The plant was designed and developed by Shams Power Company, and it cost $600 million and took three years to build.
This gargantuan power plant covers almost one square mile – the equivalent of about 285 football fields. According to Masdar, it will generate enough electricity to power 20,000 homes in the United Arab Emirates. It will also displace 175,000 tons of CO2 per year – the equivalent of planting 1.5 million trees or taking 15,000 cars off the road.
Concentrated solar is cool because in certain iterations, the plants allow you to store energy—for instance, in molten salt, like what's used in certain thorium reactors—for later use. For conventional solar, sunset's the off switch. With concentrated solar, it doesn't have to be. The Abu Dhabi system will now generate about 10% of the world's concentrated solar power.
Much has been made by those who pay attention to these kind of things about how Abu Dhabi—oil-soaked and oil-rich Abu Dhabi!—is investing so heavily into these kinds of things, while so much of the world dithers.
And good. Let's make much of this. These are the technologies that will keep societies humming if and when we finally decide to stop pumping the atmosphere full of planet-frying carbon dioxide. Things like these will replace the coal plants of the 20th century. Things like these will give us a shred of a shot at keeping the lights on without overheating.
source : http://in.finance.yahoo.com/photos/inside-world-s-largest-solar-energy-plant-slideshow/uae-energy-environment-solar-photo--1861500560.html
