eSolar unveils 5MW Los Angeles solar power plant

17 August 2009

Solar energy company eSolar has designed a 5MW pilot solar power plant that will provide electricity to 4,000 homes in and around Los Angeles.

The plant went online this week and uses heliostat mirrors to reflect and concentrate sunlight to a boiler that generates steam and powers a standard turbine to create solar energy.

Rick Iannello, vice president of manufacturing at eSolar, said, ‘As a start-up company, we want to deliver our product as fast as possible. That means proving the technology and garnering interest while you still have enough capital. SolidWorks software played a critical role in helping us refine the technology quickly so we could start shopping our scalable plant design around. The result is that we’ve gone online with our pilot, and we have other projects in the works. That’s the kind of early traction we need.’

Earlier this month eSolar, along with technology company Idealab, fired up its 5MW Sierra ‘power tower’ solar farm outside Los Angeles. Bill Gross, Idealab founder, said, ‘This plant delivers the lowest-cost solar electricity in history. We currently compete with natural gas and as we continue to drive down the cost, we will even compete with coal.’

Copyright © 2009 NewNet

Tags: solar

This story was published on Monday, August 17th, 2009 at 2:54 pm and is filed under North America, companies, solar. You can follow any responses to article entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “eSolar unveils 5MW Los Angeles solar power plant”

1. Fareed Sfard says:

   18 August 2009 at 4:20 pm

   Ahura Energy is the only company in the world that has grid parity levelized cost of energy (LCOE) of 5 cents/kWhr today with working units, we have a path to get to 40% less than grid parity in less than 3 years which is the lowest cost of producing energy by any technology including nuclear, coal and gas. Our fault tolerant architecture enables a full functional redundancy due to the functional overlap created by our architecture among refracting/reflecting elements. The system is agnostic to CPV, CST and even roof tops due to absence of pedestals, gear boxes and heavy expensive support infrastructure. For roof top applications, our performance is better than 250% more power per unit area when compared with a-Si and other traditional panels. Motors and gear boxes used on conventional CST and CPV systems are sources of very high costs preventive and corrective maintenance and failures. In addition, the requirements to ensure wind robustness and wind load tolerance puts a huge burden on the installation of these systems from logistics and costs perspective. On the contrary, our system does not require pedestals and cement for installation. Our novel approach includes independent control and steering of each and everyone of the reflecting/refracting elements to ensure that maximum amount of sun energy is captured and refracted/reflected to the most optimized target(s) as a function of the time of the day through our proprietary architecture. In a recent study that was performed, It was found that a particular power company’s net income of $1.2B will be doubled on a 300 MW installation using Ahura Energy’s proprietary architecture and system.

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