Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan President of the UAE (right) looks at Shams 1 CSP plant during the opening ceremony

CSP Today witnessed the inauguration, and spoke with executives from Masdar, Total and Abengoa Solar, who revealed exclusive insight on what distinguishes this CSP plant from others, the planned operations and maintenance, and how CSP features on Abu Dhabi’s future agenda.

By Heba Hashem

Spread across 2.5 kilometres in the desert, the 100 MW grid-connected Shams 1 was unveiled on a very sunny afternoon near Madinat Zayed, in the Western Region of Abu Dhabi, with the presence of Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, president of the UAE and Ruler of Abu Dhabi; and Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashed Al Maktoum, vice president and prime minister of the UAE and ruler of Dubai; as well as other members of the UAE leadership.

“We are now producing close to 10% of the world’s installed CSP capacity and almost 68% of the GCC region’s renewable energy capacity. The UAE has become the first country in the Middle East and OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) to produce both hydrocarbons and renewable energy”, Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, CEO of Masdar, told attendants.

At least 66 national companies contributed with direct contracts to different phases of the $600 million project. “I am very proud of the fact that 66 local companies participated in this project. More than half of them did not even exist before Shams 1. They may be small enterprises today but they will grow with time. All these companies gained experience and knowledge from working with Shams 1 from an early stage”, Dr. Al Jaber said.

Desert maintenance

The vast CSP field of Shams 1 incorporates parabolic trough technology and features 258,048 giant curved mirrors mounted on 768 tracking parabolic trough collectors. These mirrors, according to Abengoa, will last for decades, and will be cleaned with the help of an automated system.

“In this project, we have invested more in equipment to keep the solar plant clean, such as in automatic trucks, in which the only thing the driver needs to do is stand close to the mirrors, and the truck automatically detects where they are and moves an arm so that the brushes clean the mirrors. The machine takes care of everything. That’s the way we do it with all our plants – the only thing is that here, we have more of those trucks”, Santiago Seage, CEO of Abengoa Solar, told CSP Today.

But coming up with a cleaning mechanism was only part of the preparation work. The frequent sandstorms that threaten the efficiency and reflectivity of the mirrors meant that Abengoa had to spend some time in the years prior to the launch, studying the nature of the environment, making field measurements and testing the impact of the sand.

“We have been operating and maintaining plants in many places, including Spain, Morocco, the U.S., South Africa, Chile and Mexico. Shams 1 is our 15th CSP plant, and in the case of this project, we went for parabolic troughs in 2009 because it was a much more commercial technology, more mature and easier to finance”, Seage highlighted.

Abu Dhabi’s Western Region is the centre of the country’s hydrocarbon industry and represents the roots of its Bedouin heritage. But Masdar mainly selected this location because it has the strongest solar irradiance in the UAE, and because of its proximity to the grid connection.

Speaking of challenges experienced during construction, Philippe Boisseau, president of marketing and services and new energies at French oil company Total, said that the project naturally encountered obstacles because it was an innovation. Some of these related to the big mirrors that had to offer very strong resistance to wind.

“Firstly, we had difficulty finding the right location and size of the wall surroundings to ensure that the wind would not jeopardize the CSP quality. Secondly, to increase the efficiency of the plant, we had to increase the temperature of the system to a very high level. This was new and led to some challenges that are now solved”, Boisseau explained.

Natural gas replaces storage

Instead of using energy storage, Shams 1 relies on a small amount of natural gas to boost its efficiency during the day and extend electricity production to the night. By concentrating heat from sunlight onto oil-filled pipes, the plant produces steam, which then drives a turbine and generates electricity. The plant also uses a booster heater to heat steam as it enters the turbine, significantly enhancing the cycle’s efficiency.

“Shams 1 does not use storage because we decided to use natural gas and natural gas is doing here what the storage would do in other places. For this region specifically at this point of time, using natural gas will increase the efficiency of the plant and enable it to produce energy throughout the day”, Seage highlighted.

The main difference between Shams 1 and other CSP plants, according to Seage, is the fact that it uses hybrid technology and the way in which hybridization is done, which is through a gas booster that increases the temperature and provides power when the sun sets. This was not done in any of the hybrid plants Abengoa built in Algeria and Morocco, he says.

Meanwhile, a dry-cooling system was opted for used to reduce water consumption in the arid desert. “Water consumption is one of the main worries with our plants, because we nearly always do them in places where water is scarce. In the case of Abu Dhabi, what we have done was to work on the cleaning systems to ensure that we can recycle as much water as possible. We will recover a large portion - not 100% - but a high percentage of the water and recycle it. It’s the right thing to do”, explained Seage.

The world is our market

Masdar has other smaller scale renewable energy projects operating in the UAE, and is behind many renewable energy projects worldwide. The commercially-driven enterprise, owned by the Abu Dhabi government, said last year it was looking to invest in Saudi Arabia.

