A solar plant is a type of power plant which uses the suns energy to produce power that can be used in business and domestic settings. They usually have many solar panels which all point towards the sun and the energy from the sun is captured and then converted. There are different ways of doing this as there are different designs of solar panels.

A popular design is the trough system where the rounded shape of the panel helps to focus the suns energy more intensely and it collects ion a receiver pipe. The pip has oil in it which captures the heat energy and then the hot oil is pumped to a generating station where it produces steam which is used to generate the electricity using a steam turbine. A solar power tower works differently where many mirrors focus the the suns rays towards a receiver at the top of a tower. This contains a fluid which heats up and electricity is generated using a steam turbine. Solar dish engines will use dish shaped mirrors to focus the suns energy on to a receiver which is used by an engine to generate electricity.

These are the most efficient systems. One main objection to solar plants is the amount of space they take up and the way they look. Seeing many solar panels is not something that people want to look at. They are also expensive to set up and only work well in countries which get a lot of sunshine. They do work with cloud cover but much more efficiently when there is sunshine a majority of the time. There is pressure for governments to produce more green energy and so there is a lot of experimental work taking place to try to find the best way of collecting the suns energy.