AORA Solar CEO Zev Rosenzweig says he is more ready than ever to take on the world. His company’s hybrid solar thermal technology, which was launched in prototype test form in both Kibbutz Samar, Israel and Spain, has been revised and reconfigured based on a series of tests and is now ready for the global market. In an interview with Green Prophet, Rosenzweig said the company fully retrofitted about a dozen features of its 100 kW thermal solar tower system, including aspects of both the heliostats that collect thermal energy from the sun and the tulip-shared tower at the center that collects the heat and contains the system’s generator.

The new heliostats are smaller and cheaper than the previous ones, allowing for more direct reflection from the sun to the tower, and are made in Israel. Smaller mirrors, Rosenzweig said, allow for rounder reflection patterns, which means more of the energy can be collected by the tower, as opposed to larger mirrors that create a more oval-shaped reflection.

Unlike other solar thermal plants, that store the sun’s energy for use at night with molten salts or other heat-storing mediums, AORA’s tower churns a generator when the air inside its tulip-shaped tower reaches 1000 degrees Celsius. If a cloudy or rainy day lowers the temperature inside the tower, or if its nighttime and the sun is down, the tower’s mechanism automatically begins to burn gas that continues to power the generator.

“Our philosophy is that storage is inefficient and instead of storing energy we burn the gas during non-solar times. That is a much more efficient use of resources,” Rosenzweig said.

Other retrofits to the system include changes to the solar receiver itself, which now–at a newer larger size–can dissipate heat more effectively than the previously smaller model that would sometimes overheat and even soften the metal of its walls, and a new window in the solar receiver tower whose shape can capture even more of the heliostats’ sunlight. The new window was a major point of success for AORA, Rosenzweig said, because it required special certification and was tested at extremely high pressures and temperatures to prove its fortitude.

Rosenzweig said he hopes that AORA’s tower can soon be filled with biofuel as the back-up for solar instead of a fossil fuel, like natural gas. But for the time being, the improvements to the solar system will allow for a bigger percentage of the system’s 100 kW to be powered from the sun.

He added that the new system is more stable than before.

“We haven’t had a shutdown or none performance in the month that we’ve been operating it since the retrofit,” Rosenzweig said of the Samar plant, which is already grid-connected a feeding 100 kw/hour into the Israeli national electricity grid.

With Israel’s incentives for solar somewhat stagnant, AORA is looking to the international market to sell its product. Rosenzweig said the company has already scouted out locations in Mexico and in Arizona, US, but the challenge has been finding local teams to help with development at those sites.

“We came back from Mexico and there is tremendous potential there but we need a team in Mexico, and finding the team is almost harder than building [the solar tower],” he said. Rosenzweig added that scaling AORA globally will also cause more wear and tear on the company’s employees, something he called “a huge cost associated with doing business internationally.”

He said he hopes the Israel government will begin to support solar power more aggressively, but noted that for green technology to work, a mixture of different technologies is necessary.

“We hope as our system has more of a demonstrated record, we’ll be able to convince the Israeli government that they should be supporting their own domestically generated technology,” Rosenzweig said.

The post New And Improved AORA Solar Tulips Turns To Global Market appeared first on Green Prophet.

Masdar, the holistic and progressive renewable energy company from the UAE’s capital Abu Dhabi, and SENER, a leading engineering and construction firm in Spain have formed a joint venture, Torresol Energy, that just inaugurated their Gemasolar Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) project; the first commercial plant in the world to use molten salt thermal storage in a central tower configuration using a heliostat, which will give it a capacity factor of 75%, which is almost on a par with nuclear plants.

Gemasolar is the first of three projects that the newly formed partnership has financed at $1.4 billion US. Raising this amount for first of its kind technology at commercial scale shows what Masdar and SENER are jointly capable of as leaders in strong, credible solar technology.

The first of the three plants, the 20 MW Gemasolar project in Fuentes Andalucía, Spain, will power 100 percent of 27,500 Spanish households’ electricity needs, all day and most of the night, under a 25-year regulated tariff by the Spanish Government.

Storing the heat produced by the solar reflectors will enable the plant to supply energy to the grid on demand for at least fifteen hours a day, because molten salt can retain 99% of the heat stored in it for up to 24 hours.

Gemasolar will be the first commercial plant in the world to use molten salt both as the transfer fluid and the thermal storage in a central tower configuration using a heliostat field of mirrors to reflect the sun. (Molten salt storage with parabolic trough CSP has been only very recently pioneered, too.)

It will produce a net total of over 110 gigawatt-hours a year operating for a total of 6,450 hours a year at full capacity, the equivalent of a coal plant burning 89,000 tons of lignite. The plant is expected to save more than 30,000 tonnes of CO₂ emission a year, helping Spain contribute to Europe’s 2020 climate and energy targets which aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20%.

Two thousand six hundred and fifty two sun-tracking heliostats, that took seven months to build, are arranged in concentric rings around the tower, with the furthest away situated at a distance of about one kilometer. Each has a mirror surface of 120 square meters.

Because salt is the transfer fluid (rather than oil) it can reach operating temperatures of over 500°C, much hotter than plants with parabolic trough technology using oils. These higher temperatures in turn generate hotter, pressurized steam in the turbine, which significantly increases the plant’s efficiency. Its commercial operation is expected to lead the way for other central tower plants with molten salt receiver technology, an efficient system that improves the dispatchability of electric power from renewable sources.

Masdar CEO, Dr Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, told Business News that the project represents another of its milestones in an endeavor to build bridges with like-minded nations to address climate change. “Abu Dhabi aims to build bridges with like-minded nations to address the world’s greatest challenges, such as energy security, climate change mitigation, and sustainable human development” he said.

“Today is an important milestone in this endeavor. Masdar is working with international partners to develop and deploy the most recent scientific and technological innovations, increasing the role of renewable energy as part of a diversified energy. In this way, we will build on the UAE’s existing international role as an energy exporter by also becoming a global provider of future energy knowledge and expertise.”

Understandably, given this achievement, Gemasolar won the ‘Commercialized Technology Innovation of the Year’ and the Ruban d’Honneur title in the prestigious European Business Awards.

Related stories:

Which Solar Technologies Will Have the Most Investment Appeal
Airlight Energy Brings CSP to Morocco from Switzerland
MENA Cleantech Sees ‘Existential Need’ for CSP in Middle East

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