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".<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_Solar_Power_Station" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouarzazate_Solar_Power_Station</a>
<i>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.</i><p>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.<p>You can see this effect in the EIA's data about US solar farms here: <a href="https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_6_07_b" rel="nofollow">https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cf...</a><p>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%).<p>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.
Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) is a pretty interesting, but I chuckled at this phrasing, <i>"The hot oil is used to produce high-pressure water vapour that drives a turbine-powered generator."</i> Seriously? Why not just call them steam turbines?<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_plants_in_the_Mojave_Desert#Solar_One_and_Solar_Two" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_plants_in_the_Moja...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/s/531526/an-industrial-size-generator-that-runs-on-waste-heat-using-no-fuel/" rel="nofollow">https://www.technologyreview.com/s/531526/an-industrial-size...</a>
"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."<p>"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."
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.<p>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.<p>[0] tongue-in-cheek, there's always stuff to research.
It looks pretty impressive in satellite imagery [1]. Does anyone know what the black and green rectangles at the southern end are? Heat storage?<p>Also, there is what appears to be more land immediately to the north that has been leveled - presumably for more arrays.<p>[1] <a href="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" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Centrale+solaire+Noor+1+...</a>
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:<p><a href="http://www.nrel.gov/csp/solarpaces/project_detail.cfm/projectID=270" rel="nofollow">http://www.nrel.gov/csp/solarpaces/project_detail.cfm/projec...</a><p><pre><code> 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</code></pre>
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.<p>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.<p>I wonder what types of adjustments have to be made to the design of the plant to endure being thermally cycled every day.