Earth Day 2010: The world’s most powerful solar power tower
Thursday, 22nd April 2010 by Alex Turnbull
Today is Earth Day, the mission of which is to "broaden and diversify the environmental movement worldwide". Inspired by an excellent post over at the Google Earth Blog, today we're going to visit the Planta Solar 20 – the world's most powerful solar power tower.
The PS20 solar power tower is a solar thermal energy plant near the sunny Spanish city of Seville. It has a power capacity of 20 megawatts - which is enough to provide energy for around 10,000 homes.
The plant only opened in April last year, so unfortunately it doesn't yet appear on Google's aerial or satellite photography - but it has been captured by the Spanish Street View driver, who manages to get quite a good view of the 165m tower.
The plant uses 1,255 large movable mirrors called heliostats to track the movement of the sun, which focus the sun's rays back at a receiver mounted on the central tower.
Water pumped up the tower and through the receiver boils into steam, which is then directed through a turbine to produce electricity.
There are actually two towers here - the PS10 tower (opened in 2007) was the world's first commercial solar power tower plant. The 115m tower uses 624 mirrors to produce around half the energy of PS20.
Unfortunately it costs around twice as much to produce electricity via concentrating solar power as it does from fossil fuels, but we can do our part (wherever possible) by voting with our wallets.
There's some more great Earth day sightseeing links at the Google Earth Blog, and there's a good article about the PS20 tower at Venturebeat.
Here’s one in California https://www.googlesightseeing.com/maps?p=&c=&t=k&hl=en&ll=34.871972,-116.83254&z=16
Called solar II
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Solar_Project
Unfortunely, it has been destroyed.
http://www.desertdispatch.com/news/bang-7374-daggett-going.html
Would you believe this was the very first location I wanted to write about when I was taken on as a writer for this site? I’ve been waiting patiently ever since for it to appear on satellite view so that I could craft a detailed post … only for the boss to beat me to it before that happens. I’m not bitter, noooo… 8o)
Sorry about that Ian!
To be honest I’ve been sitting on the link for some time myself, but since the Street View appeared it has been burning a hole in my bookmarks…
Digital Globe have published recent images of the plant that are available online, but I won’t spoil it for when they are eventually available in GE/M – they’re fairly awe inspiring!
Perhaps at that time we should collaborate on a “top 10 solar plants around the world” post!
hello! I’m spanish so I can’t speak english bery well . I want see every countrys and towns , but I don’t see .There is a tall m…deal., there is a only photo, but I think or thing I dont now, LoL. , WHAT the photos was… better..Well , tancks
okay, Ispeak well very well , bad , wost..? say me plis
Uh, Alex, since the solar power costs more, then voting with our wallets would mean we’d buy more fossil fuels. Which is not what we want. I think you just mean we can do the right thing by using solar power.