Las Vegas is the Entertainment Capital of the World and sadly, Nevada is one of the foreclosure capitals of the world. While Nevadans party their pain away, Arizona is looking on the bright side and becoming the solar capital of the world.The sunny deserts of the Southwest United States is one of the ideal planetary locations for solar. In fact, with the amount of sun and the available land, it could produce enough electricity to meet the electrical needs of the entire US! Photovoltaics, or PVs, are 85 times as as efficient as growing corn for ethanol; on a 300 ft x 300 ft (1 hectare) plot of land, enough ethanol can be produced to drive a car 30,000 miles per year vs 2,500,000 miles by covering the same land with photo cells. Which is good news for the Southwest, where soil temperatures are often way above proper corn germination temps of 60 degrees!
A fact not lost on Arizona Public Service, they have announced another large solar plant - a 290 million watt concentrating solar plant, among the largest in the world, to be built in the Harquahala Valley, 75 miles west of Phoenix. This is in addition to a 280-megawatt concentrating solar power plant to be built 70 miles southwest of Phoenix, near Gila Bend, Arizona. Together the two plants will supply electricity to 143,000 consumers.
Not stopping there, Arizona Public Service, APS, offered Flagstaff customers the opportunity to help APS build an interconnected solar power plant – one rooftop at a time. For this program, APS will own and receive energy from solar panels installed on about 300 customer rooftops. Participating customers will not have any up-front costs or other requirements and they will receive a low 20-year fixed community power rate for the solar portion of their electricity bill.
APS staffers also celebrated with visitors as the Grand Canyon's Visitor Center went solar with 84 solar panels on the center's roof and on adjacent ground-mounted platforms. The 18 kilowatts of energy generated by the panels provide enough power to offset 30 percent of the center's electricity use. APS said that the Grand Canyon is important to their efforts "because of the opportunity that exists to educate more than 4.5 million Canyon visitors each year about renewable energy."
Maybe someday Nevadans will get over their hangovers and see the light.
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2 comments:
Great points, and very compelling.
Jim
Would be a great idea for Nevada. Las Vegas only gets 4% of the electricity generated by Hoover Dam, and with it drying up as fast as it is, we need to work on other sources to replace even that amount. Of course without water, we won't need much electricity!
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