Skip to main content

A Smaller Route to Solar Success

Wednesday, Jun 06 2012

Share
Solar in the News

The New York Times

There are at least a dozen major ways to turn sunlight into electricity, but one of the more interesting is using a field of mirrors to focus the sun's energy on a "power tower" where the heat is captured and used later to spin a turbine and turn a generator. As I have previously written, two companies are now planning to build such systems in the desert Southwest with hardware that will store the heat for a rainy day or for the period right after sunset when power demand is still high.

But now comes a new player with a different concept: build the tower, but on a smaller, simpler scale, and skip the storage in favor of using using biogas or natural gas to power the system after dark