Count Jacques de Lalaing on Solar Power Group's Linear Fresnel Solar Thermal

Beyond Zero Radio talks to Managing Director Solar Power Group, Count Jacques de Lalaing about Solar Power Group’s Linear Fresnel Solar Thermal technology including SPG’s achievement of steam at 450 degrees Celcius in a Linear Fresnel system – a world first

Jaques De Lalaing podcast

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Rebecca Dunn: We are very privileged to have on the phone Count Jacques de Lalaing who is the founder and the managing director of the Solar Power Group in Germany.

Matthew Wright: Yes, so it's great to have him at 8am in the morning, Monday, but we'll see if we've got Jacques there at the moment. Hello?

Count Jacques de Lalaing: Yes, good morning.

Matthew: Good morning, it's great to have you on the show and to be able to hear about your solar technology that I understand you developed yourself.

Jacques: Well, it's really a team effort. I started in solar in '98 where I had met someone that had been busy in CSP, in concentrated solar power, for a while already, Mr Lieven Ven, he's a former director of Solel, you might have heard the name. This is the company that is busy since the 1980s in CSP, and Solel is based actually currently in Israel. Anyway, long story short, he was busy with parabolic trough technology in the 1980s and then wanted to develop a new approach, and that's when we eventually met in 1998 and started working on this Fresnel approach together.

Matthew: Those parabolic trough plants, they've been well known because they're operating in California's Mojave Desert since 1983 and well and proven. So what you have developed with your team is sort of an advancement on that and it has some particular advantages. Can you describe perhaps the difference between…maybe how a parabolic trough works and then how a linear Fresnel system works.

Jacques: Yes, basically the basis is very much the same in the sense that both technologies are linear focusing technologies, which means that you use mirror to concentrate the sunlight on a tube. And in that tube you can either circulate oil or a molten salt, or do direct steam generation. So the idea is that you use a fluid to take the energy away from the tube and towards a turbine, either directly as in direct steam generation or through another fluid, like oil or molten salt, in which case you need to then…with the hot oil or the hot molten salt generate steam and then run your turbine on the steam.

In our case, linear concentration with Fresnel, we do direct steam generation. So we can generate steam at up to 450 degrees, that is then sent directly to a turbine. The big difference between the parabolic trough on one side and the Fresnel on the other side is we use small, flat mirrors in order to create a virtual parabola. So you can imagine taking one of those large parabolas, cutting it into small parallel stripes, maybe 10 or 12 small parallel stripes, and then putting all these stripes on the same level.

And that idea of cutting up a continuous parabola into smaller sections is something that's not really new, it was already used in 1800. It was invented by a French guy named Augustin Fresnel and he has used this approach to make simpler designs for reflecting mirror but also for lenses. And I don't know if you have that in Australia, I'm pretty sure…it's something on the back of small trucks or minivans, you see these plastic lenses that look a little bit like a fish-eye and allow you to look backwards and downwards from where you're sitting, and these are also based on the same principle of instead of having one large lens, having small parts of that lens cut out and then put all on the same level. That was a new approach definitely in CSP to use the Fresnel approach rather than the large parabolic mirror, which is why we can basically get pretty much the same result but at a much lower cost.

Matthew: Yes, and actually we often have people towing vehicles and they'll have a mirror out the side of their car and then they'll have a little, smaller, special Fresnel mirror to help, like you're talking about, so they can see further back. Also our lighthouses use the Fresnel technique.

But what I am interested in is when did somebody have the bright idea to apply this to generating power? Was that when you first discovered this or was it in the '60s? When did that occur?

Jacques: There has been a first venture in the 1960s, 1970s in the south of France when somebody used this approach of parallel mirrors to replace the parabolic trough. Then Mr Ven, as I mentioned, revived the idea in the beginning of the 1990s and was looking around for people to help him develop this, and that's where I got involved, in 1998, and that's when we founded a company called Solarmundo in Belgium. We were the first in 2000 to install a larger Fresnel field, then still in Belgium. But you also have a parallel initiative running in Australia with Professor Mills which at that time was called Solar Heat and Power and was then transformed into Ausra with American capital [6:40?]. Solarmundo and Solar Heat and Power were the first movers in the field. Solarmundo built the first large-scale pilot installed, and Solar Heat and Power came in and developed a pilot plant in Liddell.

