Concentrating solar thermal power plants is a main concept of this project. Electric power is produced by converting the sun’s energy into high temperature heat using various mirror or lens configurations.

Solar thermal systems, transfer heat to a turbine or engine for power generation.

A Solar thermal system, parabolic troughs, will be selected and designed to concentrate the sun’s rays via parabolic curved solar reflectors onto a heat absorber element – a “receiver” – located in the optical focal line of the collector. The solar collectors track the sun continuously.

The key components of a parabolic trough power plant are mirrors, receivers and turbine technology. The receiver consists of a specially coated absorber tube which is embedded in an evacuated glass envelope. The absorbed solar radiation warms up the heat transfer fluid flowing through the absorber tube to almost 300 C. This is conducted along a heat exchanger in which steam is produced, which then generates power in the turbines. The design output capacity of the power plant is between 10 MW or 30 MW of electricity, at its peak.

Including thermal energy storage systems, the plant can keep working at a constant load. With high performance and low electricity production costs, the outlook for parabolic trough power plants is very good.