Spanish company Avanzalia Solar has launched one of the world’s largest photovoltaic solar power plants. Russian news agency RIA-Novosti reports that the Planta Solara de Salamanca consists of 70,00 PV modules , manufactured by Japanese company Kyocera, spread over a 36-hectare site. The facility currently has a generating capacity of 13.8 megawatts, enough to power roughly 5,000 households and eliminate over 6,100 tons of CO2 annually. Avanzalia plans to increase capacity to 25MW. While all this may still seem like small change in the scheme of global energy needs, keep in mind that solar is currently most practical at the level of distributed generation - small arrays which power individual homes, businesses, or developments. And larger installations are on the way. Australia’s Solar Systems plans to build the world’s largest PV plant, the 154MW Victoria Project.
In other solar news, GE Energy (NYSE: GE) has acquired a minority equity stake in Colorado’s PrimeStar Solar a firm specializing in the promising cadmium telluride (CdTe) thin film photovoltaics. Last year, PrimeStar received a $3 million grant from the Department of Energy to scale up their 16.5% efficient technology for industrial use. Under their Ecomagination initiative, which was launched in May of 2005, GE will invest $1.5 billion annually in research in cleaner technologies by 2010, up from $700 million in 2004.
