Solar power plants in the Mojave Desert
Insolation (solar radiation) in the Mojave Desert is among the best available in the United States, and some significant population centers are located in the area.
[3] The Copper Mountain Solar Facility is a 150 MW photovoltaic power plant in Boulder City, Nevada.
[5] Solar power stations provide an environmentally benign source of energy, produce virtually no emissions, and consume no fuel other than sunlight.
[7]: p.13 While many of the costs of fossil fuels are well known, others (pollution related health problems, environmental degradation, the impact on national security from relying on foreign energy sources) are indirect and difficult to calculate.
In contrast, many types of conventional power projects, especially coal and nuclear plants, require long lead times.
The U.S. Department of Energy, with a consortium of utilities and industry, built the first two large-scale, demonstration solar power towers in the desert near Barstow, California.
The Solar One plant used water/steam as the heat-transfer fluid in the receiver; this presented several problems in terms of storage and continuous turbine operation.
The system operated smoothly through intermittent clouds and continued generating electricity long into the night.
[9] Solar Two was decommissioned in 1999, and was converted by the University of California, Davis, into CACTUS, an Air Cherenkov Telescope, in 2001, measuring gamma rays hitting the atmosphere.
The hot oil is pumped to a generating station and routed through a heat exchanger to produce steam.
Nevada Solar One also uses a technology that collects extra heat[citation needed] by putting it into phase-changing molten salts, which enable energy to be drawn at night.
Solar thermal power plants designed for solar-only generation are well matched to summer noon peak loads[dubious – discuss] in prosperous areas with significant cooling demands, such as the south-western United States.
Tilted toward the south, each set of solar panels rotates around a central bar to track the sun from east to west.
The 250 MW concentrating solar power (CSP) plant was estimated to cost $1.6 billion in total and was commissioned in December 2014.
[35] It features an innovative utility-scale deployment of inverters with voltage regulation and monitoring technologies, which will "enable the project to provide more stable and continuous power".
[36][37] A 2013 study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory concluded that the average large photovoltaic plant in the United States occupied 3.1 acres (1.3 ha) of permanently disturbed area and 3.4 acres (1.4 ha) of total site area per gigawatt-hour per year.
[39] The federal government has dedicated nearly 2,000 times more acreage to oil and gas leases than to solar development.
In 2010 the Bureau of Land Management approved nine large-scale solar projects, with a total generating capacity of 3,682 megawatts, representing approximately 40,000 acres (16,000 ha).
Some of the land in the eastern Mojave Desert will be preserved, but the solar industry is mainly interested in areas of the western desert, "where the sun burns hotter and there is easier access to transmission lines", said Kenn J. Arnecke of FPL Energy, a view shared by many industry executives.
This was higher than the operational water consumption (with cooling towers) for nuclear (720 gal/MWhr), coal (530 gal/MWhr), or natural gas (210 gal/MWhr).
[47][48] Also, roadrunners become trapped outside the installed perimeter fences, where they become easy prey for coyotes, who have killed and eaten dozens of them since the facilities have been constructed.
[49] Ecologically sensitive habitat in the vicinity of Boron and Mojave may experience negative impacts from photovoltaic solar and battery installations by Avantus.
