EnviroMission Inc. is looking to turn desert hot air into a different take on solar power that could sprout towers throughout the West and U.S.
The Phoenix-based company, a subsidiary of Australia-based EnviroMission Ltd., received approval late last month to be a potential power supplier for the Southern California Public Power Authority. Its approach uses the basic physics of hot air rising to fuel potential for its massive towers, which could land in La Paz County in western Arizona.
Chris Davey, the company’s president, said the solar tower concept is one that could provide power at a cost more comparable with traditional sources than today’s fleet of renewable options, along with a facility that uses no water and could last decades.
“Renewables are great, sustainability is great,” he said. “But you can’t do that if it’s too expensive.”
The solar tower concept works by building what essentially is a massive greenhouse covering potentially 2,400 acres that would trap hot air and funnel it to the tower. At the tower’s base will be 32 wind turbines for generating the power. The air would form a roughly 35 mph wind to funnel up a tower roughly 2,000 feet tall, driving the turbines.
With as much of its technology rooted in the wind industry as solar, a test site in Manzanares, Spain, used the concept for seven years on a 660-foot tower to generate power for more than 10 hours a day and could even work at night, albeit at a minimal level.
The physics behind the technology isn’t groundbreaking. The construction technology, however, is such that several years ago the facility would have been hard to build. The company is talking to potential suppliers from glass manufacturers to construction and steel providers about a possible site in La Paz county, Davey said.
“There’s technology out there and there’s engineering out there that have caught up to the design,” he said.
SCPPA is still in discussions with EnviroMission about how much power it may buy. The group, which represents 12 cities in Southern California including Los Angeles and several of its suburbs, has been accepting applications for renewable projects as more cities look for cleaner power, said David Walden, SCPPA’s energy systems manager.
The group’s power companies serve about 2 million customers representing about 4.8 million people. Some of the cities are more aggressive in their search for renewable power than others, which has opened options for projects outside of California, including Arizona, Walden said.
“La Paz (EnviroMission’s project) is one of the many projects that we’ll be negotiating with,” he said.
Those negotiations could take some time to come to fruition. The SCPPA works to coordinate all the cities’ needs. Once the power allotment has been decided, the cities’ individual councils must ratify the deals, a move that could take several months, Walden said.
“They’re all in process,” he said. “It’s a thing where they all take their own path.”
While the solar tower theory is relatively new on the market, at least one analyst sees potential for it to compete with more established technologies such as photovoltaics and concentrated solar power, which uses mirrors to heat fluids that drive turbines.
Pavel Molchanov, an analyst with Raymond James and Associates Inc. in St. Petersburg, Fla., said in a research brief the technology could provide an alternative for utility-scale production at a cost lower than other solar power.
With a cost that runs about $3.5 million per megawatt, compared with about $5 million for a concentrated solar plant and a longer power generation time, Molchanov wrote that solar tower technology could become accepted among utility providers in that growing segment.
While Davey would not comment the cost of a solar tower, Raymond James estimates put it close to $700 million for a 200 megawatt plant. In comparison, CSP plants proposed for Arizona utilities are looking at costs in the range of $1 billion to $1.5 billion for a slightly larger output.
Davey said the tower can be coupled with other external heat sources, from industrial output to geothermal, to produce more power during the night.
The company has finished its environmental studies and has a handful of parcels in La Paz County under option but has not selected a final site. Financing, which has become trickier for renewable companies, is still one of the hurdles, but Davey expects that to be cleared and the company could break ground in 18 to 24 months.
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