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Largest US Power Storing Solar Array Goes Live
Lucas123 writes "A solar power array that covers three square miles with 3,200 mirrored parabolic collectors went live this week, creating enough energy to power 70,000 homes in Arizona. The Solana Solar Power Plant, located 70 miles southwest of Phoenix, was built at a cost of $2 billion, and financed in large part by a U.S. Department of Energy loan guarantee. The array is the world's largest parabolic trough plant, meaning it uses parabolic shaped mirrors mounted on moving structures that track the sun and concentrate its heat. A first: a thermal energy storage system at the plant can provide electricity for six hours without the concurrent use of the solar field. Because it can store electricity, the plant can continue to provide power during the night and inclement weather."
The plant doesn't really store electricity. It can however, store heated salts that can be used to generate electricity well after sunset.
Covering your home in solar panels in Arizona can save you about $100/mo on your power bill, which for a single-family-residence runs about $200 in the winter and about $400 in the summer.
Those panels aren't free. They can take 10+ years to pay for themselves.
If it takes Solana 10 years to break even, that's $3,000 per year, per home served, or on par with their current power bills, and doesn't involve burning any fossils.
Technically nothing stores electricity except for super-cooled superconductors. Batteries "store electricity" in the form of chemical energy and even capacitors only "store electricity" as two charged plates. But I think we all know what they meant, that it was storing the potential for electricity.