Sunshine - the Alentejo’s future

In Rosário’s village café, no-one notices the view anymore. Right opposite, some of the 12.780 solar panels installed within 426 towers on two neighbouring plots stretch into the distance. “Now they’re building another (solar) park on the road to the Neves Corvo mines”, one of the local tells.

Of so-called “middle dimension”, this park in the heart of the Baixo Alentejo “is a good example of the kind of projects that Portugal needs”, engineer Jorge Dallot, 56 years old, and technical director in charge of the infrastructure, considers. “According to current thinking, the country doesn’t need megalomaniac multimillion euro public developments. It needs sustainable projects that are financially possible.”

Inaugurated in November 2007, this park involved a 12 million euro investment by the German company WPD AG.

Founded in 1996, WPD AG began by developing wind farms in Germany - now it is busy developing renewable energy projects in 11 countries.

“This photovoltaic park has an installed capacity of 2.15 megawatts. Its annual production is 4.45-gigawatts/ hour. In other words, it creates enough electricity to power the homes of 2.000 families”, Dallot explained.

It’s estimated that the park could function for 25 years – and that it will have paid for itself within nine.

On average, a park saves around 2.100 tons of greenhouse gases (CO2) that would otherwise have resulted from a plant of the equivalent size powered by fossil fuels.

To get an idea of its dimension, the Photovoltaic Solar Energy Centre of Brinches, in Serpa – one of the largest in the world – cost almost 61 million euros and produces nearly 20-gigawatts/ hour per year for REN (the national electricity network).

But that doesn’t make this place any less interesting. The park occupies 22 hectares, and the natural wildlife doesn’t appear put out at all – judging by the way the partridge run between the panels, and the storks fly above. Indeed, in spite of being occupied, the land retains its original function – of pasture. Flocks of sheep graze here and there, between the solar towers.

“This is what we call an abandoned structure – one that doesn’t need anyone here permanently. There are automatic systems that allow us to find out what’s going on using our laptops on the Internet”: a series of cameras watch over the perimeter, so, for sure, our visit was observed in real-time in Bremen.

But on the other hand, in terms of security, risks are minimal. The electrical cables are buried under the earth, there are lightening rods and the whole system shuts off in strong winds.

The panels (mono- and polycrystalline) are made in Japan from a silica base (sand), by Kyocera. They’re not static – they track the azimuth of the sun throughout the day, moving on two hinges.Engines fed by the electricity produced in the park rotate and elevate the panels to optimize their production capacity.

In ideal conditions, the panels turn13.5 per cent of the sun’s rays that they harness into electrical energy.

To avoid the chance of shadows, the towers are spaced 20 metres or so away from each other, on the perpendicular. For every six, there’s one equipped with an electrical box that concentrates the energy produced by the group.

Then what’s needed is to transform the continuous current into an alternate one – which is what circulates on the grid, and via domestic power points. To do this, you need machines called invertors. And that’s where the system hands over to EDP. This process is the one with the most significant environmental impact throughout the day – noise. Even so, it’s not as bad as that made by the much more powerful motocross and quadbikes that plough through the countryside, at full-throttle nearby.

In the command centre, an industrial computer manages the running of the park – its software developed by Siemens. “It’s just like the ones used in factories and nuclear power plants”. Easy to read, the main screen shows three values in real time – meteorological data (temperature and the level of the sun’s rays), the amount of energy produced, and performances of the park.

It just takes a simple touch to the monitor to consult graphs on energy production by the day, month or year. Throughout the day, the energy stored in the panels varies. “Normally, between 10am and 4pm there’s a continuous line. After that, levels begin to fall”, Dallot explains. Contrary to what people might think, spring and autumn are the best times of year as the mild temperatures allow less energy loss.

Given all this, it’s easy to ask – why aren’t there more parks like this one? “No-one is building more parks because the Government, in 2006, limited solar production to 150 megawatts. This applies to everything – from the large centres to the much smaller domestic “micro-generating” projects. I know there are 26 megawatts in licences that were not issued – and of those that were, no-one knows how many were ultimately gone ahead with”.

In spite of this criticism, Dallot faces the future “with a lot of optimism”. “Recently, the Government approved a renewable energies policy for 2010/ 2020. It established very ambitious guidelines for the country – which will put us in the front line. We’ll have to wait and see how it works in practice - giving out private licences”.

Meantime, “it’s not in the country’s interests to simply make its own renewable energy. It has to create an industry – give jobs to people. And it certainly makes no sense to import 90 per cent of the equipment that we install! We have the conditions to make a good percentage of what we need here,” he concluded.

As for the Algarve – where there’s no lack of sunshine, the problem is that land here is held hostage to property speculation. “I was involved with a bid to create a 10-megawatt park in Paderne – but the Ministry for the Environment wanted to make the investor responsible for the removal of 100.000 tons of builder’s rubble that had been dumped there. It had nothing to do with us – it had been dumped by companies constructing the marina in Albufeira! This proviso made the whole project unviable, and we erected the park in Ferreira do Alentejo, instead”.

Another plus point at the park is that the German management is very conscious of the importance of environmental education – opening its doors whenever approached to do so. “We’ve had umpteen visits from schools – from the little ones, to universities!”

In the future, the park hopes to expand and increase production by 10 per cent – enough to benefit in total from the licence they acquired.