Chile: inauguration of the largest solar thermal power plant in Latin America COMMENTS

Chile inaugurated on Tuesday the first solar thermal power plant in Latin America, in the Atacama desert (north), the driest and sunniest in the world, a project which should help the country to reach carbon neutrality by 2050.

Over a circular area of ​​more than 700 hectares, 10,600 mirrors surround a tower 250 meters high, the top of which is bombarded by the rays of the sun.

A tank containing molten salts is thus heated to more than 560 degrees to produce steam which drives a turbine generating 110 megawatts of clean electricity.

This infrastructure is combined with an adjacent photovoltaic power plant, and the two together provide a total of 210 megawatts of renewable energy.

This project, called “Cerrado dominador” (the dominant hill), has the particularity of being able to operate 24 hours a day, even in the absence of the sun, because the molten salts generate energy for 17.5 hours.

“This will allow us to save more than 600,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year. This is the equivalent of what 300,000 cars emit in one year,” said Chilean President Sebastian Piñera at the inauguration of the project, whose construction began in 2014.

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This project by the Spanish companies Abengoa and Acciona was built near the municipality of Maria Elena, about 200 kilometers east of the coastal town of Antofagasta, in the middle of the Atacama Desert, about 3,000 meters altitude.

Mr. Piñera said this is a new step in Chile's commitment to renewing its energy matrix by 2050 and achieving carbon neutrality by that date as foreseen by the Paris climate agreement, c ie to be a country without net CO2 emissions.

“Chile was a country poor in the energies of the past, we had little oil, little coal, little gas, but is immensely rich in the energies of the future. We have the deserts with the highest radiation in the world (…), the best winds in the world, geothermal energy that comes from volcanoes, tidal energy that comes from the sea,” the Chilean president said.

Chile also wants to become a benchmark in the production of green hydrogen, which is widely recognized around the world as a fuel to replace polluting fossil fuels.

At the CEM12/MI6 climate forum, which Chile hosted virtually, the country pledged alongside the UK, Australia and the European Union to promote green hydrogen as fuel.

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