MADRID Spain has opened the world's largest solar power station, meaning that it overtakes the US as the biggest solar generator in the world. The nation's total solar power production, which benefits from the peninsula's 340 days of sunshine a year, is now equivalent to the output of a nuclear power station.

Spain is no stranger to the harnessing of renewable energies. It has hydro-electricity plants - only China and the US have built more dams - its wind power sector, like solar power, has received generous government subsidies.

The new La Florida solar plant takes Spains solar output to 432MW, which compares with the US output of 422MW. The plant, at Alvarado, Badajoz, in the west of the country, is a parabolic trough. With this method of collecting solar energy, sunlight is reflected off a parabolic mirror on to a fluid-filled tube.

The heated liquid is then used to heat steam to run the turbines. The mirror rotates during the day to follow the sun's movement. The solar farm covers 550,000 square metres (the size of around 77 soccer pitches) and produces 50MW of power.

Protermosolar, the association that represents the solar energy sector, says that within a year another 600MW will have come on-stream and projects that by 2013 solar capacity will have reached 2,500MW.

The northern, though thinly populated, region of Navarra is already producing 75 per cent of its energy from a range of renewables, including wind, solar, hydro and biomass. Spains wind-farms now produce around 20,000MW of electricity and on one day in November they accounted for 53 pc of demand.

Last year, solar energy met 2.8 pc of demand out of a total of 12.9pc for all renewables. In March, the government in Madrid announced a plan to increase the renewable share to 22.7 pc by 2020, slightly ahead of EU targets. —Dawn/Guardian News Service