The Solar Total Energy Project (STEP) was the world's first and largest solar thermal cogeneration project having an industrial application. Built and operated during the 1980s in

Coweta County, Georgia Coweta County is a county located in the west central portion of the U.S. state of Georgia. It is part of Metro Atlanta. As of the 2020 census, the population was 146,158. The county seat is Newnan. Coweta County is included in the Atlanta- ...

, STEP used solar energy to provide electricity and process heat to a manufacturing facility. Developed as part of the National Solar Thermal Energy Program, which was instituted after the oil crises of the 1970s, STEP was jointly financed by the

United States Department of Energy The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government that oversees U.S. national energy policy and manages the research and development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons in the United Stat ...

and Georgia Power to advance development of nonconventional renewable energy technology. The objective was to design, construct, operate and evaluate a solar thermal energy system that could provide electrical power,

process steam A process is a series or set of activities that interact to produce a result; it may occur once-only or be recurrent or periodic. Things called a process include: Business and management *Business process, activities that produce a specific se ...

and absorption air conditioning to an adjacent knitwear factory.

Project history

In 1977, DoE selected a joint proposal by Georgia Power and the

Westinghouse Advanced Energy Systems Division Westinghouse Advanced Energy Systems Division (AESD) was a research and development facility for nonconventional renewable energy systems, in the small town of Large, Pennsylvania, Large in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania SA The site is on the ...

from a field of 16 competitors from 14 states for STEP's site and commercial application. Design work was completed between 1978 and 1980 under DoE sponsorship (with Georgia Power cost-sharing support) through the construction and test operations phases. The project was formally dedicated and began test operations i
May 1982
Georgia Power assumed full responsibility for STEP's commercial operation in 1984 and continued the project beyond 1987. The project was conceived by Edward J. Ney, a Westinghouse energy physicist who later became a nationally recognized expert on solar energy systems. Ney was the Project Integrator while with Westinghouse, later joining Georgia Power as Manager of Solar Operations and STEP Project Manager. He brought the involved parties into a joint-venture agreement and subsequently oversaw design, construction, test operations, commercial operations, and eventual decommissioning and disassembly of the Project.

Site

The site for the five-plus acre project was Solar Circle, along Amlajack Boulevard, in a commercial park within the former planned community of Shenandoah, Georgia, now part of the city of

Newnan Newnan is a city in Metro Atlanta and the county seat of Coweta County, Georgia, about southwest of Atlanta. Its population was 42,549 at the 2020 census, up from 33,039 in 2010. History Newnan was established as county seat of Coweta Coun ...

. While STEP was shut down and dismantled by 1991, the site of the collector field is still visible from the air, albeit with mature pine trees growing through the crumbling pavement within the still-fenced enclosure. The overall site includes an education center at 7 Solar Circle, between the former collector field and Amlajack Blvd. The facility, known as the

University of West Georgia The University of West Georgia is a public university in Carrollton, Georgia. The university offers a satellite campus in Newnan, Georgia, select classes at its Douglasville Center, and off-campus Museum Studies classes at the Atlanta History Ce ...

Newnan Center, accommodates classes in a range of curricula.

Industrial application

The industrial application for the project was a knitwear factory operated by Bleyle of America Inc. STEP provided a large part of the electricity for the facility, displacing fossil fuels normally used to generate power to run the factory. STEP also provided process heat for absorption air conditioning within the building, as well as steam (downstream from the turbine) for pressing the knitwear products. The building was designed with a series of features for energy efficiency, including reduced height to minimize wall area and interior volume, a 4-ft insulating earthen berm around the building, north-south orientation, heavily insulated roof and walls, high-efficiency fluorescent lighting, energy-efficient production equipment, and an air conditioning system with an economizer cycle. According to Georgia Power, which monitored the facility's energy requirements as part of the STEP design process, energy conserving features alone reduced the factory's energy consumption by 46 percent. STEP was designed according to electrical, air conditioning and process steam loads already established by the knitwear factory, which began operations during STEP's design phase. These parameters, which represent the facility's relatively constant peak load profile, were used for system design.

Project history

Site

Industrial application

References

Further reading