New plant will build towers of concrete

mexiconewsdaily.com

 

Concrete towers: greater height, lower cost.

 

Mexico News Daily | Saturday, March 7, 2015

   

Concrete will replace steel in the construction of turbine towers at a new wind farm in Nuevo León.
The Spanish energy firm Acciona Windpower has built its first concrete tower production plant in Mexico, located in General Escobedo, near Monterrey, where it will manufacture tower segments for the Ventika I and II wind farms being built for a consortium that includes Fisterra Energy, Cemex and other firms.

The two new wind farms will have a total capacity of 252 megawatts, powered by 84 3 MW turbines expected to begin operating in the second half of next year. The towers will be 120 meters high.

Concrete has been selected over steel for the new towers because greater heights can be achieved at lower cost. Greater height means access to more wind. The tower segments can be made close to the wind farms, they don’t require specialized labor to build and production and transportation costs are lower.

Concrete prices are also more stable than those of steel, says Acciona, which claims to be a world leader in the use of concrete towers, with 250 now in operation.

The company will operate the Ventika wind farms for 15 years. Acciona currently owns and operates 557 MW of wind power generation capacity in Mexico, which represents more than 23% of the country’s installed capacity.

The tower manufacturing plant employs 300 people directly and 1,500 indirectly.

Mexico News Daily
 

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Mexico hopeful for green energy

thenews.com.mx

Wind turbines sit at a test project at La Venta in Oaxaca. DALLAS MORNING NEWS PHOTO/ALBERTO ROMERO SAUCEDO

BY J.E. COLLINSON
The News


Entrepreneurs and industry experts from Mexico’s burgeoning sustainable energy sector gathered in the capital this week to discuss the opportunities and challenges facing the renewable energy market at the Wind-Power Exposition 2015.

Pedro Joaquín Coldwell, head of the Secretariat for Energy (Sener), said at the inauguration of the conference that Mexico can viably reach its renewable energy targets by 2020, as the energy reforms have allowed many new and competitive actors in the field of energy generation.

Industry experts at the conference said that the goal for the wind energy generation over the next 10 years is to increase installed capacity to 12,000 megawatts (MW), which is 40 percent of Mexico’s entire goal for renewables.

“Mexico’s renewable sector is now starting to gather pace, with continued growth in the wind sector and increased activity now in solar. The recent energy reforms mandate that 35 percent of Mexico’s energy generation should be from renewable energy sources by 2024, which is creating significant opportunities for developers and investors across all renewable technologies,” said David Rogers of Union Energía.

Organized by the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC), the Mexican Wind Energy Association and E.J. Krausse of Mexico, the event was attended by representatives from both government and private bodies, and served as an information sharing platform for industry representatives.

“Mexico is already fourth in the world in terms of geothermal energy production,” said Alvaro Gonzalez of the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE). “However, right now, the sector we are focusing on most is wind energy generation. We already have 2,000 MW capacity of wind turbines installed, and are developing more in new facilities.”

Wind farms are not without their controversy: in August 2014, protests by indigenous groups in Oaxaca forced a proposed 396 MW wind farm to be relocated due to concerns about land rights.

González, however, puts the difficulties down to underlying social issues and says that there are strict regulations for the development of wind farms, including those concerned with indigenous rights.

“We work with the World Bank, whose Climate Green Fund has strict requirements, one of which is that all proposed energy development projects have a plan for indigenous populations,” he said.

“Before you conduct any wind energy project, you have to host a general meeting, explaining to all stakeholders the details of the project, its characteristics, the location, and to address all the concerns of the local population.”

Mexico is on the frontier of turning into a new emerging market for wind energy production, with modern legislation and optimistic targets. Mexico will need to increase its capacity by 2,000 MW per year to reach the goals set over the next decade, and at the WindPower expo attendees feel confident that this can be achieved.

The WindPower Exposition 2015 was held at Centro Banamex, Feb. 25-26.

Three Mexican Cities Vie for Environmental Honors

laht.com

MEXICO CITY – Mexico will be represented by Hermosillo, Puebla and Toluca in the final round of the World Wildlife Fund’s Earth Hour City Challenge, which recognizes urban centers for striving to stem climate change and promoting a sustainable future, the WWF announced.

Those cities were selected based on their actions and commitments regarding street lighting, sustainable mobility, recycling and waste disposal, WWF said in a statement.

This year the contest involved 163 cities in 16 countries.

