Displaying items by tag: Solar power

India: Shree Digvijay Cement has executed a share purchase agreement to acquire a 27% stake in a hybrid wind and solar power project from Trinethra Renewable Energy, a power producer, and Continuum Green Energy. It will spend US$1m on the deal, implying a value of US$0.13m/MW. The total installed capacity of the project is 8.1MW.

The hybrid power contract will generate about 37% of total power needed by the plant. When combined with the plant’s waste heat recovery (WHR) system, it will constitute over 65% of the total power needs of the company, representing considerable savings in the cost of power and an improved environment footprint.

Pakistan: Meezan Bank, an Islamic bank, and Burj Solar Energy (BSE) have announced the completion of a US$5m syndicated Islamic finance facility for BSE's portfolio of renewable distributed power generation in Pakistan.

A first tranche of US$3.2m will be used to finance the construction of a 7MW solar power plant for Power Cement on the Karachi-Hyderabad Motorway. The solar power plant will be rented to Power Cement under a 20-year equipment rental agreement to supply the company's cement plant in Nooriabad. It will generate 220GWh solar units for 20 years and, in addition to reducing cost of electricity, will offset 112,000t of CO₂ emissions. The project is expected to start generating power in July 2022.

Germany: Mexico-based Cemex has joined a consortium with Sasol EcoFT and Enertrag that plans to use CO₂ and hydrogen to produce aviation fuel. The project is part of Cemex’s Future in Action program and is part of its plan to develop a carbon neutral operation at its Rüdersdorf cement plant by 2030. The consortium will source green hydrogen generated from wind and solar energy from Enertrag. The CO₂ will come from the Rüdersdorf cement plant, which will provide 100t/day CO₂ in the project’s initial stages. Sasol will then contribute its technology to produce e-kerosene, which, once certified, can be blended to constitute up to 50% of jet fuel.

The Rüdersdorf carbon neutral alliance includes over 20 start-ups, universities, companies from other industries and authorities working to develop industrial-scale solutions achieve the first carbon-neutral cement plant in the world.

Enertrag is a renewable-energy company based in Brandenburg. It operates utility-scale integrated energy plants in 10 countries. Its plants produce electricity and green hydrogen from wind and solar sources.

Sasol EcoFT is part of Sasol Group. It uses its technology to produce sustainable fuels and chemicals from green hydrogen and sustainable carbon sources, via the Power-to-Liquids process.

Pakistan: Lucky Cement plans to install a 34MW solar power plant at its Pezu power plant in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The Balochistan Times newspaper has reported that the 48GWh/yr installation will be equipped with a 5.59MWh Reflex energy storage system. Both the power plant and energy system will be the country’s largest when commissioned. Fossil fuel generation will remain online, but be shut down in the daytime, saving 26,600t/yr of CO₂ emissions.

Spain: A consortium consisting of Cemex España, energy suppliers Enagás and Redexis, renewable power and infrastructure company Acciona and 30 other partners has commissioned Europe’s first solar power-to-green hydrogen plant at the site of Cemex España’s Lloseta cement plant on Majorca. The EU contributed Euro10m to the approximately Euro50m project. Euro3.75 million came from the Balearic Islands Autonomous Community government and Euro2.5m from the Spanish Institute for Energy Diversification and Saving (IDAE) of the Ministry of the Ecological Transition. The project will generate 300t/yr of hydrogen, eradicating 20,700t/yr of CO₂. The hydrogen will primarily fuel city buses in Palma, as well as air conditioning units in public and private buildings there.

China: Anhui Conch plans to invest around US$800m in its Anhui Conch New Energy subsidiary towards the development of photovoltaic (PV) projects. By the end of 2022 the company plans to have installed PV power generation capacity of 1GW with an output of 1bn kWh. Anhui Conch fully acquired the subsidiary in August 2021.

Portugal: Cimpor is participating in a consortium, led by power company Rega Energy, which plans to invest Euro100m in developing scalable green hydrogen production plant technologies. The consortium will deploy infrastructure for its upcoming Vale Hidrogénio Verde Nazaré (NGHV) green hydrogen plant by 2023, including a dedicated 40MW solar-powered electricity grid. It will commission its first green hydrogen plant by 2026, creating 140 new jobs. The consortium aims subsequently to scale up the plant to a renewable power consumption of 600MW. It hopes that, when fully commissioned, the NGHV plant will be a reference project for green hydrogen production.

The data on cement consumption for 2021 in Spain is out this week and it looks promising. As the national cement association Oficemen explained, last year was the sector’s best for over a decade, nearly reaching 15Mt consumption and exceeding the figure in 2019 before the Covid-19 pandemic started. Oficemen also singled out particular strong performance in December 2021. It now expects this growth trend to continue into 2022 with a forecast of 5% to 15.6Mt predicted based on both domestic and infrastructure segments.

Graph 1: Cement consumption in Spain, 2012 – 2021. Source: Oficemen.

