A Spanish Breakthrough in Harnessing Solar Power. By Richard Covington, Smithsonian, August 2010 issue. "Twenty miles west of Seville, the Solúcar solar farm, built by the company Abengoa, is part of Spain's push to produce more energy from renewable sources. The nation currently produces up to 3.65 gigawatts of power from the sun, second in the world after Germany. Those gigawatts make up about 3% of the country's power, the highest percentage in the world. (The United States generates less than 1% of its energy from the sun.)... The Solúcar farm is pioneering technologies that are being replicated in the United States, including concentrated solar power, or CSP... [which] deploys huge banks of mirrors to focus solar radiation... [which] drives steam turbines... 'If you want to be optimistic,' Tisdale [Reese Tisdale, solar research director for Emerging Energy Research in Cambridge] said, 'there could be as much as eight gigawatts supplied by solar power plants [in the United States] by 2025.' That would be enough to power a U.S. city of six million."
2010-08-03
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