Objective
In this project a PV plant will be constructed and installed. The plant will be formed of 16 concentrators of 75 m long and 2.90 m wide each. The installed peak power will be 480 kWp. This type of concentration plant will be tested here for the first time in the world. In the Joule R&D programme (project n°JOU2-CT93-0418, Euclides) and in the THERMIE demonstration programme (project n° SE/109/91/ES/DE, Toledo PV) all the components have been developed and a 25 m long prototype has been installed and evaluated, with excellent results (measured system peak efficient, 15.1%; measured peak efficiency of the best module, including optical losses, 16.4%). Now the concentrator size will be enlarged to the foreseen economic size of modular units, consisting, each one, in two rows of 75 m long sharing a single tracking system. As compared to the concurrent USA technology for PV concentration, this technology uses reflecting instead of refracting optics, one axis instead of two axes tracking and encapsulated modules instead of bare cells enclosed in a module "housing".
The EUCLIDES demonstration plant will consist of 8 units, each one with 72 m long concentrators, that is 16 concentrators in total, paired in groups of two, that share a single tracking carriage. Each unit is rated in 62 kWp, so 480 kWp in total. Each one of the trackers will have an output of 750 V. In the concentrating module the concentrating cells are interconnected and encapsulated just like flat modules. The concentrating optics are mirrors instead of Fresnel lenses used previously in all PV concentration developments. The tracking system is one axis, horizontal, as it is thought that the one-axis solutions are cheaper than the two-axes tracking ones.
The concentrating schemes present a more constant output than the flat panels, so they might present some advantage in the value of the electricity produced. Cells have been developed by BP and optical system and tracking by IES.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
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Topic(s)
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
DEM - Demonstration contractsCoordinator
38594 TENERIFE
Spain