Stirling Energy takes on the solar power challenge
ALBUQUERQUE -- When the sun breaks through the clouds here, solar dish No. 0 springs to action.
Like a giant sunflower, the mirrored face of the 40-foot dish will follow the sun continuously from east to west throughout the day, generating electricity for 10 to 15 homes.
The dish is a prototype for 70,000 that a small Phoenix company hopes to plant on two 7,000-acre solar farms in the California desert over the next seven years.
If fully built out, the two solar plants will be two of the biggest in the world. Together, they'd almost double the amount of solar energy produced nationwide, power 1 million Southern California homes and cleanly generate nearly as much electricity as two smog-producing coal plants.
"This is something that hasn't been done before," says Bruce Osborn, CEO of Stirling Energy Systems, the company doing the project. "We're not aware of any showstoppers. … No fatal flaws."
A 30-employee company that has sometimes struggled to make payroll, Stirling's success or failure will have global implications. States and nations want renewable sources of energy to reduce dependence on fossil fuels and to pollute less. Solar, the most expensive renewable energy, accounts for less than 1% of U.S. electricity generation.
But given high oil prices and increased concerns over global warming, anything solar is hot. Stirling's project also aims to commercialize a decades-old technology that is the most efficient at converting sun power to electricity but which has struggled with costs and reliability.
"They clearly have the technology. It's a matter of whether they can get the cost out," says Michael Niggli, chief operating officer of San Diego Gas & Electric, one of the customers Stirling hopes to supply.
Stirling's plans are ambitious. Skeptics, which include a co-founder who left in 2000, say the technology may be too costly to produce power at competitive rates.
Stirling's plans call for construction to begin in 2009 for two $1 billion farms on federal land in California's Mojave Desert northeast of Los Angeles and in the Imperial Valley east of San Diego. State and federal regulators still have to approve the plans.
In 2005, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric, two of California's biggest utilities, signed contracts enabling them to buy all of Stirling's solar power for 20 years. The utilities have pledged to buy 800 megawatts annually with the possible addition of 950 more. Contract prices weren't disclosed, but Stirling officials have said they'd compete with what utilities pay for peak power. That's more than coal, which supplies half the USA's electricity, but less than most solar prices.
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