The Australian government approved the construction of the largest solar thermal plant in the world. This will have a power of 150 megawatts and will be built in Port Augusta, in South Australia.
The plant will cost 650 million Australian dollars (510 million US dollars), It will generate around 650 construction jobs for local workers, according to developers, and aims to cover all electricity needs for the state government. Work will begin next year and is scheduled to be completed in 2020.
SolarReserve, based in California, is the company in charge of the construction. The American company is also behind the 110-megawatt Crescent Dunes CSP plant in Nevada.
Thermal plant
Solar photovoltaic plants convert sunlight directly into electricity, so they need batteries to store excess energy when the Sun is not shining; Solar thermal plants, for their part, use mirrors to concentrate sunlight on a heating system.
According to various experts, such as the professor of the Australian National University, Matthew Stocks: "One of the great challenges of thermal energy as a storage tool is that it can only store heat".
"Thermal is a substantially cheaper way to store energy than using batteries"adds professor of sustainable energy engineering Wasim Saman, from the University of South Australia.
This plant will be able to continue generating power at full load for up to 8 hours after the sun has gone down. The company's forecasts indicate that the plant will deliver 495 GW / h of energy per year, which represents around 5% of South Australia's energy needs.
In the medium term, the aim is to complete the daily cycle, in such a way that energy production is not altered by the duration of the days.
Fortunately, this is not Australia's first major energy project. Just over a month ago Tesla announced that this country will be chosen to create the world's largest lithium battery, that Elon Musk's company will build with the French power company Neoen. The battery will be connected to a windmill farm that produces 1.050.000 MWh of electricity per year, and will reach figures of 100 MW / 129 MWh.
Energy sources
The energy potential of the light that comes to us from the sun is more than enough to cover the needs of the entire population, but its use at this efficiency level It is very low.
Experts from the Global Alliance of Solar Energy Research Institutes (GASERI) have published a study in the journal Science that describes the path that should be followed to generate up to 10 terawatts of solar energy by 2030.
One terawatt is the equivalent of 1.000 gigawatts, one million megawatts, or one trillion watts. And although it is a huge amount of energy, it would not be enough to satisfy world demand, which is around 15 terawatts. But we are only talking about that obtained from the sun, not counting wind energy and other renewable energies
Is all that glitters energy?
Port Augusta is not an innovation in the strict sense. There is already a solar thermal plant with a very similar technology, operating in Nevada with a capacity of 110 megawatts. And the results have been very good: «This is a substantially cheaper way to store energy that the use of batteries », experts say.
It is strictly true that they present improvements over batteries or other electrical storage systems. But they don't have everything on their side: they can only store heat. Their storage systems cannot be used to store, for example, surplus wind power.
Does it make sense to invest heavily in energy storage systems that we cannot take advantage of all well? Even more so when renewable energies already represent more than 40% of electricity in South Australia.
We stand before a historic race in which renewable technologies They compete to get the largest possible amount of investments. These investments will be essential in the development of the technology of the future. But one thing is clear: renewable energy is unstoppable.