The three Mexican cities are among 43 finalists to be evaluated by an independent international jury that will select one city from each participating country to compete for the title of 2015 Global Earth Hour Capital.

The award will be presented during the April 8-12 World Congress of the ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability organization in Seoul, South Korea.

Among the 43 finalists are Sao Paulo, Paris, Cali, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Vancouver and Seoul, the WWF said.

“Climate change is one of the major challenges of our time,” Vanessa Perez-Cirera, director of Climate Change and Energy for WWF-Mexico, said in a press conference.

More than 70 percent of greenhouse gases are emitted by cities and more than 70 percent of humans are expected to live in urban centers before 2050, she said.

Investment influx promises cheaper and greener power for Mexico

ft.com

Jude Webber

©Jamie Carstairs/Alamy

Winds of change: high targets have been set for renewables

Enrique Ochoa, the head of Mexico’s state electricity company, CFE, is a busy man. “My diary is full of meetings with national and international companies that want to come and open up here – I have at least 10 a week,” he says. “I’m seeing huge appetite, from Europeans, Americans, Asians and many Mexican companies.”

The prospect of Mexico’s oil reform turning North America into a new Middle East has galvanised public attention, but it is the quieter, but no less far-reaching, reform of the electricity system that could bring faster change in the form of cheaper tariffs and better, more sustainable supply.

For the past two decades, Mexico has given private companies the limited opportunity to generate power – allowing groups such as Cemex, the cement producer, or Walmex, the Mexican arm of US supermarket group Walmart, to generate power, including wind or solar, for their own needs. Now, they will be allowed to sell that power to third parties, as will electricity companies that are already in, or about to enter, the newly liberalised market.

“Mexico is going to be one of our main investment destinations in the next few years, with up to $5bn through to 2018 in new combined-cycle gas turbine plants and wind farms,” says Ignacio Galán, chairman and chief executive of Spain’s Iberdrola, the largest private generator in Mexico.

“As a result, we will be producing more energy in Mexico than in any other country where we have operations,” Mr Galán says. Iberdrola says it already illuminates one in seven of the country’s lightbulbs.

Cheaper electricity is vital to boosting Mexico’s industrial competitiveness, but there is one big problem: because Mexico is not producing enough gas to meet its own needs, and the existing network to import gas from the US is full to capacity, CFE has had to turn to costlier and less environmentally-friendly fuels.

A fifth of the country’s power is generated using fuel oil, which is four times more expensive than natural gas and 68 times more polluting.

That has led to electricity bills that are, on average, 25 per cent higher than in the US, although Mr Ochoa says when subsidies are stripped out, the average tariff is 75 per cent higher. Industrial users pay 84 per cent more for their power and commercial users considerably more than double than in the US.

It has also sent CFE’s profits plunging. Despite record sales in 2013, the company racked up a 37.6bn peso ($2.8bn) loss last year.

Mexico has stipulated green power must make up 35 per cent of the country’s generation by 2026

That left it ill-equipped to tackle another pressing problem: Mexico loses some 15 per cent of its electricity because of creaking infrastructure and theft, in particular the practice of illegal electricity connections known asdiablitos (little devils). That is more than double the OECD average of 6 per cent and five times higher than in South Korea.

Under the reform, the state retains control of transmission and distribution, but there will be an independent operator for the whole grid, known as Cenace.

The reform has already opened the door to $7.7bn of investment in a range of infrastructure projects, including gas pipelines that will boost the size of Mexico’s network by 34 per cent. Texas, which is a third of the size of Mexico, has a gas pipeline network that is nine times larger, according to Mr Ochoa.

Seven power-generating plants are being upgraded, at a cost of $200m, to run on natural gas rather than fuel oil. That promises big savings: it costs 2,000 pesos per megawatt hour to generate with fuel oil, compared with 780 pesos at converted plants and 478 pesos at the next generation of state-of-the-art combined-cycle plants, Mr Ochoa says.

“This is a reform in favour of competitiveness, sustainable supply and sustainable prices,” he stresses.

The changes also offer a big opportunity for Pemex, the state oil company, which wants to switch from being Mexico’s biggest customer of electricity to its second-largest producer. Emilio Lozoya, Pemex’s chief executive, wants to harness the heat and vapour from its operations to fuel a new business line, in which it expects to generate about 10 per cent of the nation’s supply.

Mexico has already set ambitious targets for renewable energy, stipulating that green power must make up 35 per cent of the country’s generation by 2026.

