| Solar power
in the Mojave
Not much power, but 90% of the world's
solar electricity
What? A fire? |
The Solar
Energy
Generating
System
(SEGS) in the Mojave Desert consists of nine separate installations, each
of which has a large arrary of parabolic troughs that focus sunlight onto
a black tube carrying a heat-transfer oil called therminol.
The hot oil is then used to run heat engines that turn electric generator
shafts.
Altogether, the nine SEGS units produce an around-the-clock average of 103 MWe (megawatts of electricity), about 1 tenth of the power output of a single nuke. This power is fully 90% of the world's solar electricity. On February 27th, 1999, a fire broke out in a tank containint 900,000 gallons of therminol used in SEGS-II, a unit the produces 8% of the SEGS electricity. |
