5 ms·

Vast solar power plant at the Moroccan desert

45 points by oori 10y ago

oori 10y ago
"Hundreds of curved mirrors, each as big as a bus, are ranked in rows covering 1,400,000 sq m (15m sq ft) of desert, an area the size of 200 football fields." "The plant keeps generating energy after sunset, when electricity demands peak. Some of the day’s energy is stored in reservoirs of superhot molten salts made of sodium and potassium nitrates, which keeps production going for up to three hours. In the next phase of the plant, production will continue for up to eight hours after sunset."
- frandroid 10y ago
  They could modulate the use of the molten salts according to the weather forecast or electricity grid prices/demand. I'm assuming Morocco doesn't have grid-level dynamic pricing but if they're forecasting clouds the day after sunlight they could maybe hang on to the hot salts over night and push the heat to the steam-generator the next day when demand spikes again.
andyjohnson0 10y ago
It looks pretty impressive in satellite imagery [1]. Does anyone know what the black and green rectangles at the southern end are? Heat storage? Also, there is what appears to be more land immediately to the north that has been leveled - presumably for more arrays. [1] https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Centrale+solaire+Noor+1+Ouarzazate/@31.0088322,-6.8681505,2811m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x6df7ea01fb587594!8m2!3d31.0092101!4d-6.8623352 https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Centrale+solaire+Noor+1+...
- sooper 10y ago
  It looks like they're water storage ponds. Cut from the Wiki[1] article "Water consumption for the Ouarzazate Noor complex is estimated at 2.5 to 3 million m3 per year for one wet- cooling project (Noor I) and two dry – cooling projects (Noor II and III) and due to the need to regularly clean the reflectors." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_Solar_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_Solar_Power_Station
noobermin 10y ago
Tangentially related side note, as a plasma physicist, every time I see advances like this, I worry a little bit for my future career[0]. It turns out there's a fusion reactor at the center of this solar system that's been dumping energy on us for billions of years. Of course, eventually all energy sources on earth were solar originally. Not that doing fusion won't be interesting from a scientific point of view, but if we develop solar and batteries further, we could really require no other energy revolution than this. [0] tongue-in-cheek, there's always stuff to research.
- pm90 10y ago
  We would still need fusion for interstellar travel.
  - dermotbrennan 10y ago
    Or even for ships and planes. Whats more likely in the long term, that cargo ships will be powered by batteries or that they could be powered by a compact fusion reactor?
    - dx034 10y ago
      With the right batteries, why not? You can pack them in 40ft containers and swap them at the port to charge them on land when energy is cheapest. That way it could probably be even possible to retrofit old container ships.
- jeffwass 10y ago
  >"Of course, eventually all energy sources on earth were solar originally" I originally came to reply "Not geothermal". But just read up a bit and found out only a fraction of geothermal heat came from Earth's gravitational collapse. The bulk of the heat is from radioactive decay. Which of course was sourced from stellar fusion.
Animats 10y ago
160MW peak. 42MW average over a year. That ranks about 25th in the world for solar power installations. Typical nuke or coal plant is about 1000MW per unit peak, and average is slightly less. Three Gorges Dam, 22,000MW peak. This thing is not going to "power Europe". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_Solar_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_Solar_Power_Station
- toyg 10y ago
  To be fair, something like this will upgrade as the tech improves, something that alternatives cannot do. But yeah, it's certainly not the definitive answer.
  - pilom 10y ago
    Sure you'll be able to upgrade this with more efficient turbines or something, but you'll also be able to put those more efficient turbines in a hydro-electric dam or wind turbine, or coal burning plant. I'm not seeing the magical potential for improvements in concentrated solar that you wouldn't get from any other type of generator.
  - Animats 10y ago
    How? This isn't photovoltaic. It's just a solar-powered heat engine. That's a mature technology.
- liotier 10y ago
  Hyperbole aside, the Sahara does have such humongous solar potential that supplying Europe is a possibility... But I never hear anyone mention the mightily expensive necessary upgrades to the electricity grid - and more specifically the extremely long HVDC power transmission lines to the consumer regions...
  - georgecmu 10y ago
    Why would this necessitate upgrades to the electricity grid and HVDC in particular? This plant's electricity is turbine-generated, just like in regular coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power plants.
georgecmu 10y ago
The following NREL page provides information on Ouarzazate (Phase I), a concentrating solar power (CSP) project, with data organized by background, participants, and power plant configuration: http://www.nrel.gov/csp/solarpaces/project_detail.cfm/projectID=270 http://www.nrel.gov/csp/solarpaces/project_detail.cfm/projec... Solar Resource: 2,635 kWh/m2/yr Break Ground: May 10, 2013 Start Production: December 1, 2015 Cost (approx): 1,042 € million PPA/Tariff Date: November 19, 2012 PPA/Tariff Rate: 1.62 Dirhams per kWh PPA/Tariff Period: 25 years PPA/Tariff Information: US$ cents 18.9 per kWh Project Type: Commercial
snowwindwaves 10y ago
nice to see a solar thermal plant that doesn't set fire to birds. Unfortunately they are considering the eye of sauron design for the third phase of the project. Maybe there are no birds there. While it may only average 42 MW year round, 35 days of the year it produces nothing and it probably takes some time in the morning for things to heat up before any energy can be produced, so say 12 hours of darkness a day it produces nothing and the three hours of heat storage and three hours of morning start up time cancel out. Then it averages 92 MW when it is actually generating. I wonder what types of adjustments have to be made to the design of the plant to endure being thermally cycled every day.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) is a pretty interesting, but I chuckled at this phrasing, "The hot oil is used to produce high-pressure water vapour that drives a turbine-powered generator." Seriously? Why not just call them steam turbines? Because I was going to college in LA and my parents lived in Las Vegas, I drove that route a lot and got to watch them build Solar One[1], and toured it after it was operational. These days with better thermoelectric generation capability[2] you can extract even more of the energy out of the heat difference than just steam turbines (which have a Carnot efficiency of about 50%) mostly because they can work down to lower differentials in heat. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_plants_in_the_Mojave_Desert#Solar_One_and_Solar_Two https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_plants_in_the_Moja... [2] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/531526/an-industrial-size-generator-that-runs-on-waste-heat-using-no-fuel/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/531526/an-industrial-size...
philipkglass 10y ago
Of course, on the day I visit the sky is covered in clouds. “No electricity will be produced today,“ says Rachid Bayed at the Moroccan Agency for Solar Energy (Masen), which is responsible for implementing the flagship project. This is a big problem with concentrating thermal solar power: it requires intense direct normal irradiance to work and performance falls off catastrophically when skies aren't clear. A conventional non-concentrating PV module can deliver about 10% of its rated output if it is illuminated at 10% of standard test conditions, e.g. sun through light cloud cover. Performance falls off almost linearly with decreasing illumination until very low levels. Concentrating solar thermal performance falls off a cliff with insufficient and/or diffused light. You can see this effect in the EIA's data about US solar farms here: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_6_07_b https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cf... In the summer months, PV and concentrating solar thermal plants have comparable capacity factors. In the winter months, PV plant capacity factor falls off by less than half while thermal plant performance tumbles by ~80% (June 2016: 33.6% and 33.5%, January 2016: 17.9% and 6.8%). A decade or so ago, solar thermal was justifiable because PV was so much more expensive. Even after PV matched and then beat solar thermal costs for instantaneous generation, thermal still had a value proposition for after-sunset operation via thermal storage (like this Moroccan plant has with molten salts). But as costs of PV and alternate forms of storage continue to fall, while solar thermal costs barely budge, I expect that solar thermal electricity is going to become obsolete even for the very sunniest regions.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

