The SENER group attended the start of construction ceremony for the Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plant of Bokpoort (South Africa), held on Wednesday 25 September.
The SENER engineering and technology group attended the start of construction ceremony for the construction of the thermosolar power plant of Bokpoort (South Africa), held on Wednesday 25 September.
The project is an initiative of the Department of Energy (DoE) of the Republic of South Africa, and is led by the Saudi Acwa Power company. SENER is part of the group of companies commissioned with the EPC (Engineering, Procurement and Construction) contract, thus being responsible for the building and commissioning of the plant.
The event was attended by political representatives, among them the Mayor of !Kheis Municipality, Paul Vries, and the Commercial Attaché of the Spanish Embassy in South Africa, Enrique Manazanares. SENER was represented by the Director of Operations of the Power and Process sector, Daniel Schmitt, and other people directly involved in the project.
The Bokpoort thermosolar power plant will be a 50-MW facility and will boast the SENERtrough® parabolic trough system, developed and patented by SENER, and a nine-hour molten salt storage system similar to the one that SENER has implemented in numerous thermosolar plants all over the world. The site chosen for the plant lies in the Northern Cape province, near the city of Upington, in the vicinity of the Kalahari Desert, and has magnificent solar and environmental conditions.
To date, SENER has been involved in more than 25 concentrated solar power plants, most of them turnkey projects, in Spain, the USA and India. These projects add up to more than 1500 MWe of installed capacity and annual savings of more than one million tons of CO2. Some of them, already up and running, are veritable technological milestones, such as Gemasolar; this unique and ground-breaking plant can produce electricity around the clock solely using solar energy thanks to its integrated molten salt storage system. SENER led the construction work and provided all the technology for this innovative project, and is also the 60%-owner of the plant through its subsidiary Torresol Energy.
