[social_buttons]
After less than a year of construction, the Sierra SunTower Plant that’s touted the first of its kind in the USA was finally officially launched by eSolar.
Located in Lancaster, California, this is the first eSolar concentrating solar thermal power plant with 24,000 mirrors instead of the company’s usual 12,000. The entire plant was built less than a year through the use of eSolar’s pre-fabricated components. Within that span of time, the plant’s heliostat mirrors have been utilized in various occasions, not to harness energy, but to greet the company CEO on his birthday and celebrate USA’s Independence Day. As was intended by Southern California Edison and eSolar, the 5-megawatt Sierra SunTower plant was connected to the grid this August 5 to power 4,000 homes in California’s Antelope Valley.
This is the first among several similar projects planned for California, although eSolar has plans outside of the state as well, including a 92-megawatt plant in southern New Mexico. The company claims it even has plans for solar thermal projects outside the United States; to start, it has licensed its technology to the ACME Group from India that will build a one-gigawatt project in the country.
“Today, we unveil a new blueprint for solar energy – one that leverages Moore’s law rather than more steel,” said Bill Gross, CEO of eSolar. “Sierra is just the beginning. Soon eSolar technology will be deployed worldwide to provide clean, affordable energy to hundreds of thousands of homes.”
Image Courtesy of eSolar through BusinessWire
I don't like paywalls. You don't like paywalls. Who likes paywalls? Here at CleanTechnica, we implemented a limited paywall for a while, but it always felt wrong — and it was always tough to decide what we should put behind there. In theory, your most exclusive and best content goes behind a paywall. But then fewer people read it! We just don't like paywalls, and so we've decided to ditch ours. Unfortunately, the media business is still a tough, cut-throat business with tiny margins. It's a never-ending Olympic challenge to stay above water or even perhaps — gasp — grow. So ...
Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!
Have a tip for CleanTechnica, want to advertise, or want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.
