Nevada Solar One

I can only think of one word for this picture....Beautiful.
It's only an artist's impression drawn up before the project started, but as of June 2007, it is completed, up and running. It sprawls across 1,300,000 square metres of grass land in Boulder City 40km south of Las Vegas. It's the biggest plant of a clean energy source built to date and uses the sun's energy to heat up liquid which when turned to steam, powers an existing traditonal power plant. I'll give you the link to an original (and slightly more knowledgable!) article right after i've rattled off a few stats at you, and they are some big stats!

OK:

• 76km of parabolic cylinder concentrators
• Almost 219,000 mirrors reflecting tracked heat into...
• 18,000 receiver tubes
• 1,500,000 work hours to construct
• 16 months to build

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