A Mirror a Minute: The Ivanpah Solar Farm Kicks Into High Gear
From nine stories up the 450 foot tower at the Ivanpah solar thermal farm, the tens of thousands of mirrors look like metallic chiclets, and the workers like Doozers walking amongst them. The first of its kind solar site is in a full construction boom.
GigaOM
About 45 minutes south of Las Vegas on Interstate 15 — past miles of sprawling desert, a few aging casinos, and the Nevada, California border — sits an engineering and technology marvel that is months from offering a very real solution to helping fight climate change. This is Ivanpah, one of the largest solar thermal farms in the world, which when switched on in 2013, will use 170,000 mirrors to concentrate sunlight onto three massive towers to produce solar electricity.
On a visit on Monday, BrightSource — the solar tech company behind the plant — construction giant Bechtel, and the largest owner of the project, NRG Energy, welcomed a group of reporters onto the site to check out just how close Ivanpah is to producing electricity. The solar team says the construction on the entire 3,600 acre site is about half way complete, and the site has now moved into a peak construction phase with 2,100 workers installing about one mirror a minute onto poles in the desert ground.
