Solar power plant inaugurated in Portugal

Today was inaugurated one of the largest solar power plants in the world here in Portugal, in Serpa.

According to the project builders, Renewable Energy GE, although this is not the largest it can be the most productive solar power plant because of the number of hours of sunshine it can get when compared with its closest "rival" in Germany.

I think Portugal is one of the countries that could use mostly renewable energy sources like wind, Sun, waves, tides, etc., we have good conditions for using all of those energy sources, and being a small country it is relatively easy to reduce the percentage of fossil fuels needed for producing electricity.

Lets hope the trend continues.

Hi,

I thing this is one of the biggest Solar Power Plant in the world, a good example to other countries and that also contributes well to less dangerous emissions to the atmosphere.

Something to be full of pride to be Portuguese.

(sorry for the big image, but do not takes space on ATS server)

brotherthebig.


Mod edit: image to link. It's so big it's messing up the layout of the page.

[edit on 2007/4/9 by Hellmutt]

^^ mod edit in 5, 4, 3, 2 . . .

I have heard nothing about this plant being built. Let's hope the news of this gets reported around the globe. At least someone's doing something.

Originally posted by brotherthebig
Something to be full of pride to be Portuguese.

Thanks, I think we, the Portuguese, should be proud of everything that deserves it and only of our victories in football (soccer) matches.

But it wasn't needed such a big photo.

A Mod will probably turn that into just a link sometime in the future.
(We could use the time it takes as a measure of the interest this type of threads get on ATS )

Did any of you noticed anything about that solar plant?....

It is at least twice as big as the town it is giving power to...

Imagine building a solar power plant for large cities...

The size of the power plant alone would be 2-3 times the size of the city...

Umm, you do know that the photo was taken at an angle right?

news.bbc.co.uk...

The 11-megawatt solar power plant, to be made up of 52,000 photovoltaic modules, will cover a 60-hectare (150-acre) southern-facing hillside.

The solar installation is 150 acres = 0.6 kilometers squared.

According to Google earth, Serpa is roughly 1.12 Km by 1.13 km.

I'm not sure how efficient these panels are, but on average, industrial panels can reach upto 25-30 % efficiency. This can go up quite a bit(and is apparently doubling in efficiency every 7-8 years, if this trend continues they should reach the limit within a couple of decades), and combined with Wind and Tidal, Portugal can definitely meet the majority of it's power demands with renewables.

[edit on 9-4-2007 by sardion2000]

Even then, look at the new, smaller photo, that solar power plant is huge. How big would it have to be for larger cities?

The fact is that solar and wind power cannot meet the demand.

Maybe in the future we can find better ways to maximize the efficiency of such plants, but for now, you would have to build plants bigger than cities in order to provide energy to those cities.

Then comes the problem of maintenance, what happens when hail hits that solar power plant? What happens when clouds persit over these solar plants for long periods of time? Do they have enough batteries as back up power for the city in case the skies are cloudy for a long time?

[edit on 9-4-2007 by Muaddib]

Don't get me wrong. It is good they are trying something like this, but this technology is not the anwser that would stop the whole world from having to use oil. It might be good for small cities, but for large cities it probably won't work.

Originally posted by Muaddib
Imagine building a solar power plant for large cities...The size of the power plant alone would be 2-3 times the size of the city

To 'solarise' a large city you would have to look to using distributed systems along the lines of a neighbourhood generation and supply basis.

Just a quick glance at an aerial photo of any large city and its attendant residential suburbs will give you an idea of the square-footage available in unused roof space alone, thats assuming that a fair percentage of those structures would be capable of having such a system shoe-horned into the existing structure and the capacity for the roof membranes to take the additional loading.

Here in my own home-town as elsewhere over the UK, new residential housing developments such as the Wimpy/Redrow estates are springing up with (in my opinion) one major design flaw...looking at the roofs, there hasn't been ANY attempt by the developers to design-in a community solar-power generation ability (it would be so much simpler to do so as it would negate the extra labour and materials in retro-fitting).

While a single residential home with an off-the-shelf photovoltaic/thermal package may not be able to generate enough power to meet that one households' demand, a networked system on a street-by-street or whole-neighbourhood basis would give the ability for all the output to be sent to the equivalent of a community sub-station, and then distibuted back to the houses as needed...any excess can be sent to supply the national grid and earn money to offset the costs of providing other community services (eg: street lighting, refuse collection, etc)

There are other possibilities that become apparent if a little lateral-planning is applied...
For instance, the many thousands of miles of railways and motorways in the UK have the potential to be used as solar generation sites. Just a couple of hundred or so miles of motorway/railway-embankments lined with solar-systems would make a significant offset to the massive amounts of electricity needed to keep the electrified portions of the national rail network running or the motorway-lighting network supplied..

Originally posted by sardion2000
Umm, you do know that the photo was taken at an angle right?

