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| Keahole Solar Power's Holaniku station | PS10 and PS20 solar power towers |
Photovoltaics
Solar power comes from our Sun and we can use photovoltaic devices to extract this energy which is radiated over planet earth during the day, and we can generate electricity directly from it.
A solar cell, or photovoltaic cell (PV), is a device that converts light into electric current using the photoelectric effect.
Of course there are other ways to use the energy in sunlight and some of these methods will generate electricity. But the important point here is that a photovoltaic device will generate electricity directly from the radiation from our Sun.
PS10 Solar power
The PS10 Solar Power Plant was the first commercial concentrating solar power tower in Europe. It is sited in Andalucia, Spain. The solar power tower produces 11 megawatts (MW) of electricity using 624 large movable mirrors (referrred to as heliostats) to focus the sunlight on a central receptor.
The power station took four years to build at a cost of €35 million.
Solar Energy Generating Systems (SEGS) is the largest solar energy generating facility in the world. It consists of nine solar power plants in California's Mojave Desert, where insolation is among the best available in the United States.
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References
Keahole Solar Power - Wikipedia - User: Xklaim
- GNU Free Documentation License 1.2
PS10 tower - Wikipedia - User: afloresm - Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic
PS20 tower - Wikipedia - User: Koza1983 - Creative Commons
Attribution 3.0 Unported
SEGS - Wikipedia - User: Akradecki - GNU Free Documentation License 1.2
pathfinder aircraft - Wikimedia Commons - Author: NASA
- Image in public domain