SolarReserve pulls in $140 million for 5,000 MW of new solar thermal power plants using molten salts storage.

Good Energies will take a seat on the board at SolarReserve as part of the investment, with Ware serving as a director. SolarReserve says it has the exclusive license to market a molten-salt, solar power-tower technology developed by the Rocketdyne division of Hamilton Sundstrand, a United Technologies Corp. subsidiary. According to SolarReserve, the molten-salt storage technology, which will enable the plant to operate 24 hours a day, was developed by the same team at Rocketdyne that developed the Space Station power systems, the Space Shuttle main engines and the Apollo moon rocket propulsion systems. The storage technology has already been proven in the U.S.

SolarReserve CEO Terry Murphy said the project is unique compared to other molten-salt storage systems, such as a 50 MW parabolic-trough plant being developed by Solar Millennium LLC, in Granada, Spain. For starters, SolarReserve's project is about 25 percent cheaper than parabolic-trough storage and comes with installed costs of $3,000/kW. In comparison, a 500 MW natural gas power plant has installed costs of about $800/kW, conventional parabolic troughs have installed costs of about $4,190/kW, and advanced nuclear units run up to $3,754/kW, according to the California Energy Commission's 2007 cost-of-generation report.

According to SolarReserve documents, trough systems need three times as much storage mass, suffer loss of heat at night and use therminol to transfer heat hundreds of miles. SolarReserve's system, in contrast, uses molten salt, stored in tanks, as a medium to transfer heat hundreds of feet and has collectors that use fixed rather than variable concentration ratios. Power-tower, molten-salt storage also achieves temperatures of 1,050 degrees compared to 750 degrees for a parabolic-trough storage system, and has turbine efficiencies of 40 percent as opposed to 36 percent for parabolic trough.

SolarReserve aims to build 5,000 MW of solar-thermal capacity, in increments of 50 MW to 300 MW, and has around 50 projects in its pipeline.

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