The EuroTrough technology, developed by sbp sonne, has been selected for China’s newest Concentrated Solar Power plant in Tibet. sbp sonne will provide the technology and engineering service for this challenging site at an elevation of 4,500 meters in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China.
The ZhabuYe Parabolic Trough power plant in the highlands of Tibet is to be a self-sustaining power plant for the extraction of lithium carbonate by supplying stable electricity and steam.
Once completed the 40 MW power plant will rely on a 16 full load hours thermal storage system for the provision of energy, ensuring that continuous electricity and process heat is available for the local industrial plant for lithium extraction. The collector field will consist of 190 loops – respectively 9,120 single trough collector elements (SCEs) – with an overall aperture area of 621,300 m².
China Shipbuilding New Power Co. Ltd (CSNP), will apply the EuroTrough technology in an environment where no other solar thermal power plant has ever been built. Low oxygen content in the air and low temperatures are only two of the challenges during the installation process.
After having concluded our engineering supervision works, steelwork fabrication has already moved to mass production. The solar collector field in Tibet is under preparation, enabling the start of the collector assembly during the next months.
[Ed: The EuroTrough by sbp sonne, which won the SolarPACES Innovation Award for 2013, and was originally named the UltimateTrough®, was also used in China’s Urat CSP project where it has cut rampup time, and also set generation records]
