Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Acme to set up 100MW solar thermal power plant

Published on Dec 8, 2008
Acme Energy Solutions plans to set up India's first 100MW solar
thermal power plant.

N. Venkataraman, executive vice president of the company's energy
solutions division, reportedly said that Acme plans to set up a 100MW
solar thermal project either in Rajasthan or Gujarat in about a year.
Venkataraman told IANS that the cost of power generated by his company
would be among the lowest for solar thermal plants. "The cost of
electricity would be around Rs. 8 per unit (US$1 = Rs. 50 approx.),
which is among the lowest in the world for such kinds of projects," he
reportedly said.

In August this year, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, too,
had indicated about Acme's plans.

The Ministry has also been suggesting to various Central Ministries
and Government departments to maximise the use of solar energy devices
and systems at their establishments.

To encourage participation of the private sector for development of
solar energy, the Ministry is providing various fiscal and financial
incentives which include soft loans to manufactures for technology
up-gradation, concessional or nil duty on import of various equipment,
exemption of excise duty, accelerated depreciation, generation based
incentive for setting up of grid power plants based on solar thermal
and photovoltaic technologies etc.

The quantum of subsidy / support being given to the private sector
includes: Soft loan at an interest rate of five percent to
manufactures through IREDA for technology up-gradation on solar water
heating systems; Up to Rs.10/- per KWh for electricity generated from
solar thermal and Rs.12/- per KWh from solar photovoltaic power plants
of capacities 1 MW and above.

Source:CSP Today

BrightSource Energy Signs Contract With Siemens for Largest Ever Fully Solar-Powered Steam Turbine Generator

Turbine Generator to Be Operated at BrightSource's Ivanpah Solar Power Complex


Last update: 6:00 a.m. EST Dec. 9, 2008

OAKLAND, Calif., Dec 09, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- BrightSource Energy,
Inc., developer of large-scale solar thermal energy plants, has signed
a contract with Siemens to purchase the steam turbine generator for
BrightSource's first 100MW plant at its Ivanpah Solar Power Complex in
California's Mojave Desert. The purchase marks another key step in
BrightSource Energy's path to construct the state's first large-scale
solar thermal power plant in nearly thirty years.
The contract with Siemens is for the supply of a 123 MW fully
solar-powered steam turbine generator. When completed, the turbine is
expected to be the largest fully solar-powered steam turbine generator
to date.
"This contract marks another significant milestone in building
California's first large scale-solar power plant in decades," said
John Woolard, CEO of BrightSource Energy. "The Siemens high quality
solar-powered turbine generator offers additional certainty that the
project will deliver cost effective, reliable, and clean solar power."
Due to a lengthy production process, turbine generators must be
ordered approximately three years in advance of the planned delivery
date. The Siemens turbine is slated to be delivered in early 2011, and
BrightSource expects this first phase of its Ivanpah Solar Power
Complex to be operational and supplying solar energy to utilities in
the fourth quarter of 2011.
"Our extensive experience in optimizing our steam turbines for solar
thermal applications puts us in a leading position to help customers
provide clean solar power," says Markus Tacke, CEO of the Siemens
Energy Oil & Gas Division's Industrial Applications, Steam Turbines
business unit. "Siemens is proud to be building the largest fully
solar-powered steam turbine generator to date for BrightSource's
Ivanpah solar power plant."
BrightSource's Ivanpah Solar Power Complex will be comprised of three
separate solar plants and will produce a combined total of 400 MW of
power. Upon completion, the Ivanpah Solar Power Complex will produce
enough clean energy to power the homes of 140,000 PG&E customers and
reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by over 500,000 tons per year.
BrightSource is scheduled to begin construction on the Ivanpah site in
2009.
BrightSource Energy's solar thermal energy plants are built on the
company's proven Luz Power Tower (LPT) technology. The system uses
thousands of small mirrors called heliostats to reflect sunlight onto
a boiler atop a tower to produce high temperature steam. The steam is
then piped to a conventional turbine inside a power block, which
generates electricity. The electricity is then connected to the
transmission grid for consumption. The steam is air-cooled and piped
back into the system in a closed-loop, environmentally friendly
process.
This fully integrated energy system offers the highest operating
efficiencies and lowest capital costs in the industry. The result is a
large-scale solar system that reliably delivers solar energy at a cost
competitive with fossil fuels.
BrightSource has achieved numerous milestones in the past nine months.
In March, BrightSource entered into a series of power purchase
agreements with PG&E for up to 900MW of electricity. In May,
BrightSource announced that it had secured $115 million in additional
corporate funding from its Series C round of financing, bringing the
total the company has raised to date to over $160 million. In June,
BrightSource dedicated their Solar Energy Development Center (SEDC),
an operational solar field that will provide the company with the
ability to test equipment, materials and procedures as well as
construction and operating methods.
For its technological leadership, the company was recently selected as
a 2009 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum. The only solar
company to win this year's prestigious award, BrightSource Energy was
recognized for helping global utility and industrial customers reduce
their dependence on fossil fuels by providing clean, low-cost and
reliable solar energy.
About BrightSource Energy, Inc.
BrightSource Energy, Inc. provides clean, reliable and low cost solar
energy for utility and industrial companies worldwide. The
BrightSource Energy team has more than thirty years of experience
designing, developing, and operating solar energy plants. BrightSource
Energy helps its customers reduce their dependence on fossil fuels and
is a leader in environmental stewardship. Headquartered in Oakland,
Calif., BrightSource Energy is a privately held company with
operations in the United States and Israel. To learn more about
BrightSource Energy and solar thermal energy, visit
www.brightsourceenergy.com.
(C) BrightSource Energy, Inc. All rights reserved. All trademarks are
the property of their respective owners.
SOURCE: BrightSource Energy, Inc.
Hill & Knowlton for BrightSource Energy
Kristin Hunter, 415-281-7161
kristin.hunter@hillandknowlton.com

