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Mar 5, 2010 — Jad Mouawad reports in The New York Times that FPL Group “is running an experiment in the future of renewable power.  Across 500 acres north of West Palm Beach, the … utility is assembling a life-size Erector Set of 190,000 shimmering mirrors and thousands of steel pylons that stretch as far as the eye can see.  When it is completed by the end of the year, this vast project will be the world’s second-largest solar plant.

But that is not its real novelty. The solar array is being grafted onto the back of the nation’s largest fossil-fuel power plant, fired by natural gas.  It is an experiment in whether conventional power generation can be married with renewable power in a way that lowers costs and spares the environment.

The project’s advantages are obvious: electricity generated from the sun will allow FPL to cut natural gas use and reduce carbon dioxide emissions.  It will provide extra power when it is most needed: when the summer sun is shining, Floridians are cranking up their air-conditioning and electricity demand is at its highest.  The plant also serves as a real-life test on how to reduce the cost of solar power, which remains much more expensive than most other forms of electrical generation. FPL Group, the parent company of Florida Power and Light, expects to cut costs by about 20% compared with a stand-alone solar facility, since it does not have to build a new steam turbine or new high-power transmission lines.

“We’d love to tell you that solar power is as economic as fossil fuels, but the reality is that it is not,” Lewis Hay III, FPL’s chairman and chief executive, said on a recent tour of the plant. “We have got to figure out ways to get costs down.  As we saw with wind power, a lot has to do with scale.”

For solar power, scale is still a relative term.  At its peak, the solar plant will be able to generate 75 megawatts of power, enough for about 11,000 homes.  But that is dwarfed by the adjacent gas plant, which can produce about 3,800 megawatts of power. (A megawatt is enough to power a Wal-Mart store.)”

For those challenged by arithmetic, that means that the gas plant is capable of producing over 50 times the power of the world’s second largest solar installation.  That means for the solar array to have the same output as the gas system it is next to would require 9,500,000 mirrors!  Can FPL even build the 190,000 mirrors to withstand the hurricanes that pass over the Florida peninsula some summers?

Read the full article in The New York Times and then leave your comments here.