Solar tower will power Las Vegas at night

[ohzee]

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57373 ... ditorPicks

In the summer, the Crescent Dunes project's general contractor intends to start installing a field of 10,000 billboard-size sun-tracking mirrors called heliostats around the tower. Sunlight is reflected onto a 100-foot receiver which house a series of tubes of circulating salt. The heliostat field will be about two miles across.

Looked pretty interesting to me.

[zombiess]

one of the beautiful things about Las Vegas, we have lots of sunshine, same with Phoenix with edges us out just a little. Perfect location for solar plants to power the entire West Coast.

Code: Select all

City                           % Sunshine    Hours of Sun    Clear Days
Phoenix, Arizona    83                      3872                    211
Las Vegas, Nevada    85                      3825                    210
Sacramento, Ca    78                      3608                    188


[rojitor]

Go green GO!

[miro13car]

Incredible and very reassuring that not all California think
fossil feul
very visionary project whch bring attention of other cities in sunny places
kudus to major of LA.

[spinningmagnets]

I'm glad to see more projects like this. I believe they have finally "gone green" because of the drastically low level of Lake Mead, and the resulting reduction of available electricity generated from Hoover Dam (very near Las Vegas).

If they didn't do something soon, they would've been screwed fairly soon. for over a decade, the SEGS plants in Californias Mojave desert have been doing this with solar heating of liquid salt, to boil water-steam for turbine-generators (sending power to Los Angeles/San Diego).

In the near future, the federal government will be elbowing in to referee the fights between the states over water. When snow falls in Utah/Colorado...how much of the runoff belongs downstream to Nevada/Arizona? We can make electricity several different ways, but crops need water...its going to get expensive and ugly.

Heres a "low water use" golf course in southern Utah (near Las Vegas).

[The fingers]

We need solar farms combined with the windmill locations at Whitewater in Banning Pass. It's both windy and sunny there almost all the time, and the existing windmill system could easily be augmented with a ground mounted solar system in the area underneath and around the wind towers.