Catching the rays: my part in Morocco’s renewable-energy revolution
Soukaina El Idrissi Faouzi works to optimize the performance of the world’s biggest working solar farm
“I am a performance engineer at the largest operational solar complex in the world: the Noor plant, near the city of Ouarzazate in Morocco. Its four sites have a combined capacity of 580 megawatts, which offsets more than 770,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per year.
The site where I work uses concentrated solar power technologies. To generate power, large parabolic mirrors direct sunlight onto tubes filled with oil. As the oil warms, it exchanges energy with water, which is converted to steam. This drives a turbine to generate electricity, some of which is stored in molten salts.
In this photo, I am inspecting a module for one of the units that collects sunlight. Each module contains 32 mirrors, and each collector has 12 modules. There are 3,300 collectors at Noor’s two concentrated-solar sites. The other two sites use a different technology to generate solar power. My colleagues and I inspect the modules every day to ensure that each component is achieving optimal performance. Sometimes we have calibration issues, when the collector isn’t following the Sun in the correct way. At other times, there are broken mirrors, oil leaks or blockages.
But I spend most of my time in the office analysing the plant’s performance data. We use weather forecasts to set targets for energy production, so I have to determine whether we’re hitting those targets and how to modify temperatures, pressures and flows to improve the plant’s performance.
The work we’re doing using renewable energy to drive power production is just the beginning. My hope is that we can apply our experience to future projects around the world. Morocco aims to produce 52% of its energy from renewables by 2030. I’m optimistic we can get there, and that we’ll achieve even better numbers by 2040.”
Nature 626, 1156 (2024)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00548-0
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
This story originally appeared on: Nature - Author:Nikki Forrester
