wiredInUSA April 2018

Towering solar plant China’s cable clearances

The task of removing overhead hanging cables has begun, with officials saying some key areas in Hongkou, Xuhui and Huangpu districts will be clear within weeks. A new type of street lamp is being introduced in which the cables will run through the poles. The multifunctional lamp is over 8m high. At the top of the pole will be the lamp, with traffic signals below it, followed by pedestrian walking lights. Combining different functions into the street lamps will not only save resources and space, but will also make them pleasing to the eye, said a spokesman from the Shanghai Commission of Housing and Urban-Rural Development. Shanghai first started to remove the cables in the 1990s but, due to the complicated ownership of the space and limited underground area, only about 600km of cables could be removed in the past two decades and the project was basically shelved after 2011. This year alone, 100km of overhead cables will be removed. A worker on a ladder sorts out overhead cables in Shanghai. Photograph courtesy of Wang Rongjiang

On 20 th March ground was broken for a 700MW concentrated solar power plant, part of the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park in the United Arab Emirates. The $3.8 billion project features a 260m high solar tower and will provide energy to over 270,000 residences in Dubai. The CSP project will use two technologies: a 600MW parabolic basin complex and a 100MW solar tower. The solar tower will include a molten salt storage component, which will enable power to be generated for up to 15 hours without sunlight. The project is being developed by ACWA Power, a developer, investor and operator of a portfolio of power generation and desalinated water production plants in ten countries including in the Middle East and North Africa, Southern Africa and South East Asia. It is investing $750 million in the project. The project will help achieve the Dubai Clean Energy Strategy 2050, which aims to provide 75 percent of Dubai’s total power output from clean sources by 2050. The Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park is one of the largest single- site solar parks in the world. It will have a generating capacity of 1,000MW by 2020 and 5,000MW by 2030.

wiredInUSA - April 2018

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