Abengoa's PS20 solar farm will start generating clean power in January, and the company is making the final adjustments on the solar farm's massive mirrors over the next few weeks, according to the Guardian.

Once this €80m plant is inaugurated in January, it will generate 20MW of electricity, enough to power 11,000 Spanish homes.

"The radiation hitting the earth is 10,000 times the consumption of energy," reportedly said José Domíngues Abascal, chief technology officer, Abengoa, the Spanish energy company behind the plant. "There is great potential in solar energy."

The report highlighted that Abengoa has already built a smaller version of the tower technology to test that the idea works. The 11MW PS10 system has been generating electricity for almost two years. Its new design uses an area larger than 100 football pitches, with 1,255 mirrors, called heliostats, each with a collecting area of 120 sq m.

In the same report, John Loughhead, executive director of the UK Energy Research Council, said that Abenoga's tower approach at the new plant was relatively efficient "because what you're doing is concentrating a very large area of sunlight on top of a very small area so you can get very high temperatures".  He added that, given the right environment, solar towers were a credible way to make clean power. "But can you make them cheap enough, will they be reliable enough, will they have the right lifetime?"

Another difficulty for potential developers is cost. But Abascal said the price was falling as solar projects got bigger and it would match that of fossil fuel power within a decade.