In the middle of the Atacama desert, the driest and with the highest solar radiation in the world, chili just opened the first thermal plant from Latin America, Cerro Dominador. The project aims to achieve committed carbon neutrality by 2050.
In a circular area of more than 700 hectares, 10,600 heliostats (mirrors) surround a 250-meter-high tower. At the top, the sun’s rays are reflected.
There is located a receiver that contains molten salts, which are heated to more than 560 degrees Celsius to generate water vapor that it drives a turbine that has a power of 110 megawatts (MW) of clean electricity.
This infrastructure is combined with an adjacent photovoltaic plant and both add a total of 210 MW of renewable energy.
One of the most distinctive characteristics of this solar thermal project is that molten salts can store energy for up to 17.5 hours, allowing the system to continue to operate even without direct sunlight.
Aerial view of Cerro Dominador, the solar thermal plant that Chile inaugurated. Photo: AFP
Energy saving
“It will allow us to save more than 600,000 tons of CO2 emissions a year. That is equivalent to what 300,000 cars emit in a year,” the president of Chile, the conservative Sebastián Piñera, was enthusiastic during the inauguration of the project, whose construction started in 2014.
Tendered by the Spanish companies Abengoa and Acciona, the thermosolar plant is located near the municipality of María Elena, about 200 kilometers east of the coastal city of Antofagasta, in the middle of the Atacama desert. about 3,000 meters above sea level, in the north of the country.
Piñera affirmed that this is a new step in Chile’s commitment to renew its energy matrix by 2050 and by then achieve the carbon neutrality assumed in the Paris Agreement on climate, which means being a country with zero net CO2 emissions.
To fulfill the commitment, added the president, Chile focuses its efforts on decarbonizing the energy matrix replacing coal with clean energy, electrifying public transport and improving energy efficiency, along with protecting and increasing forests.
“In 2021 we are going to inaugurate more clean energy projects in Chile than in the entire previous history of our country because this is an urgent challenge,” said Piñera.
Government bet
The Chilean president highlighted in his speech that Cerro Dominador is one of the projects with which the country seeks to become a world benchmark in the generation of clean energy.
“Chile was a country poor in the energies of the past, we had little oil, little coal, little gas, but immensely rich in the energies of the future. We have the deserts with the highest radiation in the world,” said Piñera.
“The best winds in the world, the geothermal energy that comes from volcanoes, the tidal energy that comes from the sea, added the president.
The president of Chile, Sebastián Piñera, with his ministers of Energy and Environment, the CEO of Cerro Dominador; Fernando González, and other officials, this Tuesday. Photo: EFE
Among the most important initiatives is the Government commitment to be a world reference in the generation of green hydrogen, highly consensual worldwide as a fuel to replace the current ones based on fossil fuels and pollutants.
Green hydrogen
The idea is take advantage of all renewable energy sources in Chile to produce hydrogen, through an electrolysis process, which is already being carried out, but making it “green” by substituting the fossil fuels currently used in the process with clean fuels generated from renewable energies.
Last week, during the CEM12 / MI6 climate forum, which Chile was the virtual host, the country, together with the United Kingdom, Australia and the European Union, pledged to drive the shift towards the competitive use of green hydrogen as fuel.
“Chile is a country that has a very special responsibility. Chile has a firm commitment to making its contribution so that humanity can overcome the crisis of climate change and projects such as Cerro Dominador are a contribution in the right direction,” said Piñera.
Source: AFP
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source https://pledgetimes.com/2021/06/cerro-dominador-chile-opens-the-first-thermosolar-plant-in-latin-america/
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