This week, the world’s largest solar thermal power plant went live in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
Credit: Shams Power
The 100 MW plant – called Shams 1 – is made up of parabolic trough solar thermal collectors that, with over 250,000 mirrors, reflect sunlight onto a pipe filled with fluid.
The sunlight heats the fluid, which then creates steam that powers a conventional steam turbine to generate electricity.
Each year, Shams 1 will displace 175,000 tons of carbon dioxide – that’s equivalent to planting 1.5 million trees or taking approximately 15,000 cars off the road
The project cost $600 million, and took 11,000,000 million man-hours to complete (without any major incidents).
Shams 1 coming online is a huge milestone for Abu Dhabi, an area with massive oil reserves but also with aspirations to generate at least seven percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020.
