All generators which use super heated steam need condensers but you can use air cooled condensers.The tech has improved a lot recently. They look like this. 
In the first and third pictures above you can see the green trailor-looking buildings with the pipes running into/out of them.
Those are the condensers that help cool/recirculate the water.
Only a couple billion dollars for a 10% capacity eyesore. Only in government. As long as treehuggers sleep good though. That’s what’s important.
I thought plants like this used a sodium compound that liquified at high temp and flowed to heat exchangers to make the steam. The sodium can get so hot, retain its heat and with a large enough volume of sodium, store enough energy to create power thru the night.
It could probably be re-purposed as a pretty impressive telescope.
And this power plant will pay for itself in....what? A million years?
What a crock of Libtard diaper-fillings.
Okay guys — you’ve had your rest — here it comes again — just like yesterday — all together now focus — focus — focus — you guys over on the right what are you looking at — c’mon focus — focus — focus — awwww dam birds.
And what is the costs of electricity to the consumer compared to carbon based energy?
According to U.S. Energy Information Administration data, the cost of building and operating a new solar thermal power plant over its lifetime is greater than generating natural gas, coal or nuclear power. It costs a conventional coal plant $100, on average, to produce a megawatt-hour of power, but that figure is $261 for solar thermal power, according to 2011 estimates. The figures do not account for incentives such as state or federal tax credits that can impact the cost.
world’s largest bird cooker
http://greencorruption.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-rat-in-recovery-and-gang-of-ten.html#.Uv2rRGJdW6I
The RAT in the Recovery
What most don’t know, not even the majority of Congress, is that there was a RAT hidden deep inside the 1,073-page stimulus bill, which was drafted by the Obama transition team and congressional aides.
Entitled the Obama-Biden Transition Project, it employed approximately 400 people and it was comprised of Obama bundlers and campaign contributors as well as lobbyist and those that operate inside Washington’s egregious revolving door. In the mix was a squadron of Center for American Progress (CAP) experts, the billionaire George Soros-funded liberal think tank. Within this transition group, we also find many that eventually operated inside this clean-energy scheme, of which I’ll highlight later.
“From the first debates over the stimulus bill, the White House has promised unprecedented levels of transparency and accountability,” noted U.S. News in 2009, even appointing Vice President Joe Biden as the nation’s stimulus spending cop, Stimulus Sheriff Joe, who ultimately went MIA.
Quite the contrary, and it all started when Team Obama starting planning their trillion-dollar spending spree, because “deep inside” the 2009 Recovery Act was a RAT, an attempt to suppress potential investigations, and only a few news outlets caught it in February of 2009: the Washington Post and the Washington Examiner.
As legislation was moving at rapid speed, and Congress continually failed to read the bills, the Obama administration had placed a “far-reaching and potentially dangerous provision.” The creation of the RAT Board (Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board) was supposed to be “an oversight panel headed by a White House nominee.”
The controversial provision emerged in a January 2009 draft of the bill prepared by Obama’s transition team officials and members of the House Appropriations Committee, of which at that time it was labeled by the White House as “critical to prevent waste and corruption.” This RAT board gave them the authority to ask, “That an inspector general conduct or refrain from conducting an audit or investigation.”
Did you get that? An Obama appointee could dictate what to investigate and what investigations they wanted to squash.
A modern nuclear power plant that takes up about as much space as the buildings surrounding just one of those towers would produce much more energy, cause much less environmental destruction, and look a whole lot better.
None of the pictures shown do it justice. It is pretty wild looking in person.
Corporate idiocy.
Why not solar panels with fewer moving parts..
much less maintenance fewer personnel.. less cost..
no bird problem.. much simpler system.. no water..
Gives me an idea - install solar/light collectors near all the lights in my home to recoup some of the energy. I figure that with a government grant and leaving all the lights on, I can regenerate about .00057% of my power at a cost of about 270 times the original power. Since it’s a government grant, it will basically be free energy.....