The wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine, but a Florida utilities company, the FPL Group, is trying a new experiment to get more out of renewable energy: The world’s largest natural gas power plant if building the world’s second largest solar power plant right on its back. If the experiment works, it should provide Floridians with more power on the hottest days of the year, reduce the amount of natural gas used and thus emissions expelled, lower the cost of expensive solar energy, and give solar a more reliable backup on cloudy days. That’s not just win-win, that’s win-win-win-win.

The New York Times reports:

The solar array is being grafted onto the back of the nation’s largest fossil-fuel power plant, fired by natural gas. It is an experiment in whether conventional power generation can be married with renewable power in a way that lowers costs and spares the environment.

This project is among a handful of innovative hybrid designs meant to use the sun’s power as an adjunct to coal or gas in producing electricity. While other solar projects already use small gas-fired turbines to provide backup power for cloudy days or at night, this is the first time that a conventional plant is being retrofitted with the latest solar technology on such an industrial scale…

The plant also serves as a real-life test on how to reduce the cost of solar power, which remains much more expensive than most other forms of electrical generation. FPL Group, the parent company of Florida Power and Light, expects to cut costs by about 20 percent compared with a stand-alone solar facility, since it does not have to build a new steam turbine or new high-power transmission lines…

Mark Brownstein, an energy and grid specialist at the Environmental Defense Fund, praised FPL’s innovative thinking. “When we talk about getting to a low-carbon, clean-energy economy,” he said, “we know there is not going to be a single technology that is going to transform the industry.”

This is the type of innovation that, if successful, could be the key to making renewable work. The Times says it will cut natural gas use by 1.3 billion cubic feet per year, or 2.75 million tons of carbon over 30 years. If my math is right, that’s only about 3% of the plant’s total natural gas use, but a 3% cut on top of the plant’s other benefits ain't nothin'. If this type of natural gas retrofitting is tied to the elimination of coal, the expansion of nuclear energy, and a Midwestern focus on wind, we might just see a different kind of sun come out. It’s certainly the type of innovation one hopes new federal policies will encourage. Very cool.