The Sunshine Solution

This article discusses the innovative programs of Ausra, a solar power company based in Palo Alto, California, to convert sunshine into electricity. The team is trying to use the best tools available to design a renewable energy system that can be put together by largely unskilled labor and do it cheaply enough to be profitable. The paper also highlights that instead of using one parabolic surface, Ausra divides its mirrored reflectors into strips, each of which concentrates light into a set of pipes mounted 40 feet overhead. A single square mile of mirror field like this one near Bakersfield can generate as much as 80 MW. The Ausra manufacturing plant in Las Vegas is a garden-variety factory, using robotic welders and hard-hatted workers to build the trusses that support the mirrors. According to researchers, a look at a solar radiation map of the United States shows that finding sunshine ought not to be a problem. While the eastern half of the country has too many partly cloudy days to make much use of solar thermal power, the Southwest is one of the best locations in the world for it.