45 points by oori 10y ago

oori 10y ago

"Hundreds of curved mirrors, each as big as a bus, are ranked in rows covering 1,400,000 sq m (15m sq ft) of desert, an area the size of 200 football fields." "The plant keeps generating energy after sunset, when electricity demands peak. Some of the day’s energy is stored in reservoirs of superhot molten salts made of sodium and potassium nitrates, which keeps production going for up to three hours. In the next phase of the plant, production will continue for up to eight hours after sunset."

frandroid 10y ago
They could modulate the use of the molten salts according to the weather forecast or electricity grid prices/demand. I'm assuming Morocco doesn't have grid-level dynamic pricing but if they're forecasting clouds the day after sunlight they could maybe hang on to the hot salts over night and push the heat to the steam-generator the next day when demand spikes again.

andyjohnson0 10y ago

It looks pretty impressive in satellite imagery [1]. Does anyone know what the black and green rectangles at the southern end are? Heat storage? Also, there is what appears to be more land immediately to the north that has been leveled - presumably for more arrays. [1] https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Centrale+solaire+Noor+1+Ouarzazate/@31.0088322,-6.8681505,2811m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x6df7ea01fb587594!8m2!3d31.0092101!4d-6.8623352 https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Centrale+solaire+Noor+1+...

sooper 10y ago
It looks like they're water storage ponds. Cut from the Wiki[1] article "Water consumption for the Ouarzazate Noor complex is estimated at 2.5 to 3 million m3 per year for one wet- cooling project (Noor I) and two dry – cooling projects (Noor II and III) and due to the need to regularly clean the reflectors." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_Solar_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_Solar_Power_Station

noobermin 10y ago

Tangentially related side note, as a plasma physicist, every time I see advances like this, I worry a little bit for my future career[0]. It turns out there's a fusion reactor at the center of this solar system that's been dumping energy on us for billions of years. Of course, eventually all energy sources on earth were solar originally. Not that doing fusion won't be interesting from a scientific point of view, but if we develop solar and batteries further, we could really require no other energy revolution than this. [0] tongue-in-cheek, there's always stuff to research.

pm90 10y ago
We would still need fusion for interstellar travel.
- dermotbrennan 10y ago
  Or even for ships and planes. Whats more likely in the long term, that cargo ships will be powered by batteries or that they could be powered by a compact fusion reactor?
  - dx034 10y ago
    With the right batteries, why not? You can pack them in 40ft containers and swap them at the port to charge them on land when energy is cheapest. That way it could probably be even possible to retrofit old container ships.
jeffwass 10y ago
>"Of course, eventually all energy sources on earth were solar originally" I originally came to reply "Not geothermal". But just read up a bit and found out only a fraction of geothermal heat came from Earth's gravitational collapse. The bulk of the heat is from radioactive decay. Which of course was sourced from stellar fusion.

