It is then run back through the heat exchanger to drive the steam turbine when needed.
Heat from the sun boils water to run a steam turbine generator, which delivers power to the grid.
Legge notes that newer fossil fuel plants use the heat that was once wasted to turn an extra steam turbine, a process known as combined cycle.
BrightSource generates electricity using an approach called concentrated solar power, in which computer-controlled mirrors, known as heliostats, focus the sun's heat to boil water and turn a steam turbine.
These could be among the first full-scale power plants in the nation to turn powdered coal into a synthetic natural gas that is burned in a gas turbine whose exhaust gas powers a steam turbine.
West paints other trains, including the Steam, Gas turbine, Electric, as well as first through sixth Generation Diesel Electric Locomotives.
Areva bought the Mountain View, Calif. company Ausra, a company that has developed a system of reflectors that concentrates and directs sunlight to create steam and spin a turbine.
The oil, which glows purplish when hot, flows to an adjacent power plant, where it boils water into steam that runs a turbine, and is pumped back to do it all over again.
This gas is used to drive the turbine just as steam would be.
Combined-cycle gas turbines, which use hot exhaust gases from one turbine to generate steam to turn a second one, can transform 6, 800 Btu of gas into a kilowatt-hour of electricity, enough to light one lightbulb for ten hours.
The output is a hot, high-pressure mix of steam and CO2 that powers a turbine.
Geothermal power plants turn hot water into steam or vapor to run a turbine and generate electricity, after which the water is injected back into the underground geothermal reservoir.
To supply the extra juice, utilities turn on inefficient single-cycle gas turbines, which turn 25% of the fuel's energy into electricity, as opposed to 45% for combined-cycle plants that use turbine exhaust to make steam to run a second generator.
The heat released by the molten salt is used to create steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine.
From there the trash is fed into three boilers that burn at 2, 000 degrees, heating water to create steam that spins a 60-megawatt turbine.
As solar panel prices have plunged, developers like Solar Millennium have abandoned solar thermal technology, which uses huge mirror arrays to heat water to create steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine.
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The resulting steam drives a standard electricity-generating turbine.
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Tellingly, about two-thirds of bids for solar energy contracts last year (by electricity generated) were for photovoltaic projects and only a third were for solar thermal power plants, which deploy vast arrays of mirrors to heat liquids and produce steam to drive an electricity-generating turbine.
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Solar thermal projects deploy fields of mirrors called heliostats that focus the sun on liquid-filled boilers to create steam that drives an electricity-generating industrial turbine.
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The heated oil creates steam that drives an electricity-generating industrial turbine.
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Ivanpah is a solar concentrator project, using fields of mirrors, known as heliostats, to concentrate sunlight onto a solar receiver on top of a tower. (This project when finished will include 173, 000 heliostats.) The concentrated sunlight is used to heat water, generating steam which is used to turn a traditional turbine and generator to produce electricity.
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