2000 Oil Barrels Eliminated By Solar Power

The technology started on these tropical islands, and currently it’s come home to roost, but in a very nice way.

On Dec. ten, the Massive Island will power up a four-acre solar farm based mostly on Sopogy technology, which was spun off as Keahole Solar Power LLC to develop the project.

Located on Honolulu, Sopogy’s five hundred-kilowatt concentrating solar array, which is additional efficient than solar photovoltaic systems, will deliver enough electricity to the Huge Island’s power grid to serve 250 homes, consistent with state energy agency estimates.

This amount can facilitate prevent 808 metric a lot of carbon dioxide from oil-burning power plants (for that Hawaii is justly infamous), that is the same as preserving nearly 8 acres of forest, planting twenty,176 trees, or eliminating 154 cars from the road. In 2007, Hawaii’s generation mix stood at 68.4-percent oil, and 12.five percent coal, with only 4.five-% delivered from renewable resources like solar, wind, geothermal and biomass.

Sopogy’s four-acre solar farm, comprised of 1,000 collectors about twelve feet long and 5 feet wide, can additionally eliminate the requirement to shop for 2,000 barrels of oil, a development that state energy administrator Ted Peck referred to as “exciting”.

The technology itself depends on troughs, or 0.5-barrel-shaped solar collectors, which catch, reflect and concentrate the sun’s energy on a central assortment bar. The system will head liquids up to 400 degrees (Fahrenheit), and the warmth from the liquid used to provide steam to work a turbine.

The array is being placed alongside Hawaii’s Natural Energy Laboratory (south of Kona International Airport), but a forty four,572-square-foot pilot project in July, designed by Sopogy and Helio Dynamics (a concentrating solar manufacturer), below the auspices of Southern California Gas (a division of Sempra Energy), proved the technology viable and compared Sopogy’s concentrating solar to larger concentrating trough arrays like Andasol 1 as the “PC size in concentrating solar generation” (as opposed to mainframes).

Sopogy’s collector, originally designed because the SopoFlare™ and destined for the industrial/industrial rooftop market as an alternative choice to solar thermal (solar hot water heating) or photovoltaic technologies, was developed along with an integrated roof rack mounting system.

All Sopogy’s offerings are based on its MicroCSP™ technology, which can be used in place of, or hybridized with, power generation systems, chiller (or AC) systems, process heat recovery devices, and even in desalination.

Originally founded in 2002 by Hawaiian-primarily based Energy Industries (an energy product developer) as an energy thoughts incubator at the Energy Laboratories web site, Sopogy has gone on to become an innovator, providing a product that costs less to manufacture than solar photovoltaic, with regarding twice the efficiency. And, while not as economical as utility-scale solar thermal collections systems, is less costly, provides for energy storage at nighttime and on cloudy days, and offers the hope that someday the technology will be out there in residential roof-sized units.

Sopogy is looking ahead to a fifty-megawatt project in Spain, and its sister entity, Keahole, is hoping to develop thirty megawatts of concentrating solar thermal throughout the Islands in the next six years.

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