Gemasolar power plant inaugurated

King of Spain Juan Carlos I and His Highness General Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahant, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, have inaugurated the new solar power plant Gemasolar in Fuentes Andalucía, Spain.

Torresol Energy, a joint venture between Masdar, Abu Dhabi’s renewable energy company, and SENER, a leading Spanish engineering and construction firm, own the Gemasolar plant. The plant is the first commercial plant in the world to use molten salt thermal storage in a central tower configuration with a heliostat field.

Gemasolar is a revolution in the CSP sector, and its commercial operation is expected to lead the way for other central tower plants with molten salt receiver technology, an efficient system that improves the dispatchability of electric power from renewable sources.

Gemasolar is a high temperature solar plant, that can reach operating temperatures of over 500°C, much higher than plants with parabolic trough technology, as it does not require oil, but rather directly uses molten salt as a transfer fluid. These higher temperatures in turn generate hotter, pressurised steam in the turbine, which significantly increases 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. Thus, Gemasolar, with its 19.9 MW nameplate capacity, can supply electricity to a population of 27,500 households in the South of Spain. It is expected that Gemasolar will produce a net total of over 110 GWhe per year by operating for a total of 6,450 hours a year at full capacity.

This annual production of Gemasolar (110GWhe) is the equivalent of the energy generated in a conventional thermal plant burning 89,000 tons of lignite or the converted energy of 217,000 oil barrels. Therefore, the plant is expected to save more than 30,000 tonnes of CO₂ emission a year.

Read the article online at: https://www.oilfieldtechnology.com/drilling-and-production/07102011/gemasolar_power_plant_inaugurated/