With 20 years of experience and over 25 plants and 1,500 MW in operation and construction, Abengoa Solar has firmly established itself as the leading global developer of solar power plants.

The company offers proprietary technology and solutions for power generation and thermal applications using Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) technology - solar trough, solar tower and energy storage systems and also conventional PV and high-concentration PV technologies.

Abengoa Solar was part of the consortium that built the 100 MW Shams 1 CSP plant in Abu Dhabi, currently the world's largest concentrated solar power plant in operation. In town last month to participate in the plant's official inauguration, Santiago Seage, CEO, Abengoa Solar spoke to Anoop K Menon on why Shams 1 represents a strategic milestone for his company and CSP technology's future prospects.

Shams 1 has become a poster child for CSP technology in the Middle East. Yet one cannot help but notice that announcements about large scale solar power projects in the region are centred around PV technology , depressed PV panel prices being a key attraction . As a pioneer in CSP technology , how do you view its future prospects in this region?

CSP and PV are complementary in different ways but ultimately, are two different technologies. PV has several advantages, the main one being cost.

But its main disadvantage is that it is an intermittent source of power. When the sun is shining, the PV panel produces a lot of power; when the sun goes down, it produces less; on a really cloudy day, it produces very little and during the night, next to nothing. In contrast, a major advantage of CSP and one that sets it apart from other forms of renewable energy generation is dispatchability or ability to adapt production to the demand. Another advantage is storage of energy - what we store is thermal energy not the electricity itself.

If a country wants to get into renewable energy in a big way, they need to balance that mix as well. In addition to cheap intermittent resources like wind or PV, they also need to have dispatchable resources and CSP clearly plays a very important role here.

The other major advantage of CSP technology is that it contributes the most to the development of manufacturing supply chains compared to wind and PV.

This is not about purchasing PV panels in China and bringing it to the UAE but about building a utility-scale solar power plant using local engineering and equipment suppliers. In the case of Shams 1, we had 60 significant suppliers from the region. Most of the components required for Shams 1 were either manufactured or re-tooled locally. In terms of employees, a third of the employees are local.

We imported equipment where local manufacturing capability didn't exist like turbines and mirrors. I believe that construction, operation and maintenance of CSP plants have an impact on the economy that goes way beyond other renewable energy projects.

how do you see CSP keeping its competitive advantage , especially when you have serious challengers like Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) technology on the horizon?

In the case of CSP, its competitive advantages are dispatchability, energy storage and the fact that you can combine it with conventional power plants to form hybrid plants. In Shams 1, we use a limited quantity of gas as heat source to complement the heat from the sun. At Abengoa Solar, we have extensive experience in solar hybrid projects as we are involved in two integrated solar combined cycle solar (ISCC) plants, in Algeria and Morocco. Of course, solar-gas plants give better numbers in regions where natural gas is abundant than where it is expensive. But I see a lot of potential for such hybrids in the Gulf countries.

Apart from electricity, CSP technology can also be used to produce thermal energy for industrial processes. For example, we have built one of the largest industrial solar steam systems in the world for a mining company in Chile. This plant will enable the company to reduce fossil fuel used in the processes by more than 50%, while reducing annual emissions by about 10,000 t of CO2. In the long run, the costs of such hybrid plants will come down the same way as with wind, thanks to technological improvements, suppliers improving their efficiency and operators improving the way they operate the plants.

In the case of Shams 1, how did you address the issues of water scarcity and dust storms ?

Most of our CSP projects are located in places where water is scarce, so water consumption was always a challenge for us. In the case of Shams 1, we worked on the cleaning system to make sure that we can recover and recycle as much water as possible because first, it is the right thing to do and second, water has a high cost in this place, so we are economically incentivised to do something.

The issues associated with sand had more to do with reflectivity than with impairment of moving parts. We had to make sure the mirrors were clean and reflect the energy. During sand storms, we ended up having sand on the mirrors. Here, in the sandy desert environment, we have invested a bit more in equipment to keep the mirrors clean. We have five special high-tech trucks that take care of all the cleaning. Now such trucks are being used in our projects elsewhere as well, the only difference being that we have more of those trucks here and we are going to be cleaning more often. During the course of operation, we will fine tune the frequency of cleaning.

After Shams 1, what is next on your agenda?

In the Shams 1 project, we played three roles - first, we supplied the parabolic trough technology, designed the plant and built it as turnkey Engineering, Procurement & Construction (EPC) contractor; second, the operation & maintenance (O&M) of the plant is being carried out by Abengoa in joint venture with Total; third, we are also one of the equity investors in Shams 1, owning 20% of the project. In that sense, the project is a great showcase of our capabilities. Also, Shams 1 was our 15th CSP plant. Currently, we are building two huge parabolic trough CSP plants in California and Arizona in the US. The Arizona plant will also have six hours of molten salt technologybased storage to provide power during periods of cloud cover or after sundown.

In Shams 1, we didn't use storage because we were using natural gas to increase the efficiency of the plant and produce electricity when the sun is not shining. We are also building our third commercial solar power tower, and the first to be built outside of Spain in South Africa.

© Power & Water Middle East 2013