Recently, the world’s largest solar power plant has opened in the town of Desert Center, California. Known as Desert Sunlight, the project can produce up to 550 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 160,000 average California homes.
The giant solar facility is only the world’s largest by a small margin. The Topaz solar project in San Luis Obispo County, California is also rated at 550 megawatts, but the Desert Center location gets more sun, so it is considered the larger of the two.
These are truly utility-scale solar facilities, as big as all but the largest conventional power plants. The company First Solar built these installations using federal loans under a program that funded five large-scale solar farms. The Department of Energy says it expects to make a profit of $5 billion to $6 billion from the program.
California has installed more renewable energy than any other state. The three major utilities in the state have a mandate to get at least 1/3 of their energy from clean sources by 2020. There is discussion of increasing that target to 50% by 2030.
It is not likely that there will be more solar farms as big as these two. Future utility-scale solar projects are likely to be somewhat smaller with the main goal of being located closer to energy consumers. Projects built near cities require less transmission infrastructure, which is expensive and poses environmental concerns.
In the meantime, there is plenty of solar electricity being made in sunny California. Tomorrow, we will talk about some unique problems caused by having so much solar power.
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World’s largest solar plant opens in California desert
Photo, posted February 19, 2015, courtesy of J.R. via Flickr.
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Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.