As you drive across the plains, you’ll sometimes see what appears to be a totem surrounded by crowds of worshipers. It’s not very common, but it has great potential. Renewable energy: Solar thermal power plant.
Surrounded by thousands of mirrors, technically called heliostats, they concentrate heat to a single point, achieving temperatures in excess of 1000 degrees Celsius. This heat is used to warm the salt-based liquid and, once liquefied, is pumped into a heat exchanger. Once inside that sediment, it transfers heat to the water, creating steam that powers a turbine. Most of these plants are based on simple technologies such as steam turbines, but finding the optimal settings and materials is a real engineering challenge. Efficiency is therefore still a pending issue.
Among the currently available alternatives, including parabolic trough concentrators and Stirling disks, central tower solar plant is still the most promising technology.Photon innovative technology projects Joint development with ACCIONA Industrial could take the optimization of current systems one step further.
PHOTON’s aim is to increase the efficiency of these solar power plants by 10-15%, with facilities providing 50 MW to 150 MW of electrical output.The latter proves to be truly revolutionary as the main problem with this technology Lack of scalability. This is because the heliostats are located far from the main tower and therefore have high energy losses. One of the main development areas of the project is therefore the improvement of the heliostat. Hybrid wireless solar power generation systemIn this way, each heliostat is able to self-regulate using its own energy. The new reflector system is expected to be lighter and easier to install as it does not require cables or foundations.Currently half of the development cost solar thermal power plant Go to the heliostat. Improvements in these components will therefore improve the profitability of these projects.
another goal of photon The goal is to develop an optimized central tower model by satisfying these requirements: to obtain the same energy output with a smaller receptor (by reducing the exposed surface and cost of the receptor), or to reduce the cost of the current receptor. Increases energy output while maintaining body size.
Besides ACCIONA Industrial, the project “PHOTON: High performance solar thermal power plant based on hybrid photovoltaic heliostat and tailor-made collector” project includes Tewer (Spain), Aalborg CSP (Denmark), Applied Research Institute F (Lithuania), etc. has major partners in ) and Modern E-Technologies (Lithuania). The EUREKA network and the European Commission, as well as Spain’s CDTI (Industrial Technology Development Center), are funding his PHOTON with a budget of €2 million.of new prototype It will enter the testing phase by the second half of 2019.
ACCIONA solar thermal around the world
ACCIONA Industrial is currently working with Abengoa to build the 100 MW Cerro Dominador project, the first solar thermal power plant in Latin America. ACCIONA Industrial is parabolic trough plant In Kathu (South Africa) for Engie in partnership with Sener. Together with the already completed plants in Bokpoort (South Africa) and Noor I (Morocco), this makes him one of the latest thermal solar power plants.
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