Silhouette
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- Jul 15, 2013
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An epic project, the 75 megawatt facility is spread over 500 acres of FPL-owned land, and powers 11,000 Florida homes. It has also created over 1,000 jobs and, according to the plant’s own press release, will reduce fossil fuel consumption by approximately 41 billion cubic feet of natural gas and more than 600,000 barrels of oil. This will cut more than 2.75 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions and save FPL customers approximately $178 million in fuel costs over the facility’s estimated 30-year lifetime.
The Martin Energy Center is the world’s first plant to combine solar energy with natural gas. Other plants often use dual energy sources, but this is normally done by burning oil at times of low sunlight.
Read more: Florida Launches the World's First Hybrid Solar Energy Plant | Inhabitat - Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building... Florida Launches the World's First Hybrid Solar Energy Plant | Inhabitat - Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building
You know, I've been blogging about this for years and they FINALLY DID IT!! [I'm so excited that I misspelled "Hybrid" in the title!!]
Whoot Whoot! There may be hope after all. The stupid..the stupid is wearing off...our nation maybe, just maybe, has a fighting chance.
It is precisely the perfect combination to ease out of our manic addiction to fossil fuels.
Well done gentlemen...well done...
Now get to work on about 1,000 more of those and we'll be back in the saddle again. Just do me a favor though, name just one of them the "Silhouette" power plant!...lol.. Reallly, gawd, it took like 5 years of blogging and exposing this technology for a power company to finally say, "hey, we'd like to charge the same amount to our customers but only have to pay for carbon for 30 days out of each year."
Duh! DO THE MATH $$$$ These guys are going to cleeeeeaaaan up at the bank.
For those who won't visit the link, the plant I've been urging for at least 5 years is one of parabolic mirrors that track the sun and focus it on a central elevated tube of thermal oil that gets up to 300 degrees celsius. That's way way hotter than boiling water. Then they use heat exchangers to boil water that runs turbines just like at every other conventional power plant. They don't have the salt tanks for night storage, but because for financial reasons the petroleum industry needs to be slowly weaned, they've opted to run the turbines at night with natural gas. The option to store heat in molten salt tanks still exists though and to run lower heat refrigerant boilers at night.
But this is an excellent start.
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