More Desert Mirror in Arizona

Next time you flight over Phoenix, take a look outside the window, you may find world’s largest parabolic mirrors, 2,700 of them, spread over a 3-mile-square stretch of desert about 70 miles southwest of Phoenix.

The Spain’s firm Abengoa Solar will engineer what it calls, Solana, the world’s largest solar power plant in the world at Arizona. The one billion dollars mirror-desert will have capacity of 280 megawatts, or enough to power 70,000 homes without emitting 400,000 tons of greenhouse gases.

Unlike most solar plant only generates energy during the days, the Solana does better with ability to store energy. The mirrors at daytime will also function to heat up storage tanks full of molten salt as the main energy sources after dark hours. The Solana plant is a full day operation.

Well, you may not get to see the mirrors that soon, but the plant is scheduled to be operational by 2011.

[via business journal]