Florida Power & Light +NASA = 10Mwatts?

quid_non

interesting, the first link in the article says it will serve "nearly 2600 homes"....This link says "nearly 1100 homes"

guess they count on more cloudy days??;)

http://www.fpl.com/news/2009/52709.shtml

BB.

Re: Florida Power & Light +NASA = 10Mwatts?

Then there is "Chasing the Sun":

The abandoned industrial site on the far edge of Chicago's South Side is an unlikely location for a large solar power plant. For one thing, Chicago is not a very sunny city. And the land itself, once a center of postwar manufacturing, has been vacant for 35 years and is now overgrown with trees and bushes, surrounded by a gritty neighborhood of aging houses. But Exelon, one of the country's largest electric utilities, says that by the end of the year it hopes to turn a 39-acre lot into the nation's largest urban solar plant. If it succeeds, row after row of nearly 33,000 silicon solar panels built and installed by SunPower, a photo*voltaics manufacturer based in San Jose, CA, will cover the lot to produce 10 megawatts of power--enough for about 1,200 to 1,500 homes.

But there is a big if in this scenario of urban transformation. It will happen only if Exelon receives the generous loan guarantees for renewable-energy projects promised in this year's federal stimulus bill--funds that in this case would cover 80 percent of the project's costs. Barely viable with the loan guarantees and a handful of other federal and state subsidies, the $60 million solar plant would not be possible without such government support. Speaking from the 48th-floor offices of Exelon, nearly 20 miles away in downtown Chicago, Thomas O'Neill, the utility's senior vice president for new business development, is blunt about the economics of the solar plant. "If we can't secure the loan guarantee, we can't go forward with the project," he says.

Even with the federal subsidies, says O'Neill, the solar plant won't offer the double-digit returns usually required by investors in large energy projects. It would cost $6 a watt to build, whereas wind and natural-gas plants cost roughly $2 a watt and $1 a watt, respectively. And its 10 megawatts will contribute an insignificant amount of electricity to Exelon's vast generation capacity of 36,000 megawatts. But, says O'Neill, the project is "tailor-made" for some of President Obama's goals in the stimulus package. It would create jobs (250 people would be needed to construct it), and it would demonstrate that solar power can be "brought to the Midwest and to the inner city."...

Its all about "free money".

-Bill