17 Sep 2008
Solar power plant manufacturer SolarReserve has announced that it has raised a fresh $140m, chiefly from renewable investment funds Citi Alternative Investments, and Good Energies.
The company will use the funds to speed up development of 5GW of new, utility scale, solar power plants.
California-based SolarReserve holds the patent on molten salt power solar technology. The energy storage system works by using mirrors in a two square mile field to focus the sun's thermal energy on a tower where it heats molten salt. This salt is then used to create steam which drives a turbine to produce electricity. Importantly, the molten salt can also retains its heat throughout the night, ensuring it can still be used to produce electricity even after the the sun has gone down.
Terry Murphy, president and chief executive of SolarReserve said that the system had been independently tested and was now ready for a wider roll out. " The molten salt power tower was thoroughly validated by the Department of Energy at the Solar Two pilot plant and it's ready for worldwide deployment," he said.
A large number of firms, such as BrightSource Energy in the US and Fotowatio in Spain, are working on utility scale solar farms, but Citi managing director R. Andrew de Pass insisted that the patented salt system made SolarReserve stand out. "The technology backing by United Technologies Corp and the ability of the system to store energy differentiates SolarReserve from other alternative technologies and has the ability to replace conventional fuel burning power plants," he said.
Other investors include US Renewables Group, the founding investor in SolarReserve, along with PCG Clean Energy & Technology Fund (CETF), Nimes Capital, LLC and Credit Suisse.
In related news, Bank of Scotland Corporate and Santander Investment have announced they are to finance the construction of an 8MW solar farm in Toledo, Spain.
BP Solar will be in charge of the engineering, procurement and construction of the solar power plant as well as its operation and maintenance.
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The process of evaluating and aggregating information at www.greenmarketintelligence.com gives me great appreciation for the quality of work that Business Green is doing to keep its readers informed. I encourage BusinessGreen to add macro metrics to each information piece that you publish. Identifying macro metrics will help your readers better understand the significance of every project and especially a macro project like molten salts ability to store energy. The following are examples of macro metrics that could be incorporated into articles but this is not a comprehensive list of potential metrics. Identifying and reporting the annual barrels of oil saved equivalent for a project. In this example, 5GW of new, utility scale, solar power coming on line appears to generate an annual 30,000,000 barrels of oil saved metric. This assumes the widely reported metric that 1MW of alternative energy can generate as much electricity in a year as 6,000 barrels of oil is correct. Identifying and reporting renewable energy credits, carbon mitigation and credit trading metrics that may be created by the project. For this project 5GW of new, utility scale, solar power coming on line appears to create 5,000,000 renewable energy credits but more information is needed to properly calculate the REC metric. Models to present these metrics are offered at: http://tinyurl.com/n2ry9k Creating, identifying, reporting and evaluating holistic metrics in articles that BusinessGreen posts will help readers better understand the significance of each project. Facts and analytical models can be developed to identify meaningful metrics. This creates an opportunity for Business Green to add value to each information piece that you post. Thank you for sharing quality information. My comments are meant to help you take this information to the next level not to be critical of the great work that you are doing. Sincerely, Brad Smith Austin, Texas
Posted by Brad Smith, 05 Jun 2009