Concentrated Solar Power

Solar power has been around for a good amount of time now.  Solar panels are effective green sources of energy, but they don’t harness much power and they are very expensive.  The average house uses around 3.85 kw a day (http://www.solarpoweristhefuture.com/how-many-solar-panels-does-it-take-to-make-one-kilowatt.shtml) and you need around 5 panels to generate this power which cost around 280 dollars each according to (http://www.dmsolar.com/solar-module-1.html).  This may not seem too expensive, but if you consider powering thousands of houses through one solar plant then the space needed and the amount of panels needed increases.  With the increased panels comes an increased cost and it just isn’t practical considering the amount of power that comes from other sources of power.  However, concentrated sun power does require space, but cuts costs because it uses mirriors instead of a vast amount of panels to direct beams of sunlight to a central sun tower.  This slashes costs and utilizes the power of the sun more efficiently.

CSP (Concentrated Solar Power) creates power from a steam turbine usually.  The directed sunlight is converted to heat energy which allows a heat engine to spin a steam turbine.  According to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power) a typical concentrated solar plant can produce power at about $2.50-$4.00 per watt.  Therefore a typical plant producing around 250 megawatts costs around $600 million to $1 billion dollars to manufacture.  This for of power is a competitor for the transition from fossil fuel for multiple reasons.  One is that the power from the sun is free and unlimited if the plant is placed in strategic areas.  Another comparison that wikipedia mentions is that CSP plants can produce “12 to 18 cents per kilowatt-hour” which can be compared to a nuclear plant in Arizona which produce “1.65 cents per kilowatt-hour.”  The nuclear plant still more efficiently produces power, but the solar plant can be judged as a competitor in the green power category.  With continued advancement in CSP it could be possible to make them even more efficient and less expensive, but they are still much more valuable than the typical solar plant that doesn’t concentrate the sun’s power.

Concentrated Solar power can be the wave of the future in the power industry.  All that need to be done is that it must become cheaper and more cost effect.  CSP is starting to pave the way to this much needed improvement to allow for the complete harnessing of the suns power and true renewable energy.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power

http://www.dmsolar.com/solar-module-1.html

http://www.solarpoweristhefuture.com/how-many-solar-panels-does-it-take-to-make-one-kilowatt.shtml

Image soure: http://blog.hasslberger.com/img/concentrated-solar-power.jpg