Animats 10y ago

160MW peak. 42MW average over a year. That ranks about 25th in the world for solar power installations. Typical nuke or coal plant is about 1000MW per unit peak, and average is slightly less. Three Gorges Dam, 22,000MW peak. This thing is not going to "power Europe". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_Solar_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_Solar_Power_Station

toyg 10y ago
To be fair, something like this will upgrade as the tech improves, something that alternatives cannot do. But yeah, it's certainly not the definitive answer.
- pilom 10y ago
  Sure you'll be able to upgrade this with more efficient turbines or something, but you'll also be able to put those more efficient turbines in a hydro-electric dam or wind turbine, or coal burning plant. I'm not seeing the magical potential for improvements in concentrated solar that you wouldn't get from any other type of generator.
- Animats 10y ago
  How? This isn't photovoltaic. It's just a solar-powered heat engine. That's a mature technology.
liotier 10y ago
Hyperbole aside, the Sahara does have such humongous solar potential that supplying Europe is a possibility... But I never hear anyone mention the mightily expensive necessary upgrades to the electricity grid - and more specifically the extremely long HVDC power transmission lines to the consumer regions...
- georgecmu 10y ago
  Why would this necessitate upgrades to the electricity grid and HVDC in particular? This plant's electricity is turbine-generated, just like in regular coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power plants.

georgecmu 10y ago

The following NREL page provides information on Ouarzazate (Phase I), a concentrating solar power (CSP) project, with data organized by background, participants, and power plant configuration: http://www.nrel.gov/csp/solarpaces/project_detail.cfm/projectID=270 http://www.nrel.gov/csp/solarpaces/project_detail.cfm/projec... Solar Resource: 2,635 kWh/m2/yr Break Ground: May 10, 2013 Start Production: December 1, 2015 Cost (approx): 1,042 € million PPA/Tariff Date: November 19, 2012 PPA/Tariff Rate: 1.62 Dirhams per kWh PPA/Tariff Period: 25 years PPA/Tariff Information: US$ cents 18.9 per kWh Project Type: Commercial

snowwindwaves 10y ago

nice to see a solar thermal plant that doesn't set fire to birds. Unfortunately they are considering the eye of sauron design for the third phase of the project. Maybe there are no birds there. While it may only average 42 MW year round, 35 days of the year it produces nothing and it probably takes some time in the morning for things to heat up before any energy can be produced, so say 12 hours of darkness a day it produces nothing and the three hours of heat storage and three hours of morning start up time cancel out. Then it averages 92 MW when it is actually generating. I wonder what types of adjustments have to be made to the design of the plant to endure being thermally cycled every day.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) is a pretty interesting, but I chuckled at this phrasing, "The hot oil is used to produce high-pressure water vapour that drives a turbine-powered generator." Seriously? Why not just call them steam turbines? Because I was going to college in LA and my parents lived in Las Vegas, I drove that route a lot and got to watch them build Solar One[1], and toured it after it was operational. These days with better thermoelectric generation capability[2] you can extract even more of the energy out of the heat difference than just steam turbines (which have a Carnot efficiency of about 50%) mostly because they can work down to lower differentials in heat. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_plants_in_the_Mojave_Desert#Solar_One_and_Solar_Two https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_plants_in_the_Moja... [2] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/531526/an-industrial-size-generator-that-runs-on-waste-heat-using-no-fuel/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/531526/an-industrial-size...

philipkglass 10y ago

Of course, on the day I visit the sky is covered in clouds. “No electricity will be produced today,“ says Rachid Bayed at the Moroccan Agency for Solar Energy (Masen), which is responsible for implementing the flagship project. This is a big problem with concentrating thermal solar power: it requires intense direct normal irradiance to work and performance falls off catastrophically when skies aren't clear. A conventional non-concentrating PV module can deliver about 10% of its rated output if it is illuminated at 10% of standard test conditions, e.g. sun through light cloud cover. Performance falls off almost linearly with decreasing illumination until very low levels. Concentrating solar thermal performance falls off a cliff with insufficient and/or diffused light. You can see this effect in the EIA's data about US solar farms here: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_6_07_b https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cf... In the summer months, PV and concentrating solar thermal plants have comparable capacity factors. In the winter months, PV plant capacity factor falls off by less than half while thermal plant performance tumbles by ~80% (June 2016: 33.6% and 33.5%, January 2016: 17.9% and 6.8%). A decade or so ago, solar thermal was justifiable because PV was so much more expensive. Even after PV matched and then beat solar thermal costs for instantaneous generation, thermal still had a value proposition for after-sunset operation via thermal storage (like this Moroccan plant has with molten salts). But as costs of PV and alternate forms of storage continue to fall, while solar thermal costs barely budge, I expect that solar thermal electricity is going to become obsolete even for the very sunniest regions.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]