Spanish Firm to Launch World’s Largest Solar Tower Plant

A Spanish energy company is finishing construction on a new solar installation that will employ more than 1,000 large mirrors to concentrate sunlight on a tower and heat the water inside to run a steam-powered generator. The new array — using 1,255 mirrors, each about half the size of a tennis court, to heat water inside a tower that is 160 meters (525 feet) tall — will be the largest in the world employing so-called concentrated solar power (CSP) technology. Located near Seville, the tower is scheduled to open in January and will produce enough energy to power 11,000 homes. The mirrors being employed by the Abengoa energy company focus so much sunlight on the tower that the water inside is heated to more than 1,000 C (1832 F). CSP technology is ideally suited to areas such as southern Spain that enjoy sunny weather nearly year-round, and Spain hopes to take advantage of its climate to produce 2 gigawatts of power ”“ equivalent to 2 coal-fired power plants ”“ by 2015. “CSP is at the very beginning of a very big boom,” said Jose Luis Garcia, a Greenpeace official in Spain