Across 500 acres just north of West Palm Beach, the FPL Group is building the world’s second-largest solar thermal plant, with 190,000 mirrors:
But that is not its real novelty. The solar array is being grafted onto the back of the nation’s largest fossil-fuel power plant, fired by natural gas. It is an experiment in whether conventional power generation can be married with renewable power in a way that lowers costs and spares the environment.
This is (almost) exactly what I was discussing with respect to wind power recently. An intermittent alternative-energy plant can produce energy at near-zero marginal cost, but it can’t guarantee energy when it’s needed, while a natural gas plant can’t produce free energy, but it can produce energy right when it’s needed. (At least solar-thermal generation is naturally correlated with when people demand energy to run their air conditioners.)
Under the same ownership, I suspect we’ll see that a