Solar Energy in Spain

Spain is forging ahead with plans to construct concentrating solar energy plants, establishing the country and Spanish firms as globe leaders in the emerging field. At the same time, the number of installed photovoltaic systems is growing exponentially, and researchers continue to discover new techniques to promote and enhance solar power.

This is the seventh in an eight-component series highlighting new technologies in Spain and is produced by Technologies Review, Inc.s custom-publishing division in partnership with the Trade Commission of Spain.

From the road to the Solcar solar plant outside Seville, drivers can see what seem to be glowing white rays emanating from a tower, piercing the dry air, and alighting upon the upturned faces of the tilted mirror panels below.

Appearances, although, are deceiving: those upturned mirrors are truly tracking the sun and radiating its energy onto a blindingly white square at
the top of the tower, developing the equivalent of the power of 600 suns. That power is used to vaporize water into steam to power a turbine.

This tower plant uses concentrating solar technologies with a central receiver. Its the initial commercial central-receiver system in the world.

Spanish companies and research centers are taking the lead in the recent revival of concentrating solar energy (CSP), a sort of solar thermal energy expanses of mirrors are being assembled around the country. At the exact same time, Spanish organizations are investing in huge photovoltaic (PV) fields, as companies dramatically enhance production of PV panels and investigate the next generation of this technology.

Spain is already fourth in the globe in its use of solar power, and second in Europe, with a lot more than 120 megawatts in about 8,300 installations. Inside only the past ten years, the quantity of businesses operating in solar energy has leapt from a couple of dozen to a few hundred.

Power from the Suns Heat

Southern Spain, a region recognized the world more than for its abundant sun and scarce rain, gives an ideal landscape for solar thermalpower. The tower outside Seville, built and operated by Solcar, an Abengoa company, is the first of a number of solar thermal plants and will provide about 10 megawatts of power.

The company Sener is completing Andasol 1, the first parabolic trough plant in Europea 50-megawatt technique outside Granada that will begin operation in the summer of 2008.

In contrast to photovoltaic panels, which harness the movement of electrons in between layers of a solar cell when the sun strikes the material, solar thermal energy works by utilizing the heat of the sun. CSP has till lately cost nearly twice as considerably as traditional naturalgas or coal power plants, and it is powerful only on a large scale.

You need to have a very significant budget to set up a concentrated solar power method, says Eduardo Zarza, director of concentrating solar analysis at the Solar Platform of Almera (PSA in Spanish), a research, development, and testing center.

You need a great deal of land, a steam turbine, an electricity generator, power equipment, people in the manage room, staff to run the program.

The costs are also front-loaded, unlike those of classic plants: the fuel is totally free, in contrast to oil, gas, or coal, but the up-front development expense is substantially greater.

For the duration of and instantly following the power crisis of the 1970s, nine solar thermal plants were built in California to create a total of 350 megawatts, but till this year no new commercial plant had been built, anyplace in the world, for
15 years.

PV fees run almost double those of solar thermal for a power plant of a similar size, but PV has the benefit of modularity panels can be incorporated into individual homes, businesses, and buildings or installed in little spaces.

This micro energy method has helped the marketplace for PV explode in the past 5 years, even though solar thermal remained moribund. With gas costs rising and the globe sharpening its concentrate on international warming, and governments about the globe producing a concerted try to invest in alternative power sources on a bigger scale, solar thermal is attracting new attention.

In Spain in certain, the technology has been assisted by Royal Decree 436,
implemented in March 2004, which approved a feed-in tariff (a guaranteed cost) for solar thermal energy. The feedin tariff created creating this kind of power plant economically viable. The government also recognizes that, as with wind, support is required at the beginning to allow the creation of new plantswhich will most probably drive down prices, as has occurred in Spain with wind energy.