Engineering and Manufacturing Improve Solar Collecting Trough Technology

摘要

Nevada Solar One, a 64 MW concentrating solar power generating facility that came online in July 2007, is among the first large-scale solar stations in 17 years to use a parabolic mirror trough design. The concept has been in commercial use since 1985, but simply wasn't cost efficient enough to compete with fossil fuels during the last two decades. For most parabolic trough power plants, the solar field represents 50% of the total investment cost. So to further close the cost-competition gap with fossil fuels the trough technology required significant refinements in design engineering, materials performance and cost of construction. Meanwhile, the concentrator structure refinements came about, in part, from a cost-shared R&D contract between Solargenix Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory under the US Department of Energy's USA Trough Initiative.