Spain Opens Largest Solar Power Plant in World, Passes US as Largest Solar Power Generator
Spain has now opened the largest solar power plant in the world, the La Florida solar plant in Alvarado, Badajoz. With the opening of this massive solar power plant, Spain has also now passed up the United States as the biggest solar power generator in the world.
Spain’s total solar output is now 432MW, 10MW higher than the US (which is at 422MW). (Note that this is power generated, not solar power capacity, of which Germany is the clear leader.)
The La Florida plant is a “parabolic trough,” Guardian News reports.
“With this method of collecting solar energy, sunlight is reflected off a parabolic mirror on to a fluid-filled tube. The heated liquid is then used to heat steam to run the turbines. The mirror rotates during the day to follow the sun’s movement. The solar farm covers 550,000 square metres (the size of around 77 football pitches) and produces 50MW of power.”
Solar energy met 2.8% of Spain’s energy demand in 2009 and renewable energy as a whole met a total of 12.9% of demand. However, the Spanish government announced in March that it intends to have its renewable energy share reach 22.7% by 2020. With an average of 340 days of sunshine a year, Spain is just the place to take advantage of this clean, green energy source.
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Photo Credit: Jeremy Levine Design via flickr
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July 18th, 2010 at 2:47 am
Its really a great news. I think theres no way except the solar energy for the upcoming energy crisis, specially in the third world.
July 18th, 2010 at 8:06 am
Thanks for your article. Where did you find the statistics on total solar power generated and how reliable are they? With all the distributed PV, I’ve been unable to find reliable statistics. From your article, it appears that Germany has a poorer capacity factor than Spain or the U.S., which is not a surprise. It would be useful to know what the capacity factors are in practice.
July 18th, 2010 at 12:09 pm
i looked around a bit, too. curious about this. the figure came directly from the Guardian piece, which every other site around the web seemed to also be using as a reference. i’m not sure where the Guardian got their figures.
July 20th, 2010 at 10:19 pm
The information is clearly wrong.
The “output” they are referring to seems to be only solar thermal power generation and does not include photovoltaic (PV).
Germany is way ahead of both the US and Spain with over 9,000 MW of PV alone. The US is fourth behind Spain, Germany and Japan.
July 21st, 2010 at 11:25 am
yes, perhaps that is the issue (that it is only counting solar thermal power generation). i am familiar with those stats for total PV capacity that you mention above. still, not finding figures to back this up anywhere
July 22nd, 2010 at 9:56 pm
I think it is best to keep solar thermal power (CSP) apart from solar PV because they are very different technologies, even though they both run on sunlight.
La Florida solar thermal plant is not especially big, it has the standard Spanish size of 50MW because feed in tariff are best paid up to this size. In some cases (e.g. Andasol) multiple identical plants are built next to each other, each with 50MW.
US used to be an early mover in CSP with lots of development up to 1990. Since then practically nothing has happend. Looking forward to see US getting back on track for CSP development.
Wikipedia has a list of CSP plants.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_thermal_power_stations