Spanish renewable energy company Acciona has come up with an interesting hybrid power generation proposition to generate power from its wind turbines. It has installed flexible organic PV panels on a wind turbine tower in the Breña Wind Farm in Albacete, Spain. Energy produced by the solar panels will be used for internal electricity consumption of the turbine.
Acciona expects the new PV system to cover consumption of the turbine's auxiliary systems. It also plans to get a battery storage system for the tower at a later stage.
One tower in the wind power plant has been covered with 120 solar panels. The AW77/1500 of Nordex-Acciona Windpower technology comes with a 80-meter-high steel tower. The panels face southeast-southwest to capture the maximum possible amount of sunlight during the day. Positioning of the panels is such that these are distributed at 8 different heights covering 50 meters of the tower's surface area.
German manufacturer of organic flexible solar films, Heliatek has provided its 1 mm thick panels for the wind tower. Heliatek has used carbon as the raw material for these panels instead of silicon. While the efficiency level of these type of panels is lower than those made of silicon, Acciona argues these have low maintenance costs and consume less energy during manufacturing.
"The hybridization project in Breña means the optimization of the use of space for renewable energy production and it will enable us to test the efficiency of organic photovoltaics, a technology that we believe has one of the best improvement curves in terms of technological efficiency. That is why we have decided to pilot it," said Acciona's Energy Innovation Director Belén Linares.
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