Copyright Business Wire 2008

Friday, October 3, 2008

Largest Solar Thermal Storage Plant to Start Up

By Peter Fairley

PHOTO: SOLAR MILLENNIUM
1 October 2008—A few weeks from now, the Andasol 1 solar thermal power
plant in Andalucía, Spain, will begin charging the largest
installation built expressly for storing renewable energy (other than
the tried-and-true hydroelectric dam, of course). Heat from the solar
thermal power station's 510 000-square-meter field of solar collectors
will be stored in 28 500 tons of molten salt—enough to run the plant's
50-megawatt steam turbine for up to 7.5 hours after dark.

It's pretty strange for solar power to generate electricity in the
dark. Stranger still for a renewable-energy project is the fact that
Andasol 1's developers—German renewable-energy firm Solar Millennium
and Madrid-based engineering and construction firm ACS/Cobra—believe
the energy storage that makes the plant's output more predictable will
also make it more affordable. The developers say Andasol 1's
electricity will cost 11 percent less to produce than a similar plant
without energy storage—dropping from 303 euros per megawatt-hour to
271 euros per MWh.

The lower cost of production is actually a by-product of Andasol 1's
energy-storage system, according to Paul Nava, a managing director of
Flagsol GmbH, the Cologne, Germany–based engineering subsidiary of
Solar Millennium that designed the plant. Nava says storage is a means
of maximizing the net energy production from each plant and thus
maximizes the revenues paid under Spain's generous incentive program
for renewable-energy generation. A feed-in tariff for solar thermal
power pays 2.5 to 3 times the average power price for every MWh of
energy generated for 25 years (though new rules will reduce the rate
for future projects) but limits the capacity of qualifying facilities
to 50 MW. Storage enables Andasol 1 to run its 50-MW turbine for more
hours.

Nava estimates that Andasol 1 will generate 178 000 MWh of renewable
electricity per year, whereas the same field of solar collectors and
turbine would turn out just 117 000 MWh sans storage—a difference
worth more than 24 million euros per year (US $36 million) at today's
power prices.

At Andasol 1, generating this clean energy surplus starts with 24
kilometers of trough-shaped mirrors concentrating sunlight on solar
collector tubes and heating the synthetic oil flowing within as high
as 400 degrees Celsius (the safety and durability limit for the oil).
To put power on the grid, hot oil is circulated to the plant's "power
block," where the heat is converted to steam and drives the turbine.
However, when the sun is strongest, Andasol 1's oversized collector
field should gather almost twice as much heat as the turbine can
handle. This extra heat will be dumped into the storage system: a heat
exchanger connecting two insulated storage tanks, each 14 meters high
and 36 meters in diameter, holding molten potassium and sodium nitrate
salt.

The tanks are kept at different temperatures. Molten salt pumped from
the "cold" tank (maintained at a not-so-chilly 260 °C to keep the salt
molten) into the heat exchanger picks up heat from the oil and then
flows into the hot tank (which will reach 400 °C when fully charged).
To discharge the stored energy, the process is reversed, with molten
salt pumped from the hot tank to the cold tank to reheat the oil.

One problem with running a molten-salt storage system is that the salt
could freeze during cold snaps, necessitating an injection of heat
that reduces the plant's power output. But Nava says Andasol 1 has
some improvements over earlier experimental designs to minimize the
need to warm the salt. Andasol 1's valves are fewer in number, and
both the valves and the heat exchanger are designed to drain when not
in use, eliminating the need to keep them hot. The pumps, which cannot
be drained regularly, sit submerged within the tanks instead of
outside the tanks, where they would have to be heated separately. Nava
estimates that, overall, annual energy losses from the storage system
will be just 5 percent.