“With regards to projects in Saudi Arabia, we will go wherever projects make sense, as long as there is a solid, reliable regulatory framework and as long as the returns meet our commercial thresholds. Saudi Arabia is one of our target markets. We don’t have a one-size-fits-all approach; in each opportunity we look at the different options and custom-tailor the business model around the needs and regulatory frameworks”.

“For us, the world is our market. We demonstrated a very unique capability in the way we developed projects on the ground in Spain. Shams 1 is a demonstration on how we capitalize on our experiences abroad and on the knowledge gained from them, before transferring that knowledge into Abu Dhabi”, Al Jaber stated.

He continued: “We will allocate the budgets required for any real commercial opportunities in Saudi Arabia and beyond, and we will always make the funds available for reliable opportunities that are supported by the right regulatory frameworks, whether it’s CSP or PV, and we’re also interested in wind power. Masdar will not stop at Shams 1, and there will be many opportunities in the future”.

Using CSP for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) also features on Masdar’s agenda. “We have seen many pilots demonstrated in Saudi Arabia and Oman and even here in Abu Dhabi. We will soon be looking to scale up CSP for enhanced oil recovery. We don’t have a specific opportunity to announce yet but it is part of our agenda”, Al Jaber said.

According to Yousif Ahmed Al-Ali, general manager at Shams Power Company, Masdar is already pursuing EOR experiments. “Masdar is conducting many studies about enhancing oil recovery using CO2 injections, so this is one track we’re keeping an eye on and will continue to follow. The other track is using CSP for EOR, but we believe that it’s better to focus on this project now and improve, and later on we can use the application in other ways”, Al-Ali told CSP Today.

Emiratisation imperative

Creating job opportunities for UAE nationals is going to be a vital element of the Shams 1 project and Masdar plans to foster local skills through onsite training programs. “Personally, I was one of the UAE nationals who worked with CSP projects in Spain while I did my master’s degree. We use the O&M experience that we gained from our joint ventures with Valle 1 and Valle 2 terrosol projects in Spain. In addition to that, in the Shams 1 joint venture, we have Abengoa solar, and they have been operating similar projects for a long time”, Al-Ali explains.

“We started with 30% of UAE nationals at Shams 1, but this number will go up to 40% in the next two years”. This additional 10%, according to him, will be trained through collaboration programs in the Western Region and students will be selected, sponsored and trained at the plant during their holidays, until they graduate and join the company. All the operations team and key maintenance people – around 40 individuals – have already been trained in Spain, he says.

What’s next?

Now that Shams 1 has launched, and with the 100 MW Noor 1 PV plant to follow in the second half of 2013, questions loom whether the UAE will become a CSP or PV market. “CSP is one of the very few renewable technologies that is dispatchable, where energy can be stored as thermal energy and not the electricity itself – that’s a huge advantage. Once the UAE goes big into renewables, they need to balance their energy mix and have some cheap intermittent resources that can be profitable, but they will also need to have dispatchable resources and CSP clearly plays a very important role there”, says Seage.

“There are regions worldwide where hybrid plants make sense – not everywhere – but in regions where natural gas is abundant it’s much easier. In the GCC, hybrid plants using solar and natural gas is a very good idea and I think we will see more of this”, explains Seage, whose company recently built a plant similar to Shams 1 for a mining company.

Solar desalination is another area that Masdar has been looking into. In October last year, Dr. Hassan Fath, Professor of Practice at Masdar Institute, said that the UAE and the wider GCC region will benefit enormously from large-scale solar thermal desalination plants.

“Abu Dhabi needs to build its own solar-driven water production facilities to lead the region in green water production as it did for nuclear and solar power generation. What we are looking for (at Masdar) is new solar thermal desalination plants such as Salsabeel-I (in Saudi Arabia) with 100,000 m3/day capacity. We have the expertise capable of building such a leading solar desalination plant,” Dr Fath said.

Masdar has already developed a strategy for its energy mix in Abu Dhabi, in partnership with the other stakeholders in the emirate – including Abu Dhabi Water and Electricity Company. “This is an evolving document so every year we review and update it based on the economical situation, since prices go up and down. CSP, however, comes with a special feature: it’s dispatchable and reliable, generating electricity at any time, so we will always have it in a new energy mix”. Al-Ali told CSP Today.

Shams 1 was designed and developed by Shams Power Company, a joint venture between Masdar (60%), Total (20%) and Abengoa Solar (20%). The plant utilizes GEA air-cooled condensers, Flabeg mirrors, Schott PTR 70 absorber tubes carrying Solutia heat transfer fluid, Foster Wheeler solar steam generator, and a 125 MW MAN Turbo steam turbine.

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