World's largest solar plant powers up

Alasdair Fotheringham - THE INDEPENDENT
03 January 2012 11:37:54 Oman Time

Just under a month ago, on an empty mountain plateau in Andalusia, the last of 600,000 parabolic mirrors were connected, and Andasol, the world’s largest solar power station, become operational. It is, as it glints in the Spanish sun, a shining example — literally — of what renewable energy offers.

Big almost beyond belief, it is powerful, clean and looks unlike any power station you could ever imagine. Spread over terrain which covers the equivalent of 210 football pitches, there is nothing to see behind the security fences and drainage ditches but interminable lines of gleaming, eerily silent, parabolic mirrors.

They gyrate simultaneously to follow the sun’s path through the sky — for all the world like an enormous Star Wars android army awaiting orders from above to destroy the local populace.

Joint Venture

The bleak, empty flatlands of the Guadix plateau, 30 miles from Granada, were chosen by the backers of Andasol, a joint venture by four German companies, as the location for their €350m investment because, at 1,100 metres above sea level, Guadix’s atmosphere is clearer and less turbulent than lower altitudes.

Other plus points include an ample underground spring system, which supplies water for the turbines, as well as 2,000 hours of sunlight per annum. And if a conveniently close high-voltage power line was an indispensable factor, so too was the degree of local government support. For all these reasons, if solar power is going to work anywhere, it’s going to work here. But there are clouds on the horizon.

When Rainer Kistner, Andasol’s director, talks about business prospects, he can find little cause for celebration. The source of his woes are the so-called feed-in tariffs, the indirect government subsidy which acts as the financial lifeblood for renewable energy projects. They were slashed by half last week in the UK, and, Kistner fears, they face equally dismal prospects in Spain, too.

“In the future, we know that tariffs will go down. Dramatically,” Kistner gloomily predicts. “It cannot affect existing power plants” — such as Andasol — “but the government has to give some sort of guarantee to the investors. It can’t say it’ll pay so many euros per kilowatt hour... for the next 25 years and two years later say ‘Sorry, but we’ll give you only half of this’.”

Spanish and UK solar energy are not alone in facing an imminent crisis.

“Continuing economic uncertainty is pushing a low-carbon economy further out of reach,” said Juan Costa Climent, Ernst & Young’s global climate analyst. And the International Energy Agency’s chief economist, Fatih Birol, warned recently in the Spanish newspaper El País that “renewable energies are going through a very difficult period”.

Andasol’s Kistner recognises that renewal energy subsidies have been part of the political discussion on how to reduce Spain’s deficit, but he points a finger at the “big electrical companies who would like to lay the blame on renewable energy companies for the increase in price. They’ve already reduced the tariff for photovoltaic solar energy.

The real victim of these cuts and the blame games between the electrical companies, as ever, is the environment. While countries such as Canada abandoned the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions last week, Andasol’s production alone prevents nearly 500,000 tonnes of CO2 from being pumped into the atmosphere per annum. And while some media reports say Andasol’s output of 150 megawatts is relatively modest, it still provides enough energy for a city of half a million inhabitants.