Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Solar Energy in Spain

Continued from Page 2

One of SENER’s innovations in this field was the development of new simulation software, called SENSOL, that takes into account all the parameters necessary to build a solar plant, determining the production costs and the appropriate dimension for that plant. This technology has also been used outside the country; the Japanese Institute of Technology purchased SENER’s services to determine the best dimension of a solar plant they wanted to develop.

Andasol is SENER’s first solar thermal site, though they’ve already broken ground on another site nearby, and a third is in the planning process for a location in the northern part of country.

The company has run into hurdles in building this facility, the first major parabolic trough system in Spain. “There have been a lot of challenges,” says Nora Castañeda, engineer in charge of the site’s construction, laughing. “We can begin with the design itself. It was difficult to find the right manufacturers, because there are so few suppliers of the parts. We had to learn how to assemble a solar field like this in a short time. Once we solved one problem, another appeared.”

But as quickly as problems have appeared, she says, the staff worked hard to find solutions. They built an assembly plant on-site and worked with Spanish construction companies to create appropriate jigs with laser trackers for building the extremely precise structure for the parabolic mirrors and then transporting the system to the field without altering the precision. Castañeda says she expects that the lessons learned from Andasol 1 will help drive down the cost of constructing future systems. Other companies are part of this rising trend: the Spanish utility giant Iberdrola recently announced plans for 10 parabolic trough systems across the country.

Advancing the Field
Eduardo Zarza is having a great day. In fact, he’s having a great year. With a barely suppressed grin, the director of concentrating solar research tells the story of how the Solar Research Center in Almería (PSA in Spanish) has gone from a research outpost, as he and the other researchers toiled away on solar thermal power for 25 years, to an international superstar – at least in certain circles – with nearly daily visits from companies and scientists from around the world.

Says Zarza, “Every week we have several companies coming to see the facilities to get information because they’re interested in investing in solar thermal plants. The situation has changed dramatically in only two years.”

The center, surrounded by dusty rose-colored mountains dotted with green, lies in a particularly dry area of the region, with only twenty percent of Andalusia’s average rainfall. Back in the 1970s, with the pressure of lack of access to oil at the heels of western countries, a consortium of nine countries - eight European and the US - signed an agreement to investigate two solar concentrating technologies: one of a parabolic trough, and the other with a central receiver (such as Solúcar’s tower receiver).

In 1985, the test results were in: both technologies were commercially feasible, but costs were too high.

Since then, the center has continued testing and refining the technology, working with universities and countries around the world. Though there are other research centers with departments dedicated to concentrated solar power,  PSA is the largest such research center in the world.

The center is one of two Spanish research centers that operate as part of what’s known as CIEMAT (the other, near Madrid, focuses on wind and biomass). Sixty percent of the budget comes from the government, while the other forty comes from grants and industry partnership. Lack of funds threatened the center’s operations several times, and it nearly closed.

A rapidly growing interest in renewables, government incentives to promote energy alternatives, and the rising cost of oil and gas placed PSA in the perfect position to take a leading role in the development of renewable energy technologies. After decades of working in the literal and figurative desert, Zarza finds himself at the center of a renaissance, as the technology is finally, once again, entering the marketplace – and the center’s activities appears secure and flourishing.

“We’re very happy with the situation now,” says Zarza. “In the past few people wanted to learn about our systems – now everybody wants to.