Stirling Energy takes on the solar power challenge

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http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/energy/environment/2008-01-20-solar-power_N.htm

Stirling Energy takes on the solar power challenge

By Julie Schmit, USA TODAY

ALBUQUERQUE — ...

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The dish is a prototype for 70,000 that a small Phoenix company hopes to plant on two 7,000-acre solar farms in the California desert over the next seven years.

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"They clearly have the technology. It's a matter of whether they can get the cost out," says Michael Niggli, chief operating officer of San Diego Gas & Electric, one of the customers Stirling hopes to supply.

Stirling's plans are ambitious. Skeptics, which include a co-founder who left in 2000, say the technology may be too costly to produce power at competitive rates.

Stirling's plans call for construction to begin in 2009 for two $1 billion farms on federal land in California's Mojave Desert northeast of Los Angeles and in the Imperial Valley east of San Diego. State and federal regulators still have to approve the plans.

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