Portugal leads rush into green energy

Broad fields of giant solar panels as big as houses tilt toward the sun in this torrid patch of the Iberian peninsula.

Arranged in tidy rows, like the vineyards and olive groves that quilt the typical Portuguese landscape, the panels belong to a solar power plant that comes on line this month and is due to be the world’s largest when it is completed later this year.
Portugal, one of the European Union’s least conspicuous countries, is in the vanguard of the continent’s rush to harness renewable energy. Despite its frail economy, it is one of eight EU countries whose push into clean technology has enabled a double-digit share of electricity consumption from green sources.

The EU wants clean power sources to furnish 20 percent of the bloc’s energy by 2020, up from 8.5 percent in 2005 – and the Amareleja project is at the forefront of that mission.

More than 2,500 gray-blue solar panels are being assembled over nearly 618 acres – roughly 350 soccer fields – in this town of about 3,000 people that lies in one of Europe’s hottest spots. Each panel measures 43 feet by 26 feet and weighs more than 2.2 tons. Like sunflowers the panels follow the sun, swiveling on thick metal stems. When complete, the $396 million project will provide power for some 30,000 homes.

Not far from Amareleja, a dam that will create Europe’s largest man-made lake when it fills up is already pumping electricity into the national grid. Ten other new dams are planned. On Portugal’s Atlantic coast, a pioneering wave energy project waits to be deployed within months.

San Francisco Chronicle