New projects worldwide confirm Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) is moving up the agenda

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By Dave Elliott

The big new thing in the renewables field is Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) - with focused solar heat from troughs, mirrors or dishes used to raise steam for power generation. There have been some large solar power tower projects before, in the USA and Italy, but now it is looking more economic.

Spain has just commissioned an 11MW CSP array near Seville and further CSP projects are planned in the area - with a total of 300MW expected. And in the USA, there’s the new 64MW Nevada Solar One solar trough system, with 760 parabolic cylinder concentrators, expected to produce 134 GWh pa. And there are plans for CSP units in Morocco and Algeria. One idea is to send power from N Africa by undersea High-Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) grids to the EU. For example, the 150MW Algerian project will be linked via a 3000km HVDC cable via Sicily and thence to Germany. At present plants are for hybrid solar-gas fired plants, with the gas providing power at night using the same turbo-generator: the Moroccan project, at Aïn Béni Mathar, is rated at around 470MW, but only 20 MW of this will be solar. However, for the next phase, the CSP enthusiasts look to using large heat stores to enable a larger proportion to be just from solar.

China has a huge CSP potential: there are plans to build a 50 MW pilot CSP plant at Ordos in the Mongolia Autonomous region to the north of China. As a follow up, Solar Millennium AG, a Germany-based solar energy technology company, is working with a Chinese counterpart on a feasibility study for a £2.5bn 1,000 MW project for development there by 2020 (see http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/data/germany.html).

The table below shows existing or planned CSP power stations around the world.