An artist’s rendering of Florida Power & Light’s planned combined-cycle solar and natural gas power plant. (Image: F.P.L.)The Sunshine State is starting to live up to its name on the energy front. Today Florida Power & Light, the state’s biggest utility, broke ground on what it says will be the first utility-scale solar investment in the state — and the second-largest of its kind in the country when it is fully turned on in 2010.
Projects like this will “not only do good things for the environment, but drive costs of renewable power down,” said Lew Hay, the chairman and chief executive of the F.P.L. Group, in a telephone interview.
This solar thermal plant, which is located on the Atlantic coast just north of Palm Beach County, will consist of 180,000 mirrors, spread over 500 acres. It also matches solar power with an existing combined-cycle natural gas plant, so that when the sun is not shining, the natural gas can take over the work of powering the turbines.
That solar-natural gas hybrid system is the first of its kind, said Mr. Hay. He explained that the concept made economic sense since the turbines can still be put to work even when the sun isn’t shining — but pulling it off required “a fair amount of engineering.”
Another challenge, he added, was “building it in such a way that it could withstand winds of a tropical storm or hurricane.”
The plant is the first of three solar facilities that F.P.L. is constructing in Florida, which the utility says will make the state the second-largest solar energy producer in the country. California is currently the largest.
F.P.L. already operates a big solar-thermal plant in California’s Mojave Desert. Other renewables have hit speedbumps, however: F.P.L. has recently been forced to cut back on its wind-power plans due to the credit crunch, but Mr. Hay noted: “It’s not like we stopped spending money.”
In building the Florida solar plant, Mr. Hay said that he was looking toward a future of higher renewables requirements and perhaps even carbon regulation. He also predicted that Florida will soon join more than half the states in implementing a renewable portfolio standard — a requirement that a certain percentage of a state’s electricity come from renewables by a fixed date — in addition to a national renewable standard from the incoming Obama administration.
Solar energy is still pricey, Mr. Hay acknowledged. “This is going to be more expensive than power from conventional fossil fuels,” he said. “But you can’t just look at the cents per kilowatt today, because there’s a cost for fossil fuels that’s not being reflected.”
Also boding well for solar development in Florida is a recent government-commissioned report, which found that the state’s on-shore wind potential was limited.
source: nytimes.com
link to the original post:
http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/02/a-solar-boost-for-the-sunshine-state/#more-617
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Rory Vanucchi
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