Solar power plant to be built near Kingman

PHOENIX - A Spanish company announced plans Monday to build a solar power plant in northwest Arizona that could power 70,000 homes. The solar concentrator operation to be built near Kingman would be the first U.S. operation for Albiasa Corp.

The firm is the U.S. subsidiary of Albiasa Solar which operates photovoltaic generators in Europe.

Company officials say the 200 megawatt plant will create up to 2,000 construction jobs with more than 100 permanent positions.

This is the second major project of its type planned for Arizona.

Last year, Abengoa Solar, also from Spain, rolled out plans for a 280 megawatt plant near Gila Bend.

The moves come as privately utilities face a deadline imposed by the Arizona Corporation Commission to produce 15 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2025. Abengoa already has a contract with Arizona Public Service, the state's largest utility, to purchase all the power produced to comply with the mandate.

Albert Fong, chief project engineer for the Albiasa project, said there is no specific customer at this point for the $1 billion Kingman plant, at least none his company wanted to talk about publicly. But Fong said he believes there will be sufficient demand for solar to ensure a need for what the plant will generate.

Fong said, Albiasa already is planning similar operations elsewhere in the desert Southwest.

The desert provides an ideal venue for the technology which uses parabolic mirrors to superheat a special fluid pumped through pipes. That fluid, in turn, heats water to steam which drives the generators that produce electricity.

Fong said the site chosen has the right to 14,000 acre feet of water, which is more than 4.5 billion gallons. He said the plant would use only a "small percentage'' of that water, and the amount is far less than what would be pumped if someone decided to do farming on the site.

The plant also will have a natural gas backup system. But Fong said this isn't so much to generate electricity as to keep the transfer fluid used in the pipes from freezing.

In fact, Fong said the system envisioned actually will be able to generate electricity after the peak solar hours. That's because it will store the heat generated when the sun is the highest in molten salt, a move he said will allow the plant to continue generating electricity during the summer peak use hours after 4 p.m.

Company officials said the Kingman site was chosen not only because of the sunlight but because of its proximity to transmission lines to move the power to customers.