Starwood Solar 1

Lockheed Martin has announced Starwood Solar 1, a serious move into the renewable energy field. The world's largest defense contractor will construct and operate the 290 MW concentrated solar power station to be built in Arizona. It will be operational by 2013 if the project goes as planned. The announcement follows the signing of a Power Purchase Agreement with Starwood Energy Group Global and the Arizona Public Service Company. The plant will be located 75 miles to the west of Phoenix.

Project Details

The power station uses the tried and proven parabolic dish method of harvesting energy. The sunlight is concentrated onto receiver tubes that contain synthetic oil. This oil becomes superheated, and then returns to a central station where the heat is used to either generate steam to drive a turbine or is stored in molten salt vats for later use. A major advantage of this approach is that the station can continue to provide electricity during dark hours from the stored heat. This is the same kind of design that has been used successfully in the SEGS power stations and others.

The station will use over 3500 parabolic mirrors, each 100 meters long. It is estimated that this project will provide enough energy for 73,000 homes.

Why Renewable Energy?

This move is not as unlikely as it may first appear. Lockheed Martin has an incredible amount of engineering and project management talent to draw on, and they have obviously identified the renewable energy field as one that has a great deal of promise for future profits.

A cynic could also suggest that Lockheed Martin is spreading its investments in the (extremely unlikely) event that people want to stop dropping bombs on each other and live in peace. After all, we'd still need electricity.

More Information

For more details, see the original press release. To have a look at Arizona Public Service Company's spin on the project, click here.

27 May 2009

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