Scrubbers used in thermal power plants, for instance, require limestone to capture sulphur from their exhaust.
About 600 workers have been taking unofficial action at Runcorn Thermal Power Station since Monday.
The company owns and operates wind, hydroelectric and thermal power generation facilities.
Several companies have pulled their IPOs over the past year, including solar thermal power plant builder BrightSource Energy.
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It builds biomass power plants, huge wind turbines for offshore wind farms and, as of today, concentrated solar thermal power plants.
Google has invested directly in renewable energy projects, such as the 370-megawatt Ivanpah solar thermal power plant now under construction in California.
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The Ivanpah solar tower, formally known as the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, is the largest solar thermal power facility currently under construction.
The thermal power stations require natural gas, oil and coal to operate, all of which have been rising in price in recent times.
Solar thermal power is low tech, extremely low cost to manufacture, install and use, and requires very little to no maintenance at all.
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Solar thermal power, which is the most economical form of solar power production, additionally consumes at least double the water of conventional power plants.
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Solar thermal power, however, is not currently cheaper to produce than coal, but numerous start-ups around the world are trying to reduce solar's cost.
Google said its "Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal" initiative will focus initially on solar thermal power, wind power technologies, geothermal systems and other technologies.
As a result utility providers have had to turn to thermal power stations which require oil to operate, resulting in a rise in demand.
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Now salt is back on the table as states such as California green-light big solar thermal power projects to meet ambitious renewable energy mandates.
But as its nuclear power stations have been shut, the country's electricity providers have been relying more heavily on thermal power plants to produce electricity.
He said the technology could be used to capture waste heat from a conventional 500-megawatt thermal power plant to boost electricity out by 200 megawatts.
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Underscoring the importance of such federal assistance, a partnership NRG struck with eSolar to build a series of solar thermal power plants fell apart when the Pasadena, Calif.
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It is developing giant off-shore wind turbines, biomass power plants (including projects in Florida and Washington with Duke Energy), and, with its Ausra acquisition, solar thermal power plants.
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BrightSource was founded in 2004 by American-Israeli pioneer Arnold Goldman, whose Luz International built nine solar thermal power plants in the Mojave Desert in the 1980s and 1990s.
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This was after the leak at the Fukushima nuclear plant resulted in other nuclear plants being shut, forcing it to rely on traditional thermal power stations to produce electricity.
KHIC, also widely known as Hanjung, had been in the Gulf since 1986, providing heat-recovery steam generators for the Jebel Ali thermal power plant in the United Arab Emirates.
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Goldwind, Coda, and the Thermal Power Research Institute are hybrids of Western design and Chinese production, and no nation has yet mastered both the invention and the low-cost manufacturing of clean technology.
The solar thermal power plant business is all about big: Square miles of mirrors in the desert that surround 600-foot-tall towers to generate massive megawatts of electricity for multibillion- dollar price tags.
Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) said its "Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal" initiative will focus initially on solar thermal power, wind power technologies, geothermal systems and other technologies.
The government will introduce emission limits in 47 areas in 19 provinces and regions against six "heaviest" polluting industries, including thermal power, iron and steel, petrochemical and cement factories, Economic Information Daily reports.
Developers in California often size their projects at 49.9 megawatts to avoid the licensing process by the California Energy Commission, which oversees thermal power plants with 50 megawatts of annual capacity or more.
Solar One, which went online in June, is the first solar thermal power plant built in 16 years and produces 64 megawatts of electricity during the peak midday hours, enough to power 14, 000 Nevada homes.
There are many nontrivial ancillary challenges too, especially the secondary procedure of actually getting the energy out of the reactor into a useful form, i.e. heat to drive steam-turbines as with all other kinds of thermal power stations, to generate electricity.
NextEra Energy Chief Executive Lewis Hay told me last week over breakfast that he had higher hopes for solar photovoltaic (PV) power than for solar thermal power because the prices of solar PV panels were falling so extraordinarily fast.
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Tellingly, about two-thirds of bids for solar energy contracts last year (by electricity generated) were for photovoltaic projects and only a third were for solar thermal power plants, which deploy vast arrays of mirrors to heat liquids and produce steam to drive an electricity-generating turbine.
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