On the EarthTechling Utterly Cool Projects Scale™, the
EnviroMission Solar Tower project might be unrivaled. More than 2,600 feet tall, with a mile-in-diameter greenhouse canopy at its base creating hot air that is sucked up into the tower, spinning electricity-creating turbines along the way – it’s like something a kid would build in
Minecraft.
You can’t help but hope this thing rises, as planned, in the western Arizona county of La Paz, just to see if something so brash might actually work. So here’s good news: Six months after
securing a power purchase agreement with the Southern California Public Power Authority,
EnviroMission says it “has received a formal commitment to provide the entire development and construction capital” for the project.
image via EnviroMission
Mind you, the Solar Tower
still isn’t a sure thing. The support from the unnamed source “is subject to the due diligence and the acceptance of related banking instruments by EnviroMission’s legal advisors and bankers,” EnviroMission says. But if the money comes through – and EnviroMission said it expects to know early this year – the Australia-based company says it will “form the basis of the ongoing financing for the development of Australian Solar Tower power stations in the U.S., and other global markets, including Australia.”
image via EnviroMission
Now, you might have seen towers associated with solar-power development before. But this utility-scale tower-based technology is nothing like the
power tower projects that have
popped up in Europe and are
coming to the United States. Those systems, known as
concentrating solar power, use vast arrays of heliostats to direct light to the top of a tower several hundred feet high, where water or other liquids can be heated to help produce electricity.
http://theenergycollective.com/namarchetti/74929/now-s-one-hell-solar-power-tower
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