bcb is in charge of the supply, commissioning and start up of an innovative system for measuring solar attenuation in the world’s largest CSP plant, located in Mohammed bin Rashid Solar Park in Dubai. The complex is currently under construction and has 700 MW of CSP (with a 100 MW tower and 3x200MW of parabolic trough collectors) and 250 of PV.

The system for measuring solar attenuation, developed by PSA-CIEMAT for almost 5 years, has been tested in Almería over more than 3 years, and now bcb is going to put it into operation at the Dubai plant.
In tower plants, atmospheric attenuation is highly important since radiation losses can be significant, due to the increasing distances in current plants (R> 1 Km) and the regions chosen for their location (in this case in the desert of United Arab Emirates). The great uncertainty of some of the available instruments and / or their monochromaticity (while this system measures between 400 and 1000 nm), allows us to affirm that, before this development, there was no experimental device that would allow a reliable, robust and industrial measurement. of solar attenuation. It is based on two low noise, high dynamic range digital cameras and a Lambertian target, separated by several hundred meters to measure attenuation in real time.

The measurement of this parameter is crucial, as it is the cause of energy loss due to absorption and dispersion mechanisms, in increasingly larger solar tower plants. It increases with the content of atmospheric water, steam and aerosols (sand and dust in suspensión, for example) in the optical path between the central receiver and the heliostats.