Matthew: At the power plant in Liddell.

Jacques: Exactly.

Rebecca: So was your first pilot plant, was that in Belgium?

Jacques: Yes, the first pilot was in Belgium, it was installed in Liège and then we now have a second plant in Spain.

Rebecca: That's quite amazing that you had the CSP working okay in a rainy country like Belgium.

Jacques: Absolutely, I totally agree, Belgium is not known for its sunshine. At the time we were working a lot on the automation of the mirrors and getting the whole structure to be produced very simply and very cheaply. So we based our first module in Liège so we could be there really every day, otherwise the other possibility was to transport the whole team to Spain but at that time it was not feasible.

Rebecca: But now that you are doing your plan in Spain, can you tell us a bit about that?

Jacques: Yes, that's a venture that we started in 2006, 2007. Maybe let me backtrack a little bit. In 1998 we founded Solarmundo. Then in 2004 I founded my own company to commercialise the technology that we had come up with at Solarmundo. In 2004 I founded the Solar Power Group and then very quickly after I founded SPG I established a very good working relationship with a large industrial company in Germany called MAN Ferrostaal.

It's with Ferrostaal that we established our second pilot in Almeria in the south of Spain. It's on the Plataforma Solar de Almeria which is one of the…I would say the most advanced research centre in Europe for CSP. And we've been running that plant since 2006, 2007, which is an advanced plant compared to the one we had in Belgium of course. We continue to make technical advances, and we've been running it very conclusively there. That's where we achieved the temperature that I was mentioning earlier, 450 degrees, and the 100 bar of pressure. So we do direct steam generation there and super-heated steam.

Matthew: And do you have plans now or a project in Spain for a large-scale commercial one? Spain is having a lot of 50 megawatt plants right now. Have you got anything in the pipeline?

Jacques: Yes, absolutely. We are looking at several projects. In Spain we have two larger projects, one is a fuel saver where we are actually co-firing in an existing plant. When I say 'co-firing', there is no firing really but we are co-generating, let's say, steam in a large [?10:40] plant so that they can reduce a little bit their gas burning. So that's one project that should start construction early next year.

We're looking at also 10 megawatts plants in Spain. We are not yet going for the 50 megawatts in Spain because, as I mentioned earlier, this is a new technology and we need to scale up and we want to go through that 10 megawatt step. Then we have another 10 megawatt in the south of France and a couple of other projects in the range of 10 to 15 megawatt under development also in North Africa.

So the Mediterranean area is really our main focus, but the rest of the world is not left alone, I would say, because we have also some first steps in project development in the USA. There we're working mainly with Ferrostaal. SPG is a group of 20 to 25 people, so we can't overextend our focus, so we work very much with our partner company Ferrostaal, especially in the US.

And then in Australia also a couple of very interesting ventures. For Australia we're actually working with a local partner which is IPS. IPS is a former member of the Ferrostaal group, it then was independent for a while and it's back into the Ferrostaal area of influence. And there I have to say we're very happy with the cooperation. We have been looking at several possible projects with IPS. IPS is not classically involved in renewable, it's a change in the company policy that happened about two years ago.

It's a company that had been really focused on industrial plants and equipment, both for ferrous and non-ferrous industry. And then they also are looking very much in refurbishing material in power plants for petrochemical and mining, and now they have this new venture in renewable where we work together to set up three projects mainly. One is with the mining operations where they need decentralised power, typically in the range of 5 to 10 megawatts. So we found that a very attractive proposal, to set up a couple of Fresnel fields in the outback, an ideal solution for local demand.

