A BREATH OF FRESH AIR SAY CHEESE WAR ON ... - GEA Group

The world’s deserTs
receive more energy
from The sun in
six hours Than The
planeT’s populaTion
uses in a year. could
harnessing The
power of The deserT
sun provide The
long-Term soluTion
To meeTing global
energy needs?
bu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates is
one place in the world that need not worry
about its energy supply. Its 67,340 square
kilometers holds eight per cent of global
oil reserves and five per cent of natural gas
reserves – enough to last for 100 years.
Yet, despite this natural wealth, Abu Dhabi has
embarked on a sustainable program to wean
itself away from hydrocarbon dependence.
Instead it wants to develop a more diverse
economy and to become a beacon for
renewable energy and sustainable technology.
Masdar, a multi-faceted renewable energy
company of the Abu Dhabi governmentowned
Mubadala Development Company,
is spearheading this sustainability drive. Its
flagship project, Masdar City, is one of the
world’s most sustainable developments,
currently being built 17 kilometers from
the city of Abu Dhabi. The low carbon, low
waste city is a focused effort by Abu Dhabi
to address the challenges of sustainable
planning amid increasing urbanization.
Masdar City achieves this by pioneering best
practises in sustainable urban planning,
design, development and operation. It
has a pedestrian-friendly environment
and is piloting several advanced cleantransportation
systems and strategies,
including personal rapid transit and electric
vehicle point-to-point systems.
The city is also reducing embodied carbon
emissions and waste, increasing recycling,
using local materials and timber from
sustainable forests, and selecting products
that have the greatest positive effect for
indoor air quality.
As it provides a unique test-bed platform that
allows partners in cutting-edge technology
and systems to pilot, demonstrate, refine,
develop and commercialize technologies
on a very fast-to-market platform, Masdar
City has been chosen as the Middle East
headquarters of renowned companies.
In order to help the emirate reach its goal
of moving towards a knowledge-based
sustainable economy, Masdar operates
across the full spectrum of the renewable
energy and sustainable technology industry
through its global and local projects.
For the six years since its inception, Masdar
has provided cutting-edge clean technology
solutions by developing global and local
solar and wind power projects. These include
the unique concentrated solar power (CSP)
plant Gemasolar in Spain; one of the world’s
largest CSP plants, Shams One, in Abu
Dhabi; and one of the world’s largest offshore
wind farms, London Array in the UK.
Shams Power Company is a joint venture
between Masdar Power (60 per cent),
Abengoa Solar (20 per cent) and Total (20
per cent) and is the special purpose vehicle
formed to build and operate Shams One, the
100MW CSP plant in Abu Dhabi’s Western
Region. The plant will provide electricity to
20,000 homes and save 175,000 tonnes of
CO 2. This is equivalent to planting 1.5
million trees or taking 15,000 cars off Abu
Dhabi roads.
For the solar power industry, Shams One
represents three significant milestones:
it’s one of the largest projects of its kind in
the world, covering 2.5 square kilometers,
it’s the first utility-scale commercial solar
power project in the Middle East; and, most
significant of all, it’s the world’s first solar
thermal power plant on desert sand. Shams
One is currently under construction and is
scheduled for completion by the end of 2012.
Power from sunlight
Like most commercial solar power plants,
Shams One will convert sunlight into
electricity using CSP technology. More
than 258,000 thousand concave mirrors
will be configured into 768 parabolic trough
collectors. Each collector will concentrate
the sunlight at between 30 and 60 times its
normal intensity onto a receiver pipe that runs
down the center of the trough. The pipe will
be filled with thermal oil which then passes
through a heat exchanger in the power plant,
turning water into steam which then drives a
turbine to generate electricity. Heat storage
tanks will supply energy to the steam cycle at
night and during times of peak demand.
With the thermal oil reaching temperatures
up to 400°C it partially degenerates and
forms by-products, lowering the heat
transfer. This means that it needs to be
regenerated at regular intervals. GEA
Process Engineering developed fully
automatic distillation plants for achieving
this. Following the successful implementation
at three solar thermal power stations in
Spain this technology is set to be installed at
Shams One.
“Usually the oil has to be taken off site to
a large distillery plant,” explains Sales &
Marketing Manager at GEA, Norbert Streider.
“But we came up with the idea of smaller
units so that the oil could be regenerated on
site. These units are also partially powered by
solar energy.”
He says that, although the distillation
technology itself is not new, the difference is
that these units can heat the oil to more than
300°C for high temperature fractionation.
Compared to conventional plants, the GEA
plant has a higher separation efficiency,
allowing a recovery rate of 98-99 per cent and
the reuse of thermal oil with the highest purity.
Cooling first
One of the main problems of locating Shams
One in the desert is – unsurprisingly – the
lack of water. This means that the exhaust
steam from the power plant cannot be cooled
conventionally, by condensation in a wet
cooling tower. Instead a GEA Heat Exchangers
air cooled condenser will be installed, the first
at a solar thermal power plant.
It was particle physicist Dr. Gerhard
Knies, one of the founders of the Desertec
Foundation, who calculated that the world’s
deserts received more energy from the sun in
six hours than the planet’s population used
in a year. The Desertec Foundation is a nonprofit
organization committed to promoting
clean power from the deserts.
It is part of the Desertec Industrial Initiative
(Dii GmbH) – a consortium of European and
Algerian companies – which plans to set up
a vast network of solar and wind farms in
the desert regions of northern Africa and
transmit the electricity via high-voltage direct
current cables. If successful, it could provide
15 per cent of Europe’s electricity by 2050.
Construction of the first Desertec solar farm
is due to begin in Morocco in 2012. This,
together with the Shams One project, is
proving that the idea of capturing the power
of the desert sun is no mirage.
GENERATE MAGAZINE ISSUE 15 3