Scrubbers used in thermal power plants, for instance, require limestone to capture sulphur from their exhaust.
It builds biomass power plants, huge wind turbines for offshore wind farms and, as of today, concentrated solar thermal power plants.
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.
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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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.
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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He dreams of building gigawatt-size plants, of shipping solar thermal power to the cloudy Northeast and of using molten salt to store energy so thermal plants can power homes at night. (Nevada Solar One is only for daytime peak loads.) He envisions mirrors in space that can soak up sunlight 24 hours a day.
But without Belo Monte, Brazil would probably have to build nuclear power plants or invest in coal-fired thermal energy.
Apart from nuclear power plants, the Japanese utility has shut down thermal plants in the Tohoku and Kanto areas, also afflicted by the intensity of the massive 9.0-magnitude earthquake and ensuing tsunami.
Meanwhile, power companies such as Vattenfall Europe are working on developing cleaner thermal plants.
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.
But for the most part, large power plants cannot shutdown for just one hour as there are thermal and mechanical concerns that put the plant at risk of being damaged for doing so.
The earthquake and tsunami last year resulted in 15 of its 17 nuclear plants being closed, forcing Tepco to turn to thermal stations for power generation.
For example, the first phase of the EU Emissions Trading program, which contained several design flaws that have since been rectified, has already been found to have reduced emissions by around 100 million tonnes of CO2 mostly by forcing a shift of load from coal to gas power plants and providing an incentive for inefficient coal plants to improve the thermal efficiency of their boilers.
The rocket engine power plant runs at a 35% thermal efficiency, versus 55% for conventional gas-fired plants.
However, since Brazil switched on more gas-fired thermal plants in October, to cope with growing demand and ease the pressure on the hydroelectric power system, costs have increased significantly.
However, there lies a hindrance to the revival of domestic thermal coal demand if the U.S. Environment Protection Agency raises the bar on carbon emissions on power plants.
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