Arizona - The Solar Capital of the World?

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.

Solar may be coming your way!

Congress extended the federal tax incentives for solar energy for another eight years, hoping to stimulate growth in the industry. With the current economic crises' and Americans looking to reduce their energy bills, the increase in interest in solar photovoltaic (PV) technology is expected to drop the price of the PV panels (by far the biggest expense) by 10 percent to 25 percent in the next year. In addition, companies from around the globe are testing technology that allows utility-scale solar thermal power plants to store the heat of the sun in molten salts so they can release it in a controlled manner for electricity production. United Technologies is teaming with US Renewables Group to commercialize a solar-power plant that will use this molten salt system for steam turbine power generation.
The company says plants using this method will be able to generate as much as 500 megawatts of peak power or run continuously at 50 megawatts. One megawatt is enough power to supply about 1,000 U.S. households.