Then there is the possibility of fuel saving, and they were very much looking at either coming on to the Liddell plant [parallel to what ?13:52] doing is a very, very strong possibility also. And then a couple of other projects because now that you have the Solar Flagship Program being developed in Australia, there is a lot of new ventures and a new push really in Australia, at least that's how we read it from Europe, a new push towards renewable, and we want to take advantage of that.

Matthew: Going back to the technology, what's very exciting I think is that you are saying that you'll be achieving 450 degrees in a commercial application. Compared to…I know of Ausra and I know of one other linear Fresnel company which is called Novatec Biosol, and they both talk about around sub-300 degrees Celsius. How are you actually able to achieve these temperatures? And what differentiates you in that that's your offering?

Jacques: Basically our two competitors that you just mentioned are going for saturated steam and they are not super-heating their steam, and I would say that the main reason for it is that they don't have a coating capable of handling the 450 degrees. That's one of the developments that we did at Solar Power Group was working a lot on these solar selective coatings which allow you to collect the energy from the sunlight at a very high frequency, so within the regular visible light, and then emit very little in the infrared.

As soon as you heat a body up to 350, 400, 450 degrees, one of the main losses that you incur is not so much thermal losses through cooling with contact to the air but really a lot of radiative losses, and the sun selective coatings allow you to reduce these radiative losses while keeping a very good absorber in the visible light. So that's one of the main differences that we have with our competitors is that we've developed a coating that is holding at a higher temperature and it allows us to reach 450 degrees.

So that is what we have been doing very much at the Plataforma Solar de Almeria is to test this coating and test the regulation of the whole system so that we can produce steam at 450 degrees in a very stable condition, super-heated steam, and of course that gives us an edge over the competitors because the higher the temperature of your steam, the higher the efficiency of the turbine that you hook up behind it.

Matthew: In terms of the mirror field, how wide is each section that focuses its light onto the central receiver? And of course that pipe is fixed in one location, the same as in Ausra. How wide is that and how wide are each of the individual Fresnel sections?

Jacques: In our design the field is 21 metres wide, and the fields are always constructed in subsections which we call tracking units where all the mirrors are being tracked to the sun so that the light can be reflected to the tube. Each of these units is about 100 metres long. So our basic module, I'd say, is 21 metres wide and 100 metres long. Then you assemble these different modules to make up a larger plant. For 10 megawatts, for example, you need about 100 of these modules. And what was the second part of your question?

Matthew: It was just in relation to the size and the breadth, and the other thing…perhaps you could let listeners know that when you're lower to the ground with your mirrors you don't have as much overshadowing on adjacent mirrors so you can actually pack them in closer together. Can you share that?

Jacques: Yes, absolutely. The footprint of a Fresnel field is about 30% to 40% smaller than a parabolic trough field. So we can use the ground much more efficiently.

Rebecca: And the glass is also easier to manufacture?

Jacques: Yes, as I mentioned earlier, we've moved away from the curved mirrors that they are using in parabolic troughs and we are using very simple, flat mirrors that come from a classical float that you can find anywhere in the world. That's also a big advantage of Fresnel is that the local content…that means the amount of material that can be produced locally in the country you're installing your field is much higher than with parabolic trough, because with the parabolic trough comes the curved mirror which is a special technology and this evacuated tube which is a special technology, and then even the design of the trough itself is quite special and needs to be produced centrally, whereas with our system we have cooperation with large rolling mills that allow us to produce our field pretty much anywhere in the world. The company we're working with, for example, three large productions in Europe that can make it, two in the US, I think one in Australia, another one in North Africa and the Middle East. So that's a very big advantage, that you can do a lot of it locally.

Rebecca: Can we ask who you're working with in Australia? Is it the IPS group that you were talking about before?

Jacques: IPS? No, IPS is working really more focused on the turbine side and then of course on the project development right now. We are working on the steel structure with [20:32 WergstalTeam/Steam?] which is a multinational company that has branch offices really around the world.

Matthew: We're speaking to Count Jacques de Lalaing from the Solar Power Group and we're talking specifically about his company's linear Fresnel solar thermal technology.

We often ask our guests how you got involved in renewable energy. Was it something that you really wanted to do or was it just by chance because you met the gentleman from Solel? How did that come about?

