Gemasolar - The World's First Baseload (24/7) Solar Power Plant

This video by "Solar Trillions" author Tony Seba shows Gemasolar, the world's first commercial utility-scale solar power plant.

Gemasolar is a 19.9-MW plant with a 15-hour 'battery'. Gemasolar's expected production is 110,000 MWh per year—or about enough to fully power 25,000 households. Gemasolar to produce electricity about 6,400 hours per year - a capacity factor of 75%. Gemasolar's power tower has a height of 140 meters (459.3 feet.)

The receiver on top of the tower is like a radiator that is heated to a temperature of about 565 degrees Celsius (1,050 degrees Farenheit) by the sunlight reflected by 2,650 heliostats with a total reflective surface of about 300,000 square meters (3.32 million square feet.)

http://www.tonyseba.com

• Category

  Science & Technology

[21wf]

The mirrors can't use trackers. They have to face a particular direction to concentrate the heat. But that also means they're not moving with the sun for maximum heat concentration.

In the end, the efficiency is reduced. I guess that is the opportunity cost.

[Tony Seba]

@21wf: the heliostats have to have a precision of measured in the hundredths of a degree so they have to have two-axis tracking. Each heliostat has two motors (if you pause the video you may notice them) each with a built-in pogrammable logic controller (PLC) that recalculates and readjusts the heliostat’s position every 4 seconds.

[fsteel2k]

Those optical light effects seem to be stationary and not an effect of the camera lens. Are they some sort of Rayleigh scattering perhaps?

[Tony Seba]

@fsteel2k: I'm assuming you're referring to the 'halos' around the receiver on top of the tower. That's actually the heliostats being tested. You may have noticed that not all the heliostats are focusing on the tower (some are horizontal and some vertical.) Heliostats are constantly being tested and may go in and out of focus with the tower. Those 'halos' are specific coordinates that heliostats point to as part of the tests.

[TheKfauw]

What's the effect of the plant while running on the battery vs broad daylight?

[Tony Seba]

@TheKfauw: they have technology that continuously decides what is stored in the battery and what goes to the grid. If there is cloud cover or during the evening they draw from the battery. Either way the molten salt goes through a heat exchanger to generate steam that runs a turbine that produces electricity. This process (from steam to electricity) is the same day or night.

[Abnihilius]

WE MUST CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL PYLONS!!!!!

[Jérôme FLOERKE]

Amazing // Thank you for sharing this // Looking forward to this bright future

If you are homo sapiens technologicus you gotta love this and share it forward!

Yesterday I heard this c**p again:

"You should know that the solar energy works only during the day... how are we supposed to power our stuff at night? You see classic power plants are our only option at the moment..."

Well, dude, this is not true anymore. Let the world know

[Trevor Gentry]

Who's making fun of the ant burners now?!

[AdstarAPAD]

The molten salt storage is not a battery. It simply stores heat in the form of molten salt and they pump water through pipes within the mass of salt to create steam to run a conventional steam power generator.

[sevensevenification]

Why, aren't all the deserts in the world full of these beautiful babies? Why don't we have the surface of the moon covered in these??

WHHHHYYYY??

Because government says fuck you that's why.

Well I say, it's about damn time that we take our world back!!

[pipelasercutting]

AWESOME !!  vey nice job

[Eduardo thoreum]

I lived in texas and nevada...they should have one of this and underneath they should built houses and communities so all that energy is immediately consumed? What about the sahara? then charged the batteries and send them to north europe? there are ways if we just send the oil companies to hell.

[darthvader5300]

Any opposition to nuclear power are uninformed people and we Russians knew that. During the first yrs and decades of mass produced cars there are accidents but it didn't stop the car industry but it learned from it's mistakes and results in a Swedish volvo car that went off the German autobahn, rolled over many times and the occupants got out unharmed. The same thing wt nuclear power but unfortunately when the fail-safe technologies were developed people started using past events to destroy it.

[darthvader5300]

Solar energy is vulnerable to natural solar cycles induced climate and weather changes and disruptions and not applicable to the sub-arctic and arctic regions of Russia. 24/7 power? At under what kind of weather and climate conditions? Only properly designed self-recycling fail-safe nuclear power plants that are invulnerable to unpredictable weather and climate while providing 24/7 power.

[Troye Welch]

Not new. This was done in the US about 20 years earlier (10 years earlier using the molten salt storage idea). Google "solar one project" or see (The_Solar_Project at wikipedia). True, the title is technically correct, but misleading since all they did, fundamentally, was add a larger storage tank.