On February 4, the inauguration of the thermosolar plant NOORo I took place in Ouarzazate, within the NOORo solar complex, which, once completed, will be the largest on the planet.
ACCIONA, TSK and SENER make up the construction consortium with the turnkey contract, or EPC, for NOORo I, a high-efficiency modern power station. With 160 MWe of power and 3.5 hours of thermal storage it will supply 500 GWh of solar power per year, enough to meet the demands of 135,000 homes. NOORo I will avert annual emissions of 140,000 metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
The event was presided over by King Mohammed VI of Morocco, and brought together political representatives and executives from the constructor companies, among them the Vice President of ACCIONA, Juan Ignacio Entrecanales, and the General Manager of the Industrial Department of ACCIONA Infrastructures, Ramón Jiménez; the President of SENER’s engineering and construction group, Jorge Sendagorta,and the President of TSK, Sabino García.
Project Manager of the NOORo I EPC Consortium, Carlos A. Ledesma, from ACCIONA, declared: “the construction of this plant in Morocco has represented a major challenge for the country, the developers and the Spanish companies that have contributed our know-how to the construction and start-up of the facility. We are now in a position to say that this large-scale project has been successfully completed after several months of hard work, overcoming many logistical and technical problems that have tested the professionalism of our joint venture, highlighting the fact that we are a leading company in the performance of this kind of technology.”
For his part, the Director of SENER’s Solar Department, Miguel Domingo, pointed out that “for NOORo I, the 29th power station in the SENER pipeline of thermosolar projects, we were responsible for supplying critical technology such as the SENERtrough® parabolic trough collectors – designed and patented by SENER – and the molten salt storage system. This is a technological contribution that we are providing not just in NOORo I, but also in NOORo II and NOORo III, in addition to our part in the turnkey construction of the three plants, one of which includes a central tower with a molten salt receiver.”
Furthermore, the General Manager of TSK’s Energy and Industrial Plants Division, Francisco Martín, highlighted the excellent job the construction consortium led by TSK performed, which allowed the NOORo I power station to start commercial operations just 31 months after the works began. He also asserted that “for us at TSK there rests no doubt that our involvement in the global management of the project and in the design, construction and commissioning; our supplying of the distributed control system, of various pieces of electrical equipment, of the high-voltage line and of the water treatment plant, not to mention the electrical assembly and the I&C, have all been major contributing factors towards the success achieved.”