The solar installation is 150 acres = 0.6 kilometers squared.

According to Google earth, Serpa is roughly 1.12 Km by 1.13 km.

So, it's effectively producing 18MW/KM squared? (11MW/0.6KM=18MW/KM)

I did a quick search for coal stations and found the Big Bend Power Station in Florida.

That can produce 1800MW and is situated on a site of roughly 6km squared. Thats 300MW/KM sq.

A LONG way to go before Solar can compete in terms of power production, without covering the planet in solar panels.

Isn't there another form of solar power that doesn't use photovoltaic cells, but rather reflectors and a furnace? Anyone know what power they can chuck out?

Originally posted by stumason
Isn't there another form of solar power that doesn't use photovoltaic cells, but rather reflectors and a furnace? Anyone know what power they can chuck out?

The solar powerstation shown in the photo in BtB's post looks like a parabolic-trough array, although there are systems in use that reflect the radiation to a central reciever station.

This is one of the most informative e-books that I've found on 'solar mechanics' that explains the pros/cons of each system, scientific theory, and design methodology.

well worth a read, and easy to understand too

Originally posted by Muaddib
It is at least twice as big as the town it is giving power to...

The power plant is not giving power only to that small village.

That village, Brinches, has only 1,172 inhabitants and the power plant produces enough power for 8,000 houses.

Originally posted by MuaddibWhat happens when clouds persit over these solar plants for long periods of time? Do they have enough batteries as back up power for the city in case the skies are cloudy for a long time?

That area of Portugal has around 3,000 hours of sunlight per year, that was one of reasons that area was chosen.

And they do not need to have batteries as back-up power, it doesn't work like that. The power plant is connected to the national electric network and its output is injected in the national network regardless of its production.

That is exactly the same situation as with any other power plant, if it wasn't so, what would they do when they needed to stop a huge power plant?

If the ultimate goal is to replace coal power plants with solar power plants, you will need backup batteries, or at least being able to share the power generated from one region to be used on another region which is not generating enough power due to cloud cover, storms, etc.

Such a project, sharing power between different regions would need such solar power station to generate voltages of 230 kV or higer, it could be 110 KV for the regions that are closer. Sharing power between regions also entails loss of power due to long distance transmission loss.

In a country like the U.S. the loss is about 7.2%, in the U.K. around 7.4%.

Meanwhile solar plants might be good for a city like Serpa, it is not the anwser the world needs to substitute power sources. More so when such powerplants are dependant on the weather.

Who knows, I could be wrong, but i don't see solar power plants substituting coal/nuclear plants any time soon, at least not for large cities.

You also have to remember that there are countries/regions that don't have so many sunny days. In winter in some parts of the States I have seen the skies cloudy for days and weeks. In Russia it is worse.

Solar power plants are not the anwser the world needs. It might be for cities like Serpa, we might find out differently when the weather does not agree, but the rest of the world is going to need some other alternative source of power.

[edit on 9-4-2007 by Muaddib]

BTW, Stumanson is right. You would need a solar power plant to be around 16.7Km2 to be able to generate the same amount of power as a powerplant such as Big Bend, and that is if the weather permits.

Originally posted by Muaddib
If the ultimate goal is to replace coal power plants with solar power plants, you will need backup batteries, or at least being able to share the power generated from one region to be used on another region which is not generating enough power due to cloud cover, storms, etc.

I don't think that anyone of those involved in projects like this is expecting a replacement of coal power plants by solar power plants.

In Portugal, for example, that area of the country has many hours of direct sunlight per year, but on the coast, where they do not have as much sunlight as in that area, they could use wave or tide power to help reach the needed output. In other areas they already use wind power, and Portugal was a country that, at least in the 1970s, had a bigger percentage of electricity produced by river dams than that produced by fossil fuels power plants, so we even have that to help reduced the burning of fuel.

good to see this up and running. I also saw a new wave electricity generator is being tested off the coast of portugal

in scotland we have alot of wind & rain which makes it a good opportunity for renewables. But not so much sunshine

March 2007 :
Hydro power 1344MW
Wind power 1039 MW (701 turbines)
Wave power 0.27MW (2 test projects)

not too bad were looking to do alot more in future. Especially with wave & wind.



[edit on 11-4-2007 by yeti101]

Serpa Portuguese Solar Power Plant

Hi,

Sorry for the big image from previous posts, but this small one is the real Portuguese Solar Plant, some news articles use others images.

The Solar Plant site is also available in English www.catavento.pt... (just click in the English flag) with nice pictures and descriptions of the project.

yeti101, sunshine is not Portugal exclusive, but we have a lot and I like that! The summer is approaching…

Portuguese Plant Solar tracking system

That does not solve all the energy problems, but is a good start.

More references:
. www.electricityforum.com...
. www.renewableenergyaccess.com...

[Viva ArMaP, aguentaste-te à bronca]

brotherthebig.