Spain has opened the world’s largest solar power station, meaning that it overtakes the US as the biggest solar generator in the world. The nation’s total solar power production, which benefits from the peninsula’s 340 days of sunshine a year is now equivalent to the output of a nuclear power station. Spain is no stranger to the harnessing of renewable energies. It has hydro-electricity plants – only china and US have built more dams – its wind power sector, like solar power, has received generous government subsidies. The new La Florida solar plant takes Spain’s solar output to 432MW, which compares with the US output of 422MW. The plant at Alvarado, Badajoz, in the west of the country, is a parabolic trough. With this method of collecting solar energy, sunlight is reflected off a parabolic mirror on to a fluid-filled tube. The heated liquid is then used heat steam to run the turbines. The mirror rotates during the day to follow the sun’s movement.

The solar farm covers 550,000 square meters (the size of another 77 soccer pitches) and produces 50MW of power. Protermosolar, the association that represents the solar energy sector, says that within a year another 600MW will have come on-stream and projects that by 2013 solar capacity will have reached 2,500 MW. The northern, thought thinly populated, region of Nabarra is already producing 75 per cent of its energy from a range of renewable including wind, solar, hydro and biomass. Spain’s wind farm now produces around 20,000MW of electricity and on one day in November they accounted for 53 percent of demand.           

Last year solar energy met 2.8 per cent of demand out of total of 12.9 percent of all available renewable. In March, the government in Madrid announced a plan to increase the renewable source to 22.7 per cent by 2020, slightly ahead of EU targets. Spain is now the fourth largest manufacturer of solar power technology in the world and both solar and wind power technology exports have become valuable earners.