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Shock technology shift at huge California solar plant

By Mark Halper | August 22, 2011, 4:47 AM PDT 2Commentsmore +

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Solar Millennium AG announced late last week that it is forsaking its trademark deployment of solar thermal technology in favor of photovoltaic panels at the 1GW Blythe Solar Power Project in California.

The decision underscores the rapid price decline in solar PV panels.

Erlangen, Germany-based Solar Millennium develops, builds and operates solar power plants. It specializes in solar thermal electricity generation - using the sun to heat a fluid that creates steam to drive a turbine.

It had planned to use solar thermal -also known as concentrated solar power (CSP) - at Blythe, using parabolic mirrors (pictured above) to focus the sun's rays on the heating fluid. But it disclosed last week that its U.S. subsidiary, Solar Trust of America, will instead use solar PV panels for the first 500MW that it builds.

"At the moment, the U.S. market is clearly focused on peak load supply," Solar Millennium CEO Christoph Wolff said in a press release. "Due to the drastic drop in PV prices, we agreed with the Californian utility to convert the power purchase agreements to PV The simultaneous sudden price increases for raw materials and construction would have reduced our return on equity and risk provisioning for our construction share in the Blythe CSP project to marginal values."

less chance of explosions or e/quake damage too

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty