Climate of Our Future

Climate Crisis Coalition

News: Sunny Outlook: Can Sunshine Provide All U.S. Electricity? By David Biello, Scientific American, September 19, 2007. “In the often cloudless American Southwest, the sun pours more than eight kilowatt-hours* per square meter of its energy onto the landscape. Vast parabolic mirrors in the heart of California’s Mojave Desert concentrate this solar energy to heat special oil to around 750 degrees Fahrenheit (400 degrees Celsius). This hot oil transfers its heat to water, vaporizing it, and then that steam turns a turbine to produce electricity. All told, nine such mirror fields, known as concentrating solar power plants, supply 350 megawatts of electricity yearly… But physicist David Mills, chief scientific officer and founder of Palo Alto, Calif.–based solar-thermal company Ausra, has bigger ideas: concentrating the sun’s power to provide all of the electricity needs of the U.S., including a switch to electric cars feeding off the grid. ‘Within 18 months, with storage, we will not only reduce [the] cost of [solar-thermal] electricity but also satisfy the requirements for a modern society,’ Mills claims. ‘Supplying [electricity] 24 hours a day and effectively replacing the function of coal or gas.’ The company insists it can do this at a cost of just 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, analogous to the price of electricity from burning natural gas in California if a cost was imposed for the emission of carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas (as the state’s Public Utilities Commission is considering)… Ausra hopes to announce several partnerships this fall and has already acquired the land to build one such solar-thermal plant at an undisclosed location in southern California. If its storage system works and proves cost-effective, Ausra might just help usher in a solar revolution. ‘We have the ability to transition to a zero-carbon electricity future without moving the electricity price around,’ O’Donnell says. ‘That hasn’t been part of anybody’s conventional wisdom’.”