India's Concentrating Solar Power Sector Looks Bright for Siemens

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Written by Richard Finlayson, Senior International Editor for Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Concentrating solar power (CSP) technology is moving quickly into its early mature phase, already more serious than an adolescent, but with a bright future still to develop.

Siemens Energy, a subsidiary of Siemens AG (NYSE:SI) (Munich, Germany), is on a roll with its concentrating solar technology in India, where the company has won a 50-megawatt (MW) contract to supply Shiram EPC Limited with 17,000 UVAC 2010 (universal vacuum air collector) solar thermal receivers for a parabolic trough plant to be built in Rajasthan. The receivers will generate the heat for the solar plant, for which Shiram is under contract to the project developer Corporate Ispat Alloys Limited (Abhijeet) (Ranchi, India). The plant is scheduled to start up in the first half of 2013.

In January, Siemens was awarded three contracts to supply a total of four steam turbine generator units for CSP plants totaling 300 MW of generation capacity. The plants are owned by Godawari Green Energy Limited (Raipur, Chhattisgarh), Abhijeet and Lanco Solar Energy (Gurgaon, Haryana).

Siemens UVAC 2010 has extremely high solar absorption and reduced heat loss and product durability aimed to offer solar field developers consistently high revenues and reduced operating costs.

The Abhijeet plant is being constructed as part of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNNSM), which is the Indian government's program to promote solar power installation. The program's target is 20,000 MW of installed solar power by 2020.

M.K. Prasad, Abhijeets's vice president for the solar sector, noted that CSP plants have a long lifetime and that the company can rely on Siemens to provide the plant's thermal heat for many years.

Solar power plants are part of Siemens' environmental portfolio, which in fiscal 2011 had revenues of about $40 billion.

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