Spain’s Iberdola Engineering began operations of the 150-megawatt Kuraymat power plant in Egypt, the first power facility to make use of a technology that combines the use of gas and solar energy.
The contract for the plant, valued at 150 million euros ($217 million), was awarded to Iberdrola in September 2007 by the Egyptian government, working through the New Renewable Energy Authority following an international public tendering process.
The Kuraymat plant uses a technology known as integrated solar combined cycle that combines solar energy with a combined cycle gas plant.
The plant will produce power using the combined cycle process at night, while using its 130,800 square-meter solar farm to harness the sun’s energy by day.
It is outfitted with General Electric’s 6FA gas turbine and a Siemens’ SST900 steam turbine, coupled with 160 parabolic cylinder concentrating solar power collectors and 1,900 square-meter solar mirrors.
Kuraymat will be providing electricity to 200,000 Egyptian households while reducing 16,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions. The use of solar energy in the power production process will also amount to savings of around 5,000 tons of natural gas a year.
The area is also to serve as test bed for future mass exploitation of solar resources in the Middle Eastern and North African countries.
Iberdola Engineering is a subsidiary of the Spanish energy group Iberdola. The company is an engineering firm concentrated in working on projects dealing conventional electricity generation, renewable energies and electricity transmission infrastructure in 34 countries worldwide.
Combining gas and solar
A recent development in the use of the integrated solar combined cycle technology was the investment made by General Electric Co. on California-based solar thermal company ESolar to integrate its technologies for the FlexEfficiency 50.
FlexEfficiency 50 is a combined-cycle power plant by G.E. designed to generate power quickly in response to power fluctuations from renewable energy sources. The company planned to integrate the combined-cycle power plant with ESolar’s tower-based solar thermal technology, which will boost the power plant’s efficiency from 61 to 70 percent. (Angelo Nonato P. Cabrera)
