354 megawatts of green energy to Southern 
California. It's an appropriate locale. When Luz went bankrupt in the 
early '90s after solar energy tax breaks evaporated and  natural gas 
prices fell, Solel picked up the company's parabolic trough 
technology. (Luz, meanwhile, has been revived as BrightSource Energy, 
which is negotiating  a 500-megawatt deal with PG&E.) Solel will use 
a more advanced version of the solar trough for its Mojave project, 
which will contain 1.2 million mirrors and 317 miles of vacuum 
tubing. Just this week the company announced that it had upgraded the 
old Luz plants - most of which are now operated by FPL Energy (FPL) - 
with 30,000 new solar receivers. 

Solar trough power plants use parabolic mirrors to track the sun and 
heat tubes of liquid to produce steam that drives electricity-
generating turbines. The efficiency of solar troughs is quite a bit 
lower than other utility-scale technologies under development, but 
it's tried and true and that's what apparently attracted PG&E (PCG), 
which emphasized it was "commercially-proven." The San Francisco-
based utility has been hedging its bets, signing deals with companies 
developing a variety of solar technologies. BrightSource Energy, for 
instance, will deploy fields of mirrors to focus the sun's rays on a 
tower containing a water-filled boiler to create steam to drive a 
turbine. PG&E has also signed a deal with San Francisco solar startup 
GreenVolts to build a two-megawatt "plug-in" power plant that will 
use concentrating photovoltaic technology to produce electricity near 
urban areas. 

PG&E's deal with Solel is another sign that California has become a 
proving ground for Big Solar technologies. Stirling Energy Systems 
uses a giant solar dish to concentrate the sun's rays on a Stirling 
heat engine. As hydrogen inside the engine expands it drives pistons 
that generate electricity. The Stirling dish is far more efficient 
than the solar trough but it has never been deployed on a large 
scale. Stirling Energy's deals with Southern California Edison and 
San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE) have options to produce up to 1.75 
gigawatts of solar electricity. Add in the Solel 25-year contract and 
- assuming PG&E reaches a final deal with BrightSource Energy - 
California potentially could have nearly three gigawatts of utility-
scale solar power online within the next five or six years.

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Sander C. Perle
President
Global Dosimetry Solutions, Inc.
2652 McGaw Avenue
Irvine, CA 92614 

Tel: (949) 296-2306 / (888) 437-1714  Extension 2306
Fax:(949) 296-1144

E-Mail: sperle at dosimetry.com
E-Mail: sandyfl at cox.net 

Global Dosimetry Website: http://www.dosimetry.com/