More such plants are on the way in Spain. Solar Millennium and its
Spanish partner expect to start up a twin plant, Andasol 2, next
spring and plan to begin building a third 50-MW plant early next year.

Spain's Abengoa Solar and Sener, meanwhile, are each testing solar
thermal plants with integrated molten-salt storage. Both use a "power
tower" configuration in which arrays of mirrors direct sunlight onto a
central solar receiver where the light directly heats a molten salt.
This configuration matches that of Solar Two, a 10-MW solar thermal
demonstration plant at Sandia National Laboratories, in New Mexico,
built in the 1990s. The power-tower design makes energy storage
cheaper and more compact because the salts can be safely heated well
beyond the limit of the synthetic oils.

"Using the molten salt as both the working and storage fluid gave us
high heat capacity," says Sandia concentrating solar-power program
manager Thomas Mancini. "Instead of 260 °C to 390 °C, you're going
from 260 °C to 560 °C. It's a bigger temperature difference, so you
need less salt to store the same amount of energy."

At present, most of the anticipated U.S. solar thermal projects, which
are driven by state-level renewable-energy mandates rather than a rich
feed-in tariff, are focused on minimizing upfront costs, and few
projects plan to integrate energy storage. But Mancini and Nava say
that may change as utilities adopt time-of-day electricity pricing.

Nava says a pricing scheme already introduced by Southern California
Edison should encourage what he calls a "solar booster" thermal power
plant. The California utility pays 3.28 times its base rate for
electricity delivered between noon and 6 p.m. on summer weekdays. A
solar booster would use an undersized collector field and storage to
focus generation on that sweet spot. "In the morning, you use the
solar field only to charge the storage, and then from noon on, when
you have that factor of three for the electricity rate, you discharge
the storage and use the field in parallel to drive the steam turbine,"
says Nava.

About the Author
Contributing Editor Peter Fairley has reported for IEEE Spectrum from
Bolivia, Beijing, and Paris. In May 2008 he wrote for us about China's
rapid gains in wind power.

Thursday, September 4, 2008

SPV Data from Earth Policy Institute

World Annual Photovoltaic Production, 1975-2007 (figure and table)


World Cumulative Photovoltaic Production, 1975-2007 (figure and table)

Annual Photovoltaic Production, Select Countries and Europe, 1995-2006 (figure and table)

Annual Thin Film Photovoltaic Production, Select Countries and Regions, 2003-2006 (figure andtable)

Annual Photovoltaic Installations, Select Countries and Regions, 2000-2007 (figure and table)

Photovoltaic Production by Top Ten Producing Companies, 2006 and First Half of 2007 (table)

World Average Photovoltaic Module Cost per Watt, 1975-2006 (figure and table)

World Annual Photovoltaic Production, 1975-2007

Graphic link to Top of Page

World Photovoltaic Production, 1975-2007
Year
Annual Production
Cumulative Production
Megawatts
1975
2
2
1976
2
4
1977
2
6
1978
3
9
1979
4
13
1980
7
20
1981
8
28
1982
9
37
1983
17
54
1984
22
76
1985
23
99
1986
26
125
1987
29
154
1988
34
188
1989
40
228
1990
47
275
1991
55
330
1992
58
388
1993
60
448
1994
69
517
1995
78
594
1996
89
683
1997
126
809
1998
155
964
1999
201
1,165
2000
277
1,442
2001
386
1,828
2002
547
2,375
2003
748
3,123
2004
1,194
4,317
2005
1,786
6,103
2006
2,521
8,623
2007
3,800
12,423
Source: Compiled by Earth Policy Institute from Worldwatch Institute, Vital Signs 2005(Washington, DC: 2005); Worldwatch Institute, Vital Signs 2007-2008 (Washington DC: 2008); Prometheus Institute, "23rd Annual Data Collection - Final," PVNews, vol. 26, no. 4 (April 2007), pp. 8-9; REN21, Renewables 2007 Global Status Report: A Pre-Publication Summary for the UNFCCC COP13 (Paris: December 2007).

