First Commercial Solar Tower to Start in Spain

First Plant in Spanish Solar Park Nears Start
Reuters via Eco-Business Channel, February 27, 2006

An 11 MW solar tower in southern Spain is finished and could start producing electricity in April, its owner Abengoa said on Tuesday. ...

Construction of a second 20 MW tower started last year. Both use mirrors to concentrate the sun's rays onto the top of a 100 meter (300 foot) tower where they produce steam to drive a turbine.

Santiago Seage, managing director of Abengoa's solar division, said it was the first commercial plant in the world to use this technology.

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This is the first part of a major 300 megawatt (MW) solar power operation, which will include two more 50 MW plants using a different, parabolic trough system, technology, which also form part of the solar park and and are due to get going during 2007.

"Thermosolar energy now provides solutions at reasonable costs, and allows storage, in places where there is enough solar potential," Seage said during a presentation to analysts.

Seage said the cost of the entire solar platform will be 1.2 billion euros ($1.6 billion), or 4 million euros a MW. That compares with a cost of around 1.2 million euros a MW for wind power in Spain and around 0.5 million a MW for new combined cycle gas generation plants.

"Costs will come down. In five to seven years thermosolar costs should equal fossil fuel generation costs," he said. Fossil fuel costs were likely to rise, he added

This technology has been around for quite a few years and it is good to see it is getting a try on a commercial basis. See this post for a description of the technology and this post for an update on the technology.

Comments

[Mike@HCVN]

Anyone know where the break-even point is on the solar tower? The solar tower has free fuel, but a high up-front cost versus the combined cycle gas plants that have low up-front costs but higher fuel costs.

Mike

[Paul Dietz]

Anyone know where the break-even point is on the solar tower?

I vaguely recall seeing a figure of 100 MW, but that was years ago and the underlying assumptions have no doubt changed some.

One interesting possibility for using high concentration towers of this kind is in a thermochemical hydrogen system, btw. There are some water splitting cycles in which, as part of the cycle, a metal oxide is reduced at very high temperature, liberating some or all of its oxygen as O2. This would be done with a solar tower by dropping pellets of the oxide through the focus, where they would be heated to very high temperature for a brief period.

[Stephen Boulet]

I don't think that cost per peak power is a great metric. Cost per MW times the capacity factor would be more relevant.

Stephen

[Carl Hage]

As Stephen mentions, $5/W for Solar tower, vs $1.50/W for wind, vs $.65/W gas is pretty meaningless measuring "rated power". What really matters is the $/KW-year in construction cost, or $/KWh including capital+fuel+maintenance. Unfortunately, it's rare to see measures in KWh (average or whatever) vs KW-peak, so almost all these are bogus.

It's interesting to compare this approach vs the Stirling Energy Systems solar dish: a 1MW demo was supposed to complete spring 2007, then a 300+500MW solar farm near Los Angeles and San Diego. No prices given and no news for quite some time-- at least what I could find.

[Buddy Ebsen]

I believe the links at the end are to a different 'solar tower' technology. The article refers to a mirror array concentrating sun on the top of the tower, the other two links refer to a 'greenhouse' type setup where the sun heats air which is forced up the tower chimney, powering several wind turbines.