Solar Millennium CEO Christoph Wolff told shareholders of the company’s intention, “to generate synergy effects by building not only parabolic trough power plants, but also applying other technologies for the use of solar energy in major power plants around the world in the future.” Wolff, who unveiled the strategic shift at the company’s annual shareholders' meeting in Erlangen, Germany in mid-May, said that the new technologies being explored were photovoltaics and power towers.
Photovoltaics, Wolff said, would be used in rough terrain that is unsuitable to parabolic troughs, which require a level surface. PV panels would also be used around the borders of existing solar thermal power installations. The CEO said that Solar Millennium would, "cooperate with experienced photovoltaic partners,” and that, “the cells are to be purchased on the global market.”
While Solar Millennium is best known for its successful parabolic trough power plants, which it has built in Spain, North Africa, and The United States, the company has experimented with other technologies in the past, notably solar chimneys. The solar chimney, which the company has abandoned for the near term citing the technology’s high cost, takes advantage of convection to create an updraft in a tall chimney which drives a turbine (think: horizontal windmill). It may have jettisoned the solar chimney for now, but Wolff said that the company had established its own research and development team to develop solar tower technology. Like parabolic trough systems, solar towers use reflectors to concentrate solar radiation on a small area, producing heat which can be used to drive a conventional steam turbine. Whereas solar troughs concentrate the sun's rays along a line – the collector tube in the focal line of the parabolic trough – Solar towers concentrate reflected solar radiation onto a single point on top of a tower using heliostats, mirrors that track the sun.
Solar Millennium did not provide a timeline or further details about the implementation of the company's planned expansion into the new technologies.
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