Energy Glance
The dirty secret of clean energy is that while generating it is getting easier, moving it to market is not.
“The windiest sites have not been built, because there is no way to move that electricity from there to the load centers,” he said.
The basic problem is that many transmission lines, and the connections between them, are simply too small for the amount of power companies would like to squeeze through them. The difficulty is most acute for long-distance transmission, but shows up at times even over distances of a few hundred miles.
The oil pipeline, which BP owns as part of a consortium, can carry up to 90,000 barrels of oil per day.
This could extend the driving time of electric cars and the life of mobile devices such as cell phones, music players and cameras by the same amount, making a typical laptop battery last 40 hours instead of four..
The new plant, PS10 (Planta Solar 10), is the first commercial solar thermoelectric power plant in the world and has a peak capacity of 11MW - sufficient to generate 23 million kWh of electricity per year powering 6,000 homes and saving 18,000 tonnes of carbon emissions per year. The plant took four years to build with construction finishing at the end of 2005 and has so far cost 35 million Euro. Construction was led by Solucar, an Albengoa company.