“There are thousands and thousands of megawatts of wind and solar projects that at some point in time will be able to be constructed,” says Michael Till, co-head of energy at Actis, a private equity firm that has set up the Zuma Energy platform in Mexico.

Zuma has bought a wind farm in the southern state of Oaxaca that will be operated by Spain’s Acciona, the biggest renewables producer in Mexico.

Miguel Angel Alonso, the head of Acciona in Mexico, has praised the government for its thoroughness and willingness to engage with the private sector. “It is generating more documentation than we can digest and comment on,” he laughs.

Acciona, which generates about a quarter of Mexico’s wind power, sees the reform as a great opportunity. “We are very keen to grow . . . We think growth of 30 per cent is feasible for us,” Mr Alonso says.

Sunny Mexico: An Energy Opportunity

greentechmedia.com

Mexico’s solar resources are among the best in the world, far superior to those of Germany and Spain, the countries currently recognized as the world leaders in installed photovoltaic systems.

Oso Oseguera 

Experts rank the quality of Mexico's photovoltaic (PV) and solar thermal resources among the world's best. In terms of photovoltaic resources, the country has significant advantages:

• Average Global Horizontal Irradiation (GHI) is approximately 5 kWh/m2/day, the energy equivalent of 50 times Mexico's annual national electricity generation
• 70% of the territory has GHI values greater than 4.5kWh/m2
• Just 0.06% of the Mexican national territory would be sufficient to generate the overall electricity consumption of Mexico in 2005 according the GTZ report "Nichos de mercado para sistemas fotovoltáicos en conexión a la red eléctrica de México" (June 2009).

Global Horizontal Solar Radiation

Mexico's average solar resources for PV (5 kWh/m2/day) are more than 60% higher than the best solar in Germany (5.4 GW of installed PV). Spain and Germany are the global PV leaders, with a total of 8.7 GW, 67% of the world's PV installed capacity, according to the IEA Photovoltaic Power Systems Program 2008 Annual Report.

Comparative Solar Resources, PV Performance, Energy Pay-Back and EnergyReturn (GHI kWh/m2)

Sources: GTZ (2009) "Nichos de Mercado Para Sistemas Fotovoltáicos en Conexión a la Red Eléctrica en México," June 2009; International Energy Agency Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme (2006), "Compared assessment of selected environmental indicators of photovoltaic electricity in OECD cities," April 2006.

Higher than Germany and Spain

According to the study Solar Energy Sector (2009) for the Mexican Secretaría de Energía (SENER, the Energy Department), PV installed in many cities across Northern and Central Mexico has an "energy payback time" (EPBT) of less than two years. This represents the time required for these PV systems to produce the amount of energy needed to manufacture all the PV components.

The EPBT is based on a figure of 2,525 kWh, the electrical energy required to manufacture 1 kW of a complete PV system. This kWh figure includes PV panels, wiring and electronic-connection devices. The EPBT varies according to the PV location's solar resources. This 2,525 kWh figure was used by the International Energy Agency in a 2006 report titled "Compared assessment of selected environmental indicators of photovoltaic electricity in OECD cities."

The "energy return factor" (ERF) for PV installed in most of Mexico produces 17 times the electricity required to manufacture the PV system, 1.5 times higher than the ERF for Germany, equal to most of Spain. The ERF refers to the amount of electricity produced over a 30-year period, minus the electricity required to manufacture the complete system. The ERF is the number of times the embodied energy from the PV manufacturing is produced over the life of the system. The average ERF for PV systems in Mexico is 1.7 years compared to 2.6 years for Munich.

Mexico's Insolation

Two facts emerge from the Solar Energy Sector study:

• Northern Mexico's Direct Normal Insolation is equivalent to the best in the U.S. Southwest and in the North African deserts
• Assuming a net system efficiency of 15%, a square of 25 km in Chihuahua or in the Sonora desert would be sufficient to supply all of Mexico's electricity (based on information provided by Energy Department and GTZ (2009) at the "Renewable Energy for Sustainable Development in México" study).

Direct Normal Solar Radiation

Mexico's extraordinary solar resources have largely gone untapped but the solar sector is emerging with a promising future.

Mexico Solar Installations by Type, 2007-2008

• There are no solar thermal electricity plants in Mexico
• 80% of PV installations in Mexico are for rural electrification and are off-grid ("Renewable Energy for Sustainable Development in México" study)
• 78% of all solar hot water installations is for swimming pool heating

"Huge" Potential Solar Market

According to the study IDB Public/Private Sector CTF Proposal, México Public/Private, undertaken by the Inter-American Development Bank (2009), Mexico's photovoltaic and solar thermal market potential is 45 GW, approximately 75% of Mexico's 2008 electricity generation capacity. In 2008, Mexico had approximately 59.5 GW of total installed electricity generation capacity and expects to add 10.8 GW in new capacity additions by the end of 2017, of which 20% could be from renewables.

