Al Kuraymat

Product Information

Al Kuraymat - Egypt

The hybrid solar power plant in Al Kuraymat, Egypt, is among the first in the world. For this unique plant, NEM supplied water/steam technology and control technology. NEM has made use of home developed software and innovative engineering technologies in order to handle the interaction between the solar field, oil/water heat exchangers and the HRSG.

The plant near Kuraymat catches solar radiation with a field of parabolic troughs concentrating the heat into a tube system filled with oil. This 'solar field' takes up more than 13 acres and has a thermal capacity of 60 MW. The solar collectors are connected in series and parallel to produce the required heat energy by tracking the sun from east to west, rotating on a north-south axis.
The parabolic troughs (formed from U shaped glass mirrors) will focus the solar radiation on a system of tubing filled with synthetic oil, which is used as the heat transfer fluid for the solar island. The circulating hot oil is heated to 393 °C at 20 bar and used to evaporate water in heat exchangers (supplied by NEM). The produced steam is fed into the steam pipework of the heat recovery steam generator, also provided by NEM. The water/steam and oil cycles are closed systems.
The complex character of fluctuating irradiated heat and the severe cyclic operation (the solar field does not deliver any heat during the night) ask for an extraordinary and flexible technology. The heat exchangers should be capable of processing the rapidly progressing temperature of the solar troughs each dawn, while the HRSG has to be both robust and flexible to accept all the generated steam. The steam production is 170 ton per hour at a temperature of 550 °C and a pressure level of 70 bar.

The plant has a total installed generating capacity of about 135 MWe. Construction is carried out in such a way that it will be possible to increase the solar component in the future to raise the total installed capacity of the installation to around 150 MWe.