The Spanish cement industry reached a peak consumption of over 50Mt in the late 2000s before hitting a near-50 year low in the 2010s in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The market then started to recover in the second half of the 2010s until Covid-19 came along. A report on the Spanish cement market to the start of 2021 that lays out the situation can be found in the February 2021 issue of Global Cement Magazine. The larger news stories since then have been Votorantim Cimentos’ growth in the market through its acquisitions of FYM and Cementos Balboa, and Çimsa Çimento’s final completion of its deal to buy the Buñol white cement plant from Cemex. Each of these stories involve an integrated cement plant changing ownership.

Looking back at Oficemen’s summary describing 2012 depicts a much different dwindling market. However, one commonality it shares with the association’s roundup for 2021 is that it complains about the country’s disadvantage in electricity costs compared to its neighbours. Back in 2012 this was framed as holding back exports. As Oficemen noted at the time it exported 5.9Mt of cement in 2012, less than half the 13Mt it exported in 1983. Jump forward to 2021 and exports are now 6.8Mt. Energy is still a key issue though. Now Oficemen’s president, José Manuel Cascajero Rodríguez, says that the sector’s production costs have increased by 25% since the latest round of electricity price rises began. He then compares the cost of energy intensive industry in Spain unfavourably against France and Germany and calls for a structural change in the Spanish electricity market to make prices more predictable. Cement producers elsewhere in Europe and beyond may share Oficemen’s concerns regard unpredictable energy prices over the last six months but electricity has been a particular issue for Spain for a long time. To take one recent local example, in November 2021 Cementos Cosmos said it was planning to scale down the production of clinker at its Córdoba cement plant as a result of the high cost of electricity.

The other issue that gets raised in Oficemen’s 2021 summary is competition from cement importers outside the European Union (EU) and the necessity of a border carbon adjustment mechanism (CBAM) to take in account carbon taxation for producers within Europe. To jump back a bit, back in May 2021 the EU Emissions trading Scheme (ETS) reached Euro50/t. Then in December 2021 Cembureau, the European cement association, published a calculation predicting that if the EU ETS CO₂ cost made it to Euro90/t then this could represent 12 - 15% of the production costs of cement producers. Well, as readers will have guessed, the EU ETS beat Euro90/t on 2 February 2022 and then rose to Euro96.7/t on 7 February 2022. Answers in an email for when readers think the EU ETS price will top Euro100/t.

All of the above feeds neatly into the week’s other big Spanish news story: Cemex and Synhelion have successfully produced clinker from concentrated solar radiation at a pilot unit at the Very High Concentration Solar Tower of IMDEA Energy near Madrid. It’s early days yet as the process needs to be scaled up but, make no mistake, this is a big story. An interview with the team behind Cemex and Synhelion’s solar concentration project can be found in the December 2020 issue of Global Cement Magazine for more information. The SOLPART (Solar-Heated Reactors for Industrials Production of Reactive Particulates) project in France did similar research a few years ago but it didn’t reach the 1500°C target required to reach the sintering phase where clumps of clinker form. US-based Heliogen has been trying to industrialise concentrated solar energy but not much has been heard about its cement-industry ambitions since it said it reached temperatures of about 1000°C in 2019.

The relevance of an eventual full-scale concentrated solar unit for the entire production line or just the preheater and/or calciner at a cement plant in Spain makes considerable sense. At a stroke energy costs are reduced, diverted to a renewable source and any desired CO₂ capture becomes, in theory, easier and cheaper. Cemex said in the interview with Global Cement Magazine that the tentative next step would be a pilot unit at a cement plant, although, candidate plants could be in the US or Mexico, as well as Spain. Another side of the drive to cut energy and carbon costs can also be seen in a couple of photovoltaic solar projects supplying cement plants that were announced in 2021 for Spanish plants run by Cemex and Cementos Cosmos.

We leave the Spanish cement sector in a growth phase but with plenty of challenges ahead, not least from electricity costs and the mounting cost of carbon. Yet in common with other countries in Europe the industry faces a high-wire balancing act between staying economically viable and inching towards net zero. It’s conceivable that an industrial scale concentrated solar unit at a cement plant in Spain by 2030 might steady the wobbles along the way.

Kenya: Bamburi Cement has signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) with Momnai Energy to set up two solar plants. One 14.5MW unit will be situated next to its integrated Mombasa plant and the other 5MW unit by its Nairobi grinding plant. This will account for up to approximately 40% of the cement producer’s total power supply. Construction of the solar power plants is scheduled to begin end of 2022, after requisite regulatory approvals with expected completion within a year.

“We are elated to be making this step towards switching to more affordable and clean energy that will not only lead to a significant reduction in power costs but also bring us closer to our goal of achieving net zero carbon emissions,” said Miriam Ngolo, Bamburi Cement’s Strategy and Business Development Director.

Other recent sustainability work by the subsidiary of Switzerland-based Holcim has included substituting heavy fuels with alternative fuels like biomass, including rice husks, and other waste material such as waste tyres and waste oil in its operations.

India: Dalmia Cement (Bharat) has commissioned a 14.7MW solar power plant at its 1.3Mt/yr Kapilas grinding plant in Odisha. The producer says that the new power plant multiplies its total solar power capacity in Cuttack District by six to 17.1MW from 2.4MW.

The company said "Furthering Dalmia Cement (Bharat)'s sustainability goal of becoming carbon negative by 2040, this initiative will enhance the plant's energy efficiencies."