It is obvious that solar energy is becoming more affordable than fossil fuels. But solar energy is expensive to conserve enough for a night use and even worse when it’s cloudy. That’s why a brand new solar plant occupying 1,670 acres of land close to Las Vegas was built.
Known as Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project, the plant is situated in the Nevada desert. It boasts over ten-thousand small house sized mirrors for trapping the sun’s heat. This energy is the channeled on a receiver that is packed with molten salt. When this salt is heated to nearly one-thousand degrees F, it turns the energy into heat and stores it. Then when power needs to be harvested, the heat trapped in salt is freed to turn water into steam that in turn spins generators to make energy. The process repeats any time.
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As Kevin Smith, the head of Solar Reserve (builder of the plant) puts it, the plant releases adequate and stable power for 24 hours and runs at 110megawatts. Smith also notes that the plant’s peak period is at around midnight in LV.
Requiring no natural gas, Crescent Dunes is planned to release over five-hundred-thousand-megawatt hours of power in a year. A major challenge the company has faced is getting efficient batteries that are needed to backup power for ten to twenty minutes at a time. Their batteries, however, have no comparison to those used with a solar PV plant. While the full cost of the building was one billion dollars, this is cheaper than building a new coal plant or a nuclear plant. By 2020, the company plans to set a one-gigawatt plant in China, and it will be ten times larger than Crescent Dunes.