 

Graphic link to Top of Page

World Cumulative Photovoltaic Production, 1975-2007

Graphic link to Top of Page
Annual Photovoltaic Production, Select Countries and Europe, 1995-2006

Graphic link to Top of Page

Year
United States
Japan
Europe
China
Taiwan
India
Others
Total
Megawatts
1995
34.8
16.4
20.1
NA
NA
NA
NA
77.7
1996
38.9
21.2
18.8
NA
NA
NA
NA
88.7
1997
51.0
35.0
30.4
NA
NA
NA
NA
125.8
1998
53.7
49.0
33.5
NA
NA
NA
NA
154.9
1999
60.8
80.0
40.0
NA
NA
NA
NA
201.3
2000
75.0
128.6
49.8
2.5
NA
10.5
10.5
276.8
2001
100.3
171.2
73.9
3.0
3.5
12.5
21.6
386.0
2002
120.6
251.1
122.1
8.0
8.0
19.1
18.2
547.1
2003
103.0
363.9
200.2
9.0
17.0
23.1
32.2
748.4
2004
138.7
601.5
311.8
35.0
40.0
31.1
35.4
1,193.5
2005
154.0
833.0
476.6
134.0
88.0
35.5
65.0
1,786.1
2006
201.6
926.9
678.3
369.5
177.5
43.4
123.6
2,520.8
Note: NA = not available or negligible.
Source: Compiled by Earth Policy Institute from Worldwatch Institute, Signposts 2004, CD-Rom (Washington, DC: 2005); Prometheus Institute, "23rd Annual Data Collection - Final,"PVNews, vol. 26, no. 4 (April 2007), pp. 8-9.

 

Graphic link to Top of Page
Annual Thin Film Photovoltaic Production, Select Countries and Regions, 2003-2006Graphic link to Top of Page

Annual Thin Film Photovoltaic Production, 2003-2006
Year
United States
Japan
Europe
Rest of World
Total
Megawatts
2003
14.1
5.0
7.7
6.0
32.8
2004
23.0
17.5
15.6
7.0
63.1
2005
46.0
36.2
19.6
6.0
107.8
2006
92.5
54.7
12.4
11.0
170.6
Source: Prometheus Institute, PVNews, vol. 26, no. 4 (April 2007), p. 10.

 

Annual Photovoltaic Installations, Select Countries and Regions, 2000-2007Graphic link to Top of Page

Country/Region2000 2001 20022003 20042005 20062007
Megawatts
Germany44.0 78.080.0 170.0500.0 700.01,050.0 1,260.0
Japan 74.4 91.0141.0 201.0256.0 320.0350.0 402.5
United States 16.8 28.449.1 71.789.9 108.0141.4 259.0
Rest of Europe 1.0 3.010.0 11.024.0 60.0118.0 234.0
Rest of Asia 13.0 19.043.0 33.047.0 55.081.0 131.9
Note: Installations for 2007 are estimates.
Source: Travis Bradford and Paul Maycock, "PV Market Update: Demand Grows Quickly and Supply Races to Catch Up," Renewable Energy World, July 2007.

Graphic link to Top of Page

Company
2006
First Half of 2007
Megawatts
Sharp (Japan)
434
225
Q-Cells (Germany)
253
160
Suntech (China)
158
145
Kyocera (Japan)
180
108
Sanyo (Japan)
155
87
Motech (Taiwan)
102
85
Deutsche Solar/Shell (United States, Germany)
86
66
First Solar (United States)
60
61
Mitsubishi (Japan)
111
55
SunPower (Philippines)
63
54
Source: Prometheus Institute, "Asian Cell Producers Swamping the Boat: A Look at the First Half of 2007," PVNews, vol. 26, no. 9 (September 2007), pp. 6-8.

Graphic link to Top of Page

World Average Photovoltaic Module Cost per Watt, 1975-2006

Graphic link to Top of Page


World Average Photovoltaic Production and Module Cost per Watt, 1975-2006
Year
Annual Production
Cost per Watt
Megawatts
2007 U.S. Dollars
1975
2
99.61
1976
2
78.39
1977
2
58.92
1978
3
41.18
1979
4
32.89
1980
7
27.79
1981
8
21.16
1982
9
17.92
1983
17
14.80
1984
22
12.88
1985
23
10.68
1986
26
8.67
1987
29
6.73
1988
34
7.30
1989
40
7.40
1990
47
7.47
1991
55
7.18
1992
58
6.29
1993
60
5.79
1994
69
5.32
1995
78
5.33
1996
89
5.11
1997
126
5.26
1998
155
4.71
1999
201
4.29
2000
277
4.21
2001
386
3.79
2002
547
3.73
2003
748
3.65
2004
1,194
3.55
2005
1,786
3.70
2006
2,521
3.84
Note: 2001 and 2003 prices are estimated by Earth Policy Institute.
Source: Compiled by Earth Policy Institute from Worldwatch Institute, Vital Signs 2001(Washington, DC: 2001); Paul Maycock, "Boomer," PVNews, July 2007, p. 12. Prices adjusted to 2007 dollars using U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis, "Implicit Price Deflators for Gross Domestic Product," atwww.bea.gov/bea/dn/nipaweb/TableView.asp#Mid.

 

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