20MW Solar Tower Project: Just the Beginning
by Sami Grover, Carrboro, NC, USA 
on 11.24.08
Spanish Concentrated Solar Thermal Plants Set to Grow Exponentially
Viva España! No sooner does Kimberley post on a solar electric project in a Spanish cemetery that we also read over at The Guardian about the expanding ambitions of Spain’s solar tower developers. As our readers will know from our previous posts on solar towers, they are an innovative form of renewable energy that uses giant mirrors to focus sunlight onto a central steam-powered turbine - and they have the potential to produce massive amounts of clean, renewable energy. Not only is a 20MW plant, known as PS20, going to be inaugurated in the desert outside Seville in January, but developers are eventually looking to expand to 300MW of capacity. And that’s just the beginning, as the Guardian report explains:
Spanish firms are charging ahead with CSP: more than 50 solar projects around Spain have been approved for construction by the government and, by 2015, the country will generate more than 2GW of power from CSP, comfortably exceeding current national targets. The companies are also exporting their technology to Morocco, Algeria and the US."CSP is at the very beginning of a big boom," said José Luis García, at Greenpeace in Spain. "Spain is in a good position to develop and implement the technology. We have the sun so we are in the best position to lead in this field."
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Jordanian King Abdullah bin Al-Hussein has approached the E.U. about funding this type of power station.
King Abdullah proposes to build solar power stations all the way from the Lavant to Morocco.
This would supply all of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East with their future energy needs.
I wonder if anyone has considered combining a solar tower with a large windmill? Obviously you need to have the focal point below the blades, but as long as you are building a huge tower you might as well get all you can out of it.
In the same vein, I was thinking that some enterprising company should make a windmill that can mount on standard high voltage transmission towers. There are thousands of those towers, and you could have the windmill hooked right into the grid. At the very least you could put enough windmills on the towers to offset the transmission losses on the lines, which can be significant.