Margaret and I drove from Las Vegas, NV to Joshua Tree National Park in CA recently. Saw an amazing variety of solar farms in the desert landscape.
Off US-95, south of Boulder City we saw miles and miles of solar panels. They included the Copper Mountain Solar Facility, a 802 megawatt solar photovoltaic power plant (see some of the panels in video below). It is next to the 64 MW Nevada Solar, the 150 MW Boulder Solar, and the 300 MW Techren Solar projects.
This complex adds up to half of the generating capacity at the nearby Hoover Dam, which has powered Las Vegas’s bright lights for decades.
The nearby thousand acre Townsite Solar + Storage uses a Tesla Megapack whose capacity is rated at 360,000kWh.
Off I-15, near the CA/NV border, we saw Ivanpah which uses mirrors to focus the power of the sun on solar receivers atop power towers. The video below describes the design and some of the problems the site has encountered
Impressive what you can do with cheap land and free sunshine.
Comments