One of the forms of Solar energy technologies used to generate electricity is the concentrating solar power. A type of concentrating solar power includes the power tower. Concentrating solar power technology simply uses mirrors to concentrate or converge energy from the sunlight to a point. At that point, the heat generated is very great and can be used to heat up a large reservoir of water which can then be used to turn turbines that generate electricity. A solar tower in its case has a large field of several mirrors concentrating sunlight to its top where a receiver sits and uses the heat to generate electricity as mentioned earlier.
The first commercial solar tower in the world was constructed in Spain and it went online in mid-2007, providing 11 megawatts of electricity( which adds up to 24.3 gigawatts/hour per year) that power up to about 5,500 households in the country.
The solar field occupies 148 acres of land and contains 624 heliostats that concentrate sunlight to the 377-foot/ 115m/ 40 storey high concrete tower and the whole project took 4 years designed by Abengoa solar and it cost about US $46 million to construct. On the part of environmental friendliness, the project is set to prevent 6000 tons of CO2 emission into the atmosphere.
This is another technology that developing countries that have rich irradiance to tap into to generate electricity and add to their energy mix.
Thank you for reading and I hope you have been a little bit informed about solar towers.