Largest Solar Thermal Storage Plant to Start Up
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.
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.
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