As the political circus over the failure of the solar panel maker Solyndra plays out on Capitol Hill, the Obama administration is quietly forging ahead with its renewable energy loan guarantee program with ambitious new projects.
Last week the Department of Energy finalized a $1.2 billion loan guarantee for energy company Abengoa Solar to build a 250-megawatt concentrating solar power plant in the Mojave desert 100 miles north of Los Angeles.
If and when the project is built, it will be the first utility scale development of Abengoa’s most advanced Solar Collector Assembly technology, featuring lighter, stronger, and cheaper frames to hold parabolic mirrors (used to concentrate sunlight on tubes containing liquid with a low boiling point). California-based utility PG&E has agreed to a 25-year contract to purchase energy from the Mojave Solar Project (MSP), which at peak production will generate enough electricity to power up to 54,000 homes.
According to Abengoa and the DOE, the Mojave Solar Project will also create more than 900 jobs. Abengoa plans to purchase parts for the plant, including parabolic mirrors and receiver tubes, from manufacturers in New Mexico, Arizona, and several other states.
“Investments in solar generation like the Mojave Solar Project are critical to our effort to create good, clean energy jobs in America and compete with countries like China in the global clean energy race,” DOE secretary Steven Chu said in a statement.
But is there reason to believe that the Mojave Solar Project will fare any better than Solyndra? Concentrating solar power technology has existed for more than two centuries but is still in its infancy as a utility scale power source. So just how viable is this technology?
Plenty viable, according to Mark Mehos, principal program manager of concentrating solar power research at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
“Parabolic troughs have been operating in California for 25 years and have proven to be extremely reliable with performance actually increasing over time,” he said. (There are currently two operational concentrating solar plants in California, plus other plants in Florida, Arizona, Nevada, and Hawaii, and dozens of plants in Spain.)
Another key to the Mojave Solar Project’s long-term viability, Mehos notes, is its agreement with PG&E. Where solar panel maker Solyndra had to compete in a global market increasingly dominated by cheap panels made in China, MSP has a guaranteed revenue stream already in place.
Critics of the DOE’s green energy financing program are proposing legislation to require federal agencies to audit and thoroughly investigate the financial health of companies slated to receive federal funding.
Underlying the critique is the notion that the need for guaranteed loans and other federal subsidies is a sign of green energy’s inherent weakness and inability to survive on the open market.
But concentrating solar and other renewable energy technologies should not be expected to go toe-to-toe with fossil fuels, at least not without the aid of substantial, long-term federal support, observes Mehos.
“The technology is still relatively immature compared to conventional fossil-fired generation, so significant cost reduction opportunities exist, and will come about through government and privately funded R&D,” he said. “Scale-up and learning are two additional avenues for cost reduction, but they can only come about through the construction of other plants,” which at this point is possible only with the aid of federal dollars.
The DOE, meanwhile, intends to finalize loans for 15 other renewable energy projects before the stimulus program for such funding expires at the end of September.