One estimate presented at the "Global Renewable Energy Forum: Scaling Up Renewable Energy" conference in León in October 2009 indicated that solar thermal and PV electricity will account for up to five percent of the country's energy supply by 2030 and up to ten percent by 2050. Solar thermal is expected to play a greater the role in heat generation rather than generating electricity with five percent to ten percent of Mexico's heat expected to come from solar thermal in 2030 and ten percent to 15 percent by 2050.

Solar thermal potential in Northern Mexico

The quality and quantity of northern Mexico's solar resources are as good as anywhere in the world. Mexico's best solar thermal resources are in the states of Baja California, Sonora and Chihuahua. Baja California has 5 GW of solar thermal generation capacity, with the potential to generate 11.6 GWhs of solar electricity annually, as the Solar Thermal Resources Inventory undertaken as part of the Western Renewable Energy Zones Project revealed.

Despite the extensive wind development planned for Northern Baja for export to the U.S., there are considerably greater solar thermal resources in the country than wind resources.

According to BSRIA, a consultancy organization, the Mexican solar thermal market is growing strongly. Traditionally, it has been a flat-plate collector market, but the last few years have seen a substantial increase in the number of small companies directly importing vacuum-tube systems from China.

Solar Thermal Market Size in the Americas

New Renewable Energy Law

The "Renewable Energy Development and Financing for Energy Transition Law" (LAERFTE in Mexico) became effective in November 2008 and mandated the country's Secretaría de Energía to produce a National Strategy for Energy Transition and Sustainable Energy Use and a Special Program for Renewable Energy. The law's main objective is to regulate the use of renewable energy resources and clean technology and to establish a national strategy and financing instruments to allow Mexico to scale up electricity generation based on renewable resources. SENER and Comisión Reguladora de Energía (CRE) are responsible for refining those mechanisms and establishing legal instruments to allow Mexico to increase renewable power generation.

With LAERFTE, the Mexican Congress took the first key steps to address the lack of regulatory and pricing certainty for renewable-energy project implementation. Perhaps of greatest significance is that the LAERFTE shifts responsibility from the CFE to the CRE for developing a clear and transparent tariff system for power producers.

Needed: Land

Nowhere in the world is there more evidence of the explosive growth in utility-scale solar than in the southwestern U.S. There has been a literal 'land rush' since 2007 by solar developers and speculators who have made massive filings for rights-of-way to lock in large tracts of U.S.-government owned desert lands to site central solar projects.

In November 2008 there were approximately 119 applications before the California and Arizona BLMs requesting land for some 83 GW of solar projects. Since then, 81 of these applications (representing 60 GW of projects) have moved forward in development and advanced to the stage of filing required "Plans of Development" as of October 2009.

The step between filing a BLM right-of-way application and submitting a major technical and engineered document such as the "Plan of Development" requires resources and filters out land speculators. The project developers for most of these 81 projects have demonstrated commitment and have gone through the additional step of submitting the required 'recover fee' deposits to compensate BLM for application processing. Projects that have filed "Applications For Certifications" to CEC and the other projects that have announced PPAs that involve BLM lands have been screened out of the 81 projects. The table below represents a reasonable profile and inventory of potential new capacity additions, showing the enormous scale of the solar thermal electric market in the Southwest deserts.

Utility-Scale Solar Projects with Active BLM Applications

California and Arizona, as of October 2009

('Active' means projects that have advanced by filing a "Plan of Development" with the BLM)

U.S.-Mexico bilateral framework

The "U.S.-Mexico Bilateral Framework on Clean Energy and Climate Change" agreed to by Presidents Calderon and Obama in April 2009 builds on co-operation in the border region, promotes efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and strengthens the reliability and flow of cross-border electricity grids, while enabling neighboring border states to work together to strengthen energy trade.

Perhaps the largest near-term solar opportunity for Mexican companies is to initiate the development and construction of utility-scale solar power plants in Mexico to export electricity to the United States.

