The Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project covers 1,670 acres of Nevada desert. When it officially opened in February this year, the massive plant was the world’s first solar facility to use molten salt as both a heat transfer fluid and a way to store thermal energy even when the sun goes down or the weather is bad. SolarReserve poured $1 billion into building the plant as a completely solar, totally sustainable facility, with no natural gas or fossil fuels required.
It only takes one glance at the Las Vegas strip to realize why power usage doesn’t go down when the sun sets in Nevada. Solar power is becoming more and more affordable as technology to make the resource available improves, but surplus energy storage has been a big obstacle in order to guarantee power even at night. The Crescent Dunes plant relies on more than 10,000 sun-tracking mirrors. These mirrors store the solar energy in a pit of salt that is heated to about 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. In order to provide power to the grid any time of day or night, the heat stored in the molten salt is used to turn water into steam that powers energy generators.
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10,347 tracking mirrors (heliostats), each about the size of a billboard, focus the sun’s energy onto the receiver
110 MW Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Plant is the first utility-scale facility in the world to feature advanced molten salt power tower technology
All 1.2 million square meters of glass was U.S. sourced, with assembly completed in an on-site manufacturing facility that employed local workers
Crescent Dunes features SolarReserve’s market leading energy storage to provide 10 hours of ‘full load’ storage for grid stability and reliability
The storage technology developed by SolarReserve eliminates the need for any backup fossil fuels
Highly accurate GPS measurements and sophisticated software control algorithms enable precise position of the beam on the receiver
Over the 30+ year operating life, the plant will expend more than $10M per year in salaries and operating costs, much of this spent in the region
SolarReserve owns the proprietary receiver and controls technology, developed for more than two decades, with over 100 patents and patents pending
The Crescent Dunes plant is a tremendous success story for US-developed technology that is leading the world in solar energy storage
The plant produces more than 500,000 megawatt-hours of electricity per year, twice the generation of an equivalent sized photovoltaics (PV) plant
The plant utilizes dry cooling technology in a hybrid design to minimize water use well below conventional power projects
The project created over 4,300 direct, indirect and induced jobs, with more than 1,000 workers on site during peak construction
The project will deliver enough firm, reliable electricity from solar to power 75,000 homes in Nevada during peak demand periods, day and night
Within the black tube walls of the receiver, molten salt flows through the piping and absorbs the heat from the concentrated sunlight
“Whether it’s in the daytime or the nighttime, it provides base-load stable power. If you get a bit of cloud cover that goes across at three o’clock in the afternoon, we’re always drawing out of storage, so we continue to operate at 110 megawatts. We don’t miss a beat, and the utility doesn’t see any fluctuations in the power output over the day,” said Kevin Smith, CEO of SolarReserve.
In the near future, SolarReserve has its sights set on a series of similar solar plants in China. Their first one-gigawatt plant in China will be ten times the size of Nevada’s Crescent Dunes facility, and SolarReserve plans to complete another ten Chinese plants on top of that by the year 2020. Considering the incredible population growth and dire environmental issues in China, solar energy is poised to make a big difference to resource consumption.
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