Reducing Costs

Parabolic trough plants are expensive. Beginning with the production of curved mirrors, most components require special manufacturing that often cannot be undertaken at the location of the plant. By virtue of the plant design and in order to avoid any overshadowing of the mirrors, vast space is needed to set up large parabolic trough solar fields. Parabolic trough plants also use thermo oil, very contaminant, as a heat transfer medium and therefore require a heat exchange unit to produce steam and electricity. Because of their weight, powerful hydraulics and sophisticated tracking systems have to position the mirrors to follow the sun. The extra weight also requires especially strong foundations. Each of these characteristics of the plant design increases the costs of the initial investment and later operation.

Our Fresnel solar boilers have been designed for maximum efficiency at the lowest costs of all CSP technologies.

Instead of using curved mirrors which need to be manufactured at high costs and transported across long distances, the Fresnel collector features planar, horizontal mirrors, which can be manufactured almost everywhere. Nearly all components can be mass-manufactured with local added value.

The Fresnel system is most compact by the nature of its design. Due to the use of flat mirrors far less space is required to set up the system than for any other CSP plant. Compared to the parabolic trough, the footprint of our Fresnel system is 30 % to 40 % smaller. Although light-weighted, our Fresnel plant is extremely robust and resistant against winds of over 100 km/h.

< previous  | 1 | 2 | 3 |   next >