Sonora's government has been doing this since 2006, when the World Bank announced the funding of a $50 million grant for a Hybrid Solar Thermal Power Plant Project at Agua Prieta, Sonora. The project was initially approved in 1999 with the construction contract expected to be awarded in 2010. The project will demonstrate the benefits of integrating a 31 MW parabolic-trough solar field with a 535 MW conventional thermal facility, using combined-cycle gas turbines that will contribute to reducing the long-term costs of the technology to reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, as the 2008 report "Eco‐Innovation Policies in México" documented.

The project grant is funded through the Global Environmental Facility Trust Fund of the World Bank.

Also, Universidad de Sonora is developing a utility-scale solar system with a U.S. company. TxTec AC is the Institute for Technology Transfer at the University of Sonora, which has a long history of cooperation with industry in aquaculture, agriculture, metallurgy, geology, energy and the environment. TxTec promotes university/industry collaboration for mutual support of technology development and technology transfer to improve the socioeconomic conditions and productivity. TxTec has experienced faculty and researchers, as well as equipped laboratories in multiple specialties, such as the National Laboratory of Solar Concentration Systems in collaboration with Universidad de Sonora and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), and provides confidential industrial-research facilities as well as economic and business consulting to nurture successful new technology developments in the region.

In 2008, TxTec and Utility Scale Solar, Inc. (USS), of Palo Alto, California, announced a joint agreement to develop advanced CSP power-plant designs. The systems feature TxTec's contributions to tower receiver designs and USS's breakthrough heliostat (sun tracker) technology. Under the agreement, TxTec and USS will jointly develop CSP plant designs suited for Mexico's Sonoran Plateau, one of the best solar regions in the world and one ideally suited for the CSP plant configuration known as "power tower." TxTec will deploy and test USS's next-generation heliostat technology at TxTec's CSP lab plant, in conjunction with advanced tower receiver designs developed and tested by TxTec. The two parties are also collaborating on a 50-megawatt power-tower plant that will supply enough power to the Mexican grid to power more than 53,000 households.

The Mexican federal government has recognized the contributions of solar and other renewable energies in terms of greenhouse-gas mitigation. Translating that into concrete reforms remains the challenge, but the last decade has seen substantial progress on that front. IPPs, for example, are now permitted to sell power to CFE for the industrial sector.

To date, Mexico's solar sector has concentrated on off-grid photovoltaics (PV). The federal government has identified PV as one of the most cost-effective solutions for providing power to the three percent of rural Mexicans not currently connected to the grid. Approximately 60,000 to 80,000 PV systems are now in operation across rural Mexico.

Moisés Gómez Reyna, Economy Secretary of the Sonora state government, explained the policy, law and infrastructure arrangements that their administration is creating to start a joint-venture to rent the desert at San Luis Río Colorado to produce energy and sell it to California or Arizona.

"Boundary states in Mexico have been betting on renewable energy since 2005. We want to be considered providers of wind and solar energy inside the country and to our foreign neighbors," Gómez explained.

To gain credibility as energy providers, the Sonoran state administration has been establishing relationships with other Mexican states to build an 'energy corridor' to produce solar and wind energy to serve California and Arizona since 2009. The opportunity is there -- three of Mexico's sunniest cities are in Sonora. It is just a matter of finding the necessary government backing.

Solar power in all its forms amounts today to less than one percent of Mexico's energy matrix, according to CSP Today. For all its potential, utility-scale concentrated solar power (CSP) remains very much in its infancy. But Sonora wants to grow up fast.

Mexico Ratifies Amendment to Kyoto Protocol

laht.com

UNITED NATIONS – Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto announced that his country delivered Tuesday to the UN General Assembly its ratification of the Doha Amendment to the Kyoto Protocol for the prevention of greenhouse gases.

In his address to the plenary session of the Climate Summit, called by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, Peña Nieto said that with this measure, Mexico reaffirms its “confidence in the only multilateral system of regulations and facilitating mechanisms dealing with climate change.”

Doing something about climate change “requires the commitment and the sum total of efforts by all nations,” the Mexican leader said.

Extreme meteorological phenomena like those that last week slammed Mexico’s Baja California peninsula and last May hit the Balkans with the most severe flooding in a century “indicate the sense of urgency with which the world must undertake the reduction of greenhouse gases,” he said.

The president told the plenary session of the UN Climate Summit that Mexico, with a moderate 1.4 percent of the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases, is also strengthening its measures against climate change.

Peña Nieto ended his speech calling on the international community, when it meets at the 2015 Climate Change Conference in Paris, to adopt a workable accord that includes financial mechanisms to support the national strategies of developing countries.