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Typically, solar power has been a difficult technology to commercialize on a large scale. The problems are efficiency and cost. Your average solar panel only converts between 8 and 15% of the light incident on it, the rest is absorbed as heat or otherwise wasted.


Solar Power

To put this into perspective, a conventional power plant generates electricity for between 8 and 15 cents per Kilowatt hour — a solar power plant, on the other-hand, produces energy for around 15 to 17 cents. The result is that relative to coal or nuclear power, it’s much more expensive to operate large scale solar energy farms.

A California company wants to help change this.

Their design involves using an array of mirrors called heliostats. These mirrors track the sun and reflect its rays towards a large tower positioned at the center of the array. The water in this tower is boiled into steam, which drives a turbine that acts to generate electricity. The company, Brightsource Energy, claims that this technology could help reduce the cost of producing solar energy by 30-50%, pushing solar power one more step towards becoming a viable alternative to traditional power plants.

Brightsource’s technology is currently being field tested in the Israeli desert, initial results are expected by the end of the Summer. If everything goes according to plan, Brightsource hopes to have a complete solar power plant up and running in the Mojave desert by 2011.

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