Golmud CPV Solar Park is a 138 MW_p (~110 MW_AC)

concentrator photovoltaics Concentrator photovoltaics (CPV) (also known as concentration photovoltaics) is a photovoltaic technology that generates electricity from sunlight. Unlike conventional photovoltaic systems, it uses lenses or curved mirrors to focus sunlight onto ...

power station located near Golmud City in

Haixi Prefecture Haixi Mongolian and Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (; mn, ᠬᠠᠶᠢᠰᠢ ᠶᠢᠨ ᠮᠣᠩᠭᠣᠯ ᠲᠥᠪᠡᠳ ᠦᠨᠳᠦᠰᠦᠲᠡᠨ ᠦ ᠥᠪᠡᠷᠲᠡᠭᠡᠨ ᠵᠠᠰᠠᠬᠤ ᠵᠧᠦ; bo, མཚོ་ནུབ་� ...

Qinghai Province Qinghai (; alternately romanized as Tsinghai, Ch'inghai), also known as Kokonor, is a landlocked province in the northwest of the People's Republic of China. It is the fourth largest province of China by area and has the third smallest pop ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

. It is the

largest Large means of great size. Large may also refer to: Mathematics * Arbitrarily large, a phrase in mathematics * Large cardinal, a property of certain transfinite numbers * Large category, a category with a proper class of objects and morphisms (or ...

operating CPV facility in the world, and was constructed in two phases by

Suncore Photovoltaics Suncore Photovoltaic Technology Company Limited ("Suncore") is a solar energy company that specializes in concentrator photovoltaics (CPV), an emerging photovoltaic (PV) technology. The company manufactures, develops, and finances CPV systems f ...

starting in 2012. It is situated at an elevation of about 2,800 meters (9,200 ft) on the

Tibetan plateau The Tibetan Plateau (, also known as the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau or the Qing–Zang Plateau () or as the Himalayan Plateau in India, is a vast elevated plateau located at the intersection of Central, South and East Asia covering most of the Ti ...

near the

Gobi Desert The Gobi Desert (Chinese: 戈壁 (沙漠), Mongolian: Говь (ᠭᠣᠪᠢ)) () is a large desert or brushland region in East Asia, and is the sixth largest desert in the world. Geography The Gobi measures from southwest to northeast an ...

with several other conventional

photovoltaic power station A photovoltaic power station, also known as a solar park, solar farm, or solar power plant, is a large-scale grid-connected photovoltaic power system (PV system) designed for the supply of merchant power. They are different from most building- ...

Facility details

The park includes the 270 acre 57.96 MW_p Golmud 1 unit located 7 km south of the airport, and the 370 acre 79.83 MW_p Golmud 2 unit located about 27 km east. Golmud 1 consists of 2300 dual-axis Suncore CPV-Gen3.5 solar tracking systems divided into 100 sections. Golmud 2 consists of 3168 systems divided into 120 sections. For the majority of sections at both units, there are 23 systems connected

in parallel Two-terminal components and electrical networks can be connected in series or parallel. The resulting electrical network will have two terminals, and itself can participate in a series or parallel topology. Whether a two-terminal "object" is an ...

to a central grid-connected 500 kW Growatt

inverter A power inverter, inverter or invertor is a power electronic device or circuitry that changes direct current (DC) to alternating current (AC). The resulting AC frequency obtained depends on the particular device employed. Inverters do the opp ...

. For a fifth of sections at the second unit, 40 systems are connected to a central 1 MW Chint inverter. Each system supports 56 DDM-1090X CPV

modules Broadly speaking, modularity is the degree to which a system's components may be separated and recombined, often with the benefit of flexibility and variety in use. The concept of modularity is used primarily to reduce complexity by breaking a sy ...

which are each rated to produce 450 W_p. Each module contains 15

Fresnel lens A Fresnel lens ( ; ; or ) is a type of composite compact lens developed by the French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel (1788–1827) for use in lighthouses. It has been called "the invention that saved a million ships." The design allows the c ...

es to concentrate sunlight 1090 times onto approximately 1 cm²

multi-junction solar cell Multi-junction (MJ) solar cells are solar cells with multiple p–n junctions made of different semiconductor materials. Each material's p-n junction will produce electric current in response to different wavelengths of light. The use of multiple ...

s, allowing 28% module efficiency which is greater than other photovoltaic power plants. The Gen3.5 tracker system is especially notable for its tilt and roll design, which is unique among the trackers used by other CPV vendors. The same system is utilized at the 1.21 MW_p Eubank Landfill Solar Array in New Mexico, and at the 1.26 MW_p Evora Landfill facility in Portugal.

Electricity production

A study of electricity production conducted over an 18-month period following commissioning of Golmud 1 in September 2013 showed performance at both units stabilizing within about 10% of expectations relative to measured DNI. The authors' data over the final 12-month period is reproduced from their graphs in the tables below, and also shows production when including their suggested 0-15% correction for system optimization activities during the first several months of operation. This result extrapolates to combined annual production at both facilities of about 175

GW·h A kilowatt-hour (unit symbol: kW⋅h or kW h; commonly written as kWh) is a unit of energy: one kilowatt of power for one hour. In terms of SI derived units with special names, it equals 3.6 megajoules (MJ). Kilowatt-hours are a common bil ...

. The authors' also note that the DNI measurements during the study period were generally 20%-30% lower than historical and regional DNI, a trend they speculated to be caused by a known recent increase in the level of airborne particulates in the Golmud locality.

References

External links

VIDEO: Golmud Plant in Operation

Suncore Brochure
Buildings and structures in Qinghai Photovoltaic power stations in China Science and technology in the People's Republic of China {{PRChina-powerstation-stub

Facility details

Electricity production

See also

References

External links