During the first weekend of July, US President Obama and DOE Secretary Steve Chuworked together on the approval of massive loan guarantees to solar projects in the US as part of the federal stimulus.
…
During the first weekend of July, US President Obama and DOE Secretary Steve Chuworked together on the approval of massive loan guarantees to solar projects in the US as part of the federal stimulus. Abengoa“s 250 megawatt Solana Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) project in Gila Bend, Arizona, 70 miles southwest of Phoenix, which received a USD 1.45 billion loan guarantee, was the largest announced project. The loan guarantee process was started over a year and a half ago and, according to Santiago Seage, CEO at Abengoa Solar: “It has been a long process with lots of work with the DOE. It is expensive and not an easy process but the DOE has been very professional and they have spent their time to do things very thoroughly.” The Solana project is a trough-based system as opposed to the Brightsource power tower design. Abengoa does work with both architectures as well as with photovoltaics. “Our belief is that CSP is a better option with bigger plants or where you need dispatchability,” according to Seage. The project also incorporates six hours of molten salt storage that improves the dispatchability of the power, in a relatively new two-tank molten salt storage scheme. Abengoa built a demonstration facility in the south of Spain in 2008 and the scheme has only been used in a few other solar projects, although molten salt technology has been used at different temperatures in other applications in different industries. Kate Maracas, Arizona vice president at Abengoa Solar, said in the press release that the building of Solana will also create between 1,600 to 1,700 new construction jobs, and operation of the plant will add another 85 permanent jobs. These construction and operating jobs will create a few thousand additional indirect jobs. Taken together, 98 percent of the jobs created by Solana will be American jobs – primarily from Arizona, and a smaller portion from neighbouring states. Abengoa Solar, which, as a priority, uses US-made components wherever possible for the Solana plant, has signed a power purchase agreement with APS, the state“s largest electric utility, to sell the energy produced by Solana for a period of 30 years. Consequently to the construction of Solana, a mirror manufacturing factory will be built in Surprise, Arizona which will employ almost 180 people. The Solana plant will be Abengoa Solar“s tenth CSP plant worldwide.