Editorial: Solar energy has potential for Nevada

Monday, Dec. 27, 2004 | 9:11 a.m.

There is good news for Nevada on the solar energy front. Sandia National Laboratories has announced that tests at its research facility in New Mexico show that energy from the sun can be produced far more cheaply than energy from natural gas. The potential for Nevada, which has the necessary open land and ideal sun, is endless.

A movement for massive solar farms in Southern Nevada sprang up in the early 1990s. The plan then was to arrange thousands of solar collectors, resembling gigantic satellite dishes, in the desert and use the power from the sun to separate hydrogen from water. Proponents, including Sen. Harry Reid, foresaw the day when hydrogen, not oil, would be the main source of energy. While they were right in sensing that inevitability, researchers began favoring other methods of producing hydrogen.

That was partly because the cost then of generating solar energy was not competitive with the cost of producing energy from other sources. Yet research continued and last month Sandia announced that it now believes "solar farms" -- featuring as many as 20,000 solar dishes -- could produce energy at a far lower price than natural gas. The mission of the farms would be different. Instead of producing hydrogen, they would produce energy for those peak periods when coal and nuclear plants cannot meet the demand.

Currently, energy from natural gas is used during those peak periods. But that energy costs anywhere from 10 cents to above 30 cents per kilowatt hour. Sandia officials have announced now, however, that they believe they can build solar farms that could provide energy in sufficient quantity for those peak periods at about 6 cents per kilowatt hour.

The technology for producing solar energy at this highly competitive rate should be perfected in about three years. Nevada should use this time to investigate the potential of establishing the solar farms here. The state could also be home to the manufacturing plants that would produce the thousands of dish-shaped collectors that would be needed, which individually stand 3 stories tall. The state has already committed itself to clean energy by requiring that Sierra Pacific, parent company of Nevada Power, provide 15 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2013. A deal to set up solar farms, perhaps at the Nevada Test Site, would be the ultimate commitment.