Hybrid Solar Thermal and Gas--About Time

Hybrid Solar Thermal and Gas--About Time

A recent short article described a great idea--using solar as the daytime heat for a natural gas power plant.  The impetus is the old alternative-energy maxim:  "He who cannot store, has no solar after four!"  At the same time, natural gas is still expensive (although drifting down in price).  A practical solution is a common boiler that can receive heat from either a solar array or natural gas burners.  A part of the article is below, and the URL is at the bottom.

Hybrid Solar Power Plant Offers New Model for Traditional Electricity Production Solar Feeds News and Commentary


Friday, 05 March 2010 getsolar.com

By the end of this year, the world’s second-largest solar power plant will be unveiled in what were once Floridian swamplands, 500 acres north of West Palm Beach. According to the New York Times, 190,000 mirrors and thousands of steel pylons will compose the striking display in Indiantown, Florida, a glimmering ode to the nation’s renewable energy future among the humble flora and fauna of its surrounding wetlands. The story here, however, is not of the solar array’s size or splendor, but of its integration with a fossil fuel power plant—the nation’s largest, in fact.

The FPL Group utility, the parent company of Florida Power & Light, is the muscle behind the Martin Next Generation Solar Energy Center, the first of several comparable hybrid energy projects springing up in the industry. Although solar plants integrated with small, gas-fired turbines for backup purposes are not uncommon, the FPL solar hybrid plant is the first instance of a “conventional plant [ ] being retrofitted with the latest solar technology on such an industrial scale.” The solar thermal system will be directly grated onto the existing natural-gas plant, and the two will share both transmission lines and a steam turbine. The benefits of such hybridization are twofold: the electricity generated from the plant’s 75-megawatt solar thermal system will cut natural gas usage and consequently carbon emissions, and the retrofit will be cheaper than building a new solar power plant from scratch. (FPL expects to cut costs by 20 percent, compared with a purely solar facility, as it is spared the trouble of constructing a new steam turbine and transmission lines.)

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Hybrid Solar Power Plant Offers New Model for Traditional Electricity Production

http://solarfeeds.com/getsolar/11499-hybrid-solar-power-plant-offers-new-model-for-traditional-electricity-production

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