First plant in Spanish solar park nears start
Feb 27, 2007
Source: Reuters News
MADRID (Reuters) – The first part of a major 300 megawatt (MW) solar power operation in southern Spain is finished and could start producing electricity in April, its owner Abengoa said on Tuesday. The first of two solar thermal power plants is finished and now being prepared for production, with a capacity of 11 MW.
Construction of a second tower, with 20 MW of potential, 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.
Work on two more 50 MW plants, which also form part of the solar park and use a different parabolic trough system technology, is due to get going during 2007. 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.
“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. In practice this technology is limited to sunny places like southern Europe, North Africa, parts of the United States or the Middle East.
“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. “Cheap energy is a thing of the past. It has to reflect the oil price and the cost of carbon emissions.”