Gemasolar 24-hour Solar Power Station

On October 4, 2011, in the Spanish town of Fuentes de Andalucia, in the province of Seville, the opening ceremony of the world's first commercial tower solar power station Gemasolar took place.

The construction of this grandiose facility, designed and built by engineers from the Spanish SENAR group, with the support of Masdar Power (UAE), cost their joint venture Torresol Energy more than 170 million euros. A number of leading European financial institutions, including Banco Popular, Banesto, ICO and the European Investment Bank, also participated in financing the project.

A feature of this power plant is that it is able to generate clean electricity around the clock, both day and night, despite the lack of sunlight at night.

This was made possible thanks to a special thermal salt technology that allows you to concentrate the sun's rays in the daytime and accumulate their energy in molten salt, which serves as a heat accumulator.

This salt receiver is located inside the tower, which is located in the center of the field dotted with mirrors, due to which the sun's rays focused by the heliostats transfer their energy to the liquid coolant as efficiently as possible. The salt-based coolant cools slowly enough, which allows you to block 15 hours of lack of sunlight.

The station covers an area of ​​210 hectares, 185 of which account for 2650 heliostats located concentrically around a central tower with a height of 140 meters. The mirror modules of heliostats have a rectangular shape, with each module measuring 10 by 12 meters, so that the total area of ​​the mirrors themselves is about 30.5 hectares.

The entire system has a nominal capacity of 19.9 MW, and is capable of supplying 110 GWh of electrical energy (on average per year) to power a network of 27,500 households, working around the clock in full force for 9 months.

The heart of the power plant is the receiver (3), with which energy is collected for electricity production and then stored in a tank with molten salt for subsequent conversion. There are two salt storage tanks near the tower: in the first (2) salt, it has a temperature of 290 ° C (cold salt), and in the second (4) 565 ° C (hot salt).

The cold salt reservoir is connected to the receiver so that the heat concentrated by the sun-tracking heliostats from each of the 2650 mirrors (1) can be absorbed by the principle of a reversed radiator. After the cold salt is heated, it is sent to the hot salt tank (4), where the accumulated solar energy can be stored.

The salt heated to 565 ° С is fed to the steam generator (5), where it gives its heat to water and therefore is cooled. The steam rotates the turbine (6), which in turn rotates the generator (7) connected to the transformer (8). The output voltage is 25,000 volts, which is supplied to the power lines.

The results obtained from the first two years of operation of the power plant exceeded all expectations. Already in the summer of 2013, the Gemasolar station showed the possibility of continuous operation for 36 days, which was impossible to achieve from any other solar power station in the world.

Operating for 6450 hours at full power for a year, the power plant avoided approximately 30,000 tons of CO2 emissions that would have been inevitable when generated by conventional methods.

See also on this topic: Efficiency Solar Panels