An Orlando Sentinel review of production data on file with state regulators reveals that, during its first year of operation, the Florida Power & Light Co. solar plant in Martin County has not come close to producing enough electricity to meet the demand of 11,000 homes — the output that FPL continues to claim for its one-of-a-kind facility.
Instead, it generated enough power last year for only 2,056 homes, according to the Sentinel's analysis of monthly reports filed by FPL with the Florida Public Service Commission.
Company officials said the lagging performance was caused by the disastrous spill of an industrial fluid used to conduct heat, outages at an interconnected power plant, and ongoing difficulties in responding to swings in production between sunny and cloudy skies.
"In doing all of your engineering, you go through all of your hypothesis, but when you're actually doing it for the first time, it does present some challenges," said Buck Martinez, FPL's senior director of project development. "The beauty of it is, it [recently] hit 68 and 69 megawatts on back-to-back days. I think we are getting a lot of the kinks out."
Designed to make 75 megawatts of electricity, the Martin Next Generation Solar Energy Center is markedly different from most solar plants.
Florida utilities, including FPL, generally operate systems that use vast assemblies of "photovoltaic" panels that produce electricity when exposed to sunlight. But the Martin plant has a unique "hybrid" design, with 190,000 mirrors erected on 500 acres in such a way that they concentrate the sun's rays to heat an industrial fluid to 740 degrees. That fluid is then harnessed to produce steam, which is then piped to an adjoining, older and much larger electric plant — powered by natural gas — to help spin its generator.
Mirror-based solar plants have been in use for decades; a sister company of FPL operates and co-owns a 310-megawatt system in California. But the Southwestern U.S., often cloudless, is considered ideal for mirror systems, while Florida's wetter weather is more challenging.
FPL, the state's largest utility, contends that feeding the solar plant's steam into the larger, existing electric plant next door reduced the solar plant's cost enough to justify its construction in a state where mirror systems are unproven.
But the piggybacking of the two plants has been difficult to manage, said Martinez, who characterized its operation so far as marred by "learning-curve" issues rather than any flaws in the technology.
"I think we're actually getting over the hump on some of that," Martinez said. "We're cautiously optimistic. We think it's going to be great technology."
In 2008, when the Public Service Commission approved FPL's request to bill customers to cover the cost of the plant, the agency established little in the way of performance standards for its operation. FPL has about a half-million customers in Central Florida, mostly in Brevard and Volusia counties.
The Martin system, built to last 50 years, cost $398 million, or $75 million less than budgeted, according to the utility.
J.R. Kelly of the Office of Public Counsel, the state's legislatively created advocate for utility customers, said there is no precedent for evaluating whether a utility or its customers should bear the cost of a solar plant's poor performance.
"We're going to study this," Kelly said.
Work began on the Martin plant in 2008 and was completed in late 2010. Its peak output was last March, when Gov. Rick Scott spoke at the plant's dedication ceremony.
"It's great to see this, and it's great to see that the cost of solar is coming down as compared to fossil fuel," Scott said.
Power production then dropped off dramatically; the plant barely ran in June and was shut down in July, August, October and December.
The PSC asked FPL to explain why the output of electricity was "relatively low" during the first seven months of 2011.
Among its responses, FPL said that an accident had occurred in June when the industrial fluid, which circulates through the mirrored array, became contaminated with water that turned into steam and burst a valve.
According to an FPL report filed with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, an estimated 46,000 gallons of fluid sprayed into the air for two hours, raining down on 25 acres of power-plant property. The fluid, while not highly hazardous to people, is extremely toxic to fish and aquatic organisms, and the plant overlooks the eastern shore of Lake Okeechobee, Florida's largest lake.
Crews worked around the clock through June and maintained extended shifts in July to remove 94,200 gallons of contaminated water and 27,253 tons — or more than 1,000 truckloads — of soil, asphalt, gravel and vegetation.
Critics of solar power say it's simply too expensive. But utilities, such those serving the Orlando and Jacksonville areas, contend that they must learn how to integrate solar power into their grids because natural gas and coal, which now fuel most power plants, could become costly because of market pressures or problematic because of new environmental regulations.
Solar proponents say the Martin plant's rough start was a hiccup.
"That is not a statement about where the industry is," said Susan Glickman, a lobbyist for the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. "Solar is booming and, ultimately, we need a combination of utility projects as well as solar panels on rooftops."
SOURCE: http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-03-10/news/os-fpl-solar-electricity-dud-20120310_1_solar-plants-fpl-power-plant
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