Dignitaries from Spain and the United Arab Emirates have officially inaugurated an advanced, 17 MW concentrating solar power plant in Spain’s Andalucia region.
The king of Spain, Juan Carlos I, and general Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, led the ceremony celebrating the successful completion of the Gemasolar project.
Gemasolar is the first CSP project in the world to demonstrate the commercial-scale use of central tower receiver technology and heliostat field coupled with a molten salt heat storage system.
It is also the first project to be developed by Torresol Energy, a joint venture between Masdar of Abu Dhabi and Spain’s Sener. President of Torresol Energy, Enrique Sendagorta, said that the project was the “first decisive step” in making Torresol a global company.
He added that Gemasolar deomstrated three important technological advances in the CSP field: thermal storage, an increase in thermoelectric efficiency, and cost reductions. The thermal storage system makes it possible for Gemasolar to generate energy at night and during cloudy conditions.
CEO of Masdar, Dr Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, said that the benefits of Gemasolar would extend “beyond new technology to economic and social development”.
Torresol hopes that Gemasolar will pave the way for the development of other CSP plants using central tower receiver technology and thermal storage. It is a high temperature solar plant that can reach operating temperatures of over 500°C, much higher than plants with parabolic trough technology. These higher temperatures in turn generate pressurised steam in the turbine, at a temperature high enough to significantly increase the plant's efficiency.
The salt storage capacity enables the plant to supply energy to the grid based on demand, regardless of whether there is solar radiation. It is expected that Gemasolar will produce a net total of over 110 GWhe per year by operating for a total of 6450 hours a year at full capacity.
This annual production of Gemasolar is the equivalent of the energy generated in a conventional thermal plant burning 89 000 tons of lignite and is expected therefore to save more than 30 000 tonne per year of CO2 emissions.
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