Solar panels on A-Bomb testing site

Twenty-five square miles of Nevada desert will soon be home to the Solar Demonstration Zone, a new effort across numerous federal departments to speed development and reduce costs of large-scale solar projects. The zone is part of the DOE’s Solar Energy Technologies Program, which is trying to make solar energy cost-competitive “with grid electricity by 2015,” and to increase the amount of solar energy in the electricity market, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

The site is located on a former nuclear testing site in Nevada. Its selection was announced on July 8 at a ceremony attended by Nevada Sen. Harry Reid (D), Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu, and U.S. Department of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. The site is on land owned by the interior department and is managed by the DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration.

Under the interagency agreement, the zone at the Nevada Test Site will be used to test “cutting-edge solar energy technologies,” the Department said. The site will serve as a proving ground for new solar technologies and as a bridge between development and commercialization of successful technologies.

While certain things are still up in the air, NREL said solar technologies that may be tested there are high-temperature troughs, low-cost reflectors, low-cost thermal storage, low water consuming operations, power conversion cycles, and concentrators or heliostats. The DOE is now developing public and private funding relationships to make sure the government and the demonstration-project builders each have money in the pot.

NREL explained that the Solar Demonstration Zone will have two phases. Under the first phase, new concentrated solar power technologies will be tested at smaller scales. NREL said projects in the first phase will range from a 1 megawatt (MW) dish or concentrated PV system to a 10 MW concentrated trough or tower system. The smaller demonstration projects, according to the energy department, will help to validate the technology and its cost-effectiveness and will help the demonstration projects attract conventional financing from private companies.

In the second development phase commercial-scale projects will be built based on the success of the first phase demonstrations. Second phase projects may also qualify for federal loans and incentives.

But they better get to work, five years isn’t all that long to bring new products to market.