Concentrated Solar Power

Currently, more than 100 solar thermal power plants are either under construction or in planning on a world-wide basis. More than 80 of these will be in Spain. Francisco Vallejo ­Serrano, the Andalusian Minister of Economic Affairs and Innovation, gave even higher figures during a visit to SCHOTT. In Spain, building applications for seven to eight gigawatts have already been submitted and grid access rights acquired, five gigawatts in Andalusia alone. In order to be able to live up to these high expectations, customer satisfaction is of immense importance. A recent study conducted by the market research institute tns Infratest gives SCHOTT Solar top scores in areas, such as product line, sales performance, speed and reliability of deliveries. Customers, like Solar Millennium AG from Erlangen, Germany, a global planner of parabolic trough power plants, agree: “We used receivers from SCHOTT Solar for the AndaSol projects, the first European parabolic trough power plants in Spain, ­because we were convinced of the high quality of these products from the very beginning,” explains Christian Beltle, Chairman of the Board of Management of Solar Millennium AG. ”We’ve been very satisfied with the relationship and reliability so far and expect production capacities to expand quite considerably so that we can rely on SCHOTT Solar as a supplier of these key components once again for our future projects, such as the 150 megawatt hybrid power plant in Kuraymat, Egypt, that we’ve now started working on,” he stresses.

Receiver manufacturing is not the only engagement in Spain for the SCHOTT Group. SCHOTT Iberica has been operating a manufacturing site for specialized glass tubing near Barcelona since 1963. The sales office for the Iberian Peninsula has also been here since 1979. Important projects include the Zerodur® glass ceramic mirror segments for the large telescope on the Canary Island of La Palma or the glass components for the ­memorial to the victims of terrorism at the Atocha Train ­Station in Madrid.