Electricity generated by the first 160-megawatt portion of the
580-megawatt Ouarzazate CSP plant will be added to the grid in Morocco beginning
in December. The World Bank and the European Investment Bank have
provided about $9 billion in loans for the huge project. ACWA Power was
behind the fundraising and it might be in a position to
acquire Abengoa’s assets, should the Spanish company go bankrupt.
The dramatic drop in the price of PV solar has not been good for concentrating solar power, which is now much more expensive, “The
debate of whether CSP or PV power plants will prevail has been argued
for several years. When looking at current and future price levels CSP
has—and will have—the highest levelized cost of electricity (LCOE;
€/kWh). Due to large price reductions in PV over the last few years the
LCOE of PV is about half the cost of CSP, and will remain so until 2030
[1].”
Another advantage of PV solar farms is that they take less time to
complete. Solar thermal plants can include a way to store a heated
material and can generate electricity at night, however — but
cost-effective energy storage in the form of batteries is becoming more
common too. Once the second and third phases of the Ouarzazate solar power plant
are up and running, it will be able to store energy for about 8 hours.
Also, when the plant is fully operational, it will provide electricity
to an estimated one million homes.
By 2020, Morocco will get about one third of its electricity from
solar power. The government has been pushing to get more from renewables
because it historically has been over-reliant on imported fossil fuels.
Dr. Hakima El Haiti, Morocco’s Environment Minister, explained,
“We are not an oil producer. We import 94% of our energy as fossil
fuels from abroad and that has big consequences for our state budget. We
also used to subsidise fossil fuels which have a heavy cost, so when we
heard about the potential of solar energy, we thought; why not?”
It has been written that Morocco has about 3,000 hours of sunshine annually, so it has plenty of solar power potential.
http://cleantechnica.com/2015/12/19/160-mw-moroccan-concentrating-solar-power-coming-online/
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