Sandia Labs Working on Solar Power Farm

Nov 25 - Deseret News (Salt Lake City)

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) -- A remote Sandia National Laboratories office is working with a private firm to develop huge farms of solar dishes, working out technical and manufacturing problems.

Solar farms with up to 20,000 dishes each could produce enough electricity to compete with so-called peaking power stations, saving customers money during times of heavy electrical use, said Sandia engineer Chuck Andraka. Peaking stations use natural gas to meet power demands when coal and nuclear plants don't provide enough energy.

"Peaking power with natural gas can cost from 10 cents to 30 cents or more per kilowatt-hour," Andraka said. "We can't compete with coal or nuclear, which are in the 3 cents to 5 cents range, but we think we can make solar farms that produce energy at about 6 cents per kilowatt-hour."

Sandia and Stirling Energy Systems Inc. are working out details of a revenue-sharing agreement, which should be finished by the end of the year, Andraka said.

"We're kind of like a technology incubator for them," he said. "We're teaching them how to attack the technology like Sandia. It's more of a scientific approach. A lot of the time in industry, they put Band-Aids on products to get them out the door because there's a rush for profits. We look at the system first and analyze it and maybe go a little bit more slowly."

Sandia is helping solve the problem of synchronizing thousands of solar dishes economically. Engineers have set up a test field of six three-story-tall dishes on a remote area of Sandia to work out bugs on a small scale.

"We have one older solar tower we have to shut down sometimes because an owl nests there," Andraka said. "That's OK, though, those things could actually be real-world problems for remote dish fields."

Stirling Energy Systems believes it can be ready to start building its first solar farms in two to three years, said Bob Liden, company executive vice president and general manager. Andraka expects it to be about three years before a 20,000-dish solar field can be built.

"This is the perfect type of electricity generation for the Southwest," Liden said. "It's a renewable resource, it's pollution free, and the maintenance of a solar farm is minimal."

Sandia engineers are working on how to make a field of solar dishes work together -- not as easy as it sounds, Andraka said.

"In the very early morning the dishes shade each other, and that will certainly affect a large field," he said. "Also, these things start up using an electric generator. If 20,000 of those went on at the same time, you'd damage the power grid."

Staggering start times a minute apart for 20,000 dishes won't work because it would be dark before the last ones cranked up, Andraka said.

"What we need to do is find a way to start these things up a millisecond apart, so they don't hurt the power grid but they come up in a timely fashion," he said.

Sandia also is starting to figure out how the dishes will talk to a central computer system, Andraka said.

Once the bugs are worked out in the six-dish field, Sandia and SES probably will expand to a field of 100 or more dishes to continue testing, Andraka said. That probably will occur next year.