Jacques: No, that was really something I wanted to do. I have studied civili engineering, and I did a masters in the US. I studied in Belgium and then did a masters in MIT in Boston, and the focus of my masters was environmental engineering, so it has been something I wanted to do from the beginning. I had not planned, however, to start working with Fresnel. I had thought more of going into photovoltaics at the time, but when I graduated I gave myself a few months to make up my mind and decide. I wanted to travel a bit also. And it was a bit by chance that I met Lieven Ven, and what started as just a discussion on 'What do you think of this idea?' then turned into 'How about setting up a company to do this?' and then, yes, setting up my own company a few years later.

Rebecca: Jacques, we've interviewed quite a few people on molten salt storage on this show and the Friday show previously. Do you guys have any plans for any types of storage with your linear Fresnel system?

Jacques: Yes, definitely. Storage is a very important aspect, especially I would say in the second phase once we have developed the market and once we…I mean, in the first step of developing the market I think there is enough peak demand during the day that you don't really need a storage, let's say, in the next two to three years. You can install a few hundreds of megawatts without storage. However, if you really want to expand CSP, at one point you would need to have a very strong and reliable storage, and that's why we are also working on storage technologies.

Due to the fact that we are doing direct steam generation, the molten salt storage that you have with parabolic trough where they use oil as a heat carrier is not really adapted to what we need because we need to store our energy at a fixed temperature. So what we're looking at is phase change materials, which is basically melting the salt at the same temperature as we are generating the steam.

So in our cycle we are typically first heating up water from, let's say, 80 degrees to about 270 degrees. Then we are generating the steam and that's the step that takes most of the energy. Then the steam generation is at a constant temperature, a constant pressure, around 270 degrees, and then we are super-heating. That steam generation, that constant temperature and pressure, is a critical one for storage because it means that you need to have a storage material where you can get the energy out at a constant temperature. And the only way we see to achieve that is to have a material that is freezing or melting at that temperature. There are a few salts that can do that. So that is what we are looking at with SPG.

Rebecca: That's exciting.

Matthew: And for listeners if you jump on our website at beyondzeroemissions.org , the last podcast we did on Friday was with Anoop from Terrafore in the US and they are actually developing a phase change material for solar storage, so if you want to find out about that certainly check our podcasts.

Rebecca: In addition to Jacques' one.

Matthew: Of course. We're coming to Europe later for the SolarPACES Conference and we'll certainly be listening to our interview again on the plane.

Rebecca: And we hope to see your demonstration plant at the PSA when we are in Spain.

Jacques: Yes, you are very welcome to come over, that's absolutely not an issue to organise a visit down there.

Melissa Crotty: And one final question. We notice that you're a count and this is foreign to us here in Australia, so you could explain to us how one becomes a count?

Jacques: In the case of my family that happened a while ago…

Melissa: So it's inherited?

Jacques: Yes, I inherited it. We got the title of Count de Lalaing in 1550 about, I think, so that's a while ago.

Matthew: Well, you put it to good use. You can be a count of renewable energy now!

Jacques: Exactly.

Matthew: Fantastic. Thank you very much for joining us and sharing a bit about your linear Fresnel technology. It's interesting because some Australians are aware of the technology because of Ausra but may not know that there are three companies in the world that are commercialising this, and I think the fact that you're doing those very high temperatures is really interesting too and it shows the potential and the development path for this technology. So it's great to have you join us and to be able to share that with our Australian audience.

Jacques: Thank you very much, Matthew, and it was a pleasure.

Matthew: Thank you.

Melissa: Thank you.

Matthew: We've been talking to Count Jacques de Lalaing, and he's been telling us about the Solar Power Group. You can check out their website at www.solarpowergroup.com and they've got a lot of information there on their particular technology, and that's well worth finding out, you know, along with your parabolic technology, your linear Fresnel technology and your power towers, between those obviously we're going to be very simply re-powering Australia and that's what's pretty exciting.

Transcript by Julie Burleigh