Arizona Daily Star - January 20, 2010 - Tom Beal

A New York-based energy company will build a $32 million solar thermal plant at the University of Arizona's Tech Park. UA officials say it is the first step in developing a 200-acre zone devoted to solar research, manufacturing and job training.

Bell Independent Power Corp. says its "innovative technology" will produce power from the sun that is reliable and "cost-competitive with fossil fuel energy."

Key to the 5 million-watt system is a storage component that will allow it to produce electricity for several hours after the sun sets or is obscured by clouds.

Bell proposed the system to Tucson Electric Power, which has signed a contract to buy the plant's power for the next 20 years. The financial arrangement, which will use a renewable-energy tariff collected from TEP's customers, awaits approval by the Arizona Corporation Commission, which has ordered state utilities to generate 15 percent of their power from renewable sources by 2025.

The new plant at the former IBM site at South Rita Road and Interstate 10 will feed its electricity into the TEP grid - enough to power more than 1,500 homes.

Construction, expected to be completed by May 2011, will temporarily employ 75 people. Seven workers will be needed to operate the plant, according to a release from Bell, TEP, the Tech Park and Tucson Regional Economic Opportunities.

This is the first solar-power plant built by Bell, a five-year-old, alternative-energy company whose founder, Joseph M. Bell, ran a construction firm that built and operated power plants for 30 years.

Gerard C. Walter, the firm's chief financial officer, said the company has spent several years developing the Bell Energy Storage Technology that makes this plant "one of a kind."

Bell will use 45 acres of mirrored parabolic troughs to heat a network of oil-filled pipes to 750 degrees Fahrenheit. That heat will be transferred to water, producing steam to turn turbines that generate electricity.

Cooling towers will be required to recondense the water, and the site will use about 50,000 gallons a day, Walter said.

The tank of molten salt that will store heat for later use is not a new concept. What's "innovative," said Walter, is the proprietary engineering that will make this storage system work more efficiently than others.

"It's scalable," said Paul Bonavia, TEP's president and CEO. Bonavia said he expects the demonstration project to work and to be replicated on much larger scales.

Walter declined to reveal the expected cost of the power generated or TEP's contractual obligation to purchase it, as did TEP spokesman Joe Salkowski, who said the company's contract prevented disclosure.

The contract with the UA Tech Park also prevents disclosure of the lease price for the 54 acres Bell will occupy, said Bruce Wright, director of the Office of University Research Parks. "They got a very good deal," Wright said.

Land at the Tech Park is generally too valuable for solar arrays, said John Grabo, but the UA would like to put other demonstrations of solar technology, in addition to research and manufacturing facilities, on the 200 acres set aside as "Solar Zone."

Grabo, director of business development for the Tech Park, said he already has talked to a second solar-power company and a manufacturer of solar tracking devices about locating in the new zone.

Wright said the Solar Zone also will incorporate education and work-force training programs, as well as solar demonstration sites for the public.