May 2, 2008

Biggest Clean-Energy Projects In The World

In a depiction of some of the world’s largest energy projects, Forbes.com takes readers to Bahrain, where, a few weeks ago, three 100-foot-wide propellers began turning between the two towers of the recently completed World Trade Center building there.

The world’s first wind turbine-integrated skyscraper’s wing shape funnels the shore winds between the 54-story buildings to provide more energy for the turbines, which are expected to provide more than 10 percent of the building’s energy.

Forbes.com says it has identified the “biggest and boldest” clean energy projects that have emerged on a scale never seen before.

Also among them:

• California’s Mojave Desert is rapidly filling up with solar-thermal power plants.
• Solel Solar Systems, an Israeli solar-thermal company, plans to string 1.2 million mirrors in large arrays over nine square miles of California’s southeastern desert. The plant will use parabolic 3- by 4-foot mirrors developed by Solel to convert the sun’s heat into steam that powers turbines.
• In an effort to tap roughly 25 percent of the entire European Union’s tidal power potential and 10 percent of its wave energy potential, Scotland-based wave energy company Scottish Power plans to build the world’s largest wave-energy farm off the coast of Orkney Island, from which Scotland could produce more than 1,300 megawatts of electricity by 2020, enough to power a city the size of Seattle.
• The London Array project plans to erect a constellation of more than 340 wind turbines in the outer Thames Estuary, roughly seven miles off the Kent Coast. The world’s largest offshore wind farm when completed, Array will generate more electricity than the largest offshore farm operational today — Denmark’s Middelgrunden offshore wind farm.
• Texas oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens also plans to build the world’s largest wind farm. The farm’s 2,700 wind turbines, planned to stretch across four counties in the Texas panhandle, will be able to power 1 million homes when construction ends.

In Pictures: The World’s Biggest Clean Energy Projects

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