World News – Abengoa to Build World’s Largest Solar Plant

Abengoa Solar has entered into a deal with the Arizona Public Service Co. (APS), one of Arizona’s leading energy utilities. Under the deal Abengoa would build, own, and operate what could be the world’s largest solar power plant if it was operating today.

The plant, scheduled to go into operation by 2011, will be located in Gila Bend, Arizona. The plant will sell the produced electricity to APS over a 30-year period for total revenue of around $4 billion.

The solar plant has been named Solana, meaning “a sunny place” in Spanish. The Solana Generating Station will have a total capacity of 280 MW which is enough power to supply 70,000 homes. The use of solar generated electricity for those 70,000 homes takes about 400,000 tons of greenhouse gases that would otherwise contribute to global warming and climate change.

Abengoa will employ a proprietary Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) trough technology developed by the company, and will cover a surface of around 1,900 acres. The solar trough technology uses trackers with high precision parabolic mirrors that follow the sun’s path and concentrate its energy, heating a fluid to over 700°F and using that heat to turn steam turbines. The solar plant will also include a thermal energy storage system that allows for electricity to be produced as required, even after the sun has set.

In Spain the company currently operates the world’s first commercial CSP solar tower plant, a demonstration trough plant and the world´s first commercial photovoltaic low concentration plant. It is also building three more CSP plants in Spain with a total capacity of 120 MW, two trough plants that will generate 50 MW of electricity each, one tower plant with a capacity of 20 MW, and two hybrid gas-solar plants in Algeria and Morocco. A subsidiary of Abengoa, a $4 billion multinational company, Abengoa Solar has access to the financial, technical, and human resources required to